Signs and Semblances: The Problem of Likability in Some Recent Productions of Much Ado About Nothing

Abstract

Following the “intertextual turn” in adaptation studies, scholars of Shakespearean performance have embraced the interpretive possibilities offered by infidelity, focusing increasingly on the corrective potential of recent stagings and adaptations. Such productions are not primarily valuable as progressive rewrites, however. In claiming not to be “Shakespeare”, these productions make testable claims about the nature of the Shakespearean playtext. In this paper, I examine two recent stage productions and one non-traditional film adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing: Kenny Leon’s 2019 Public Theater production, Chris Abraham’s 2023 Stratford Festival production, and Will Gluck’s 2023 romantic comedy Anyone But You. All three performances are consciously unfaithful to Shakespeare’s text or setting, and their revisions attend to making the characters’ behavior more palatable for a contemporary liberal–progressive audience. Yet when we compare these revisions with the original playtext, Shakespeare’s own views come into sharper relief, as does our own inclination to identify with characters that Shakespeare’s immediate audience may have felt quite distanced from. I argue that in their drive to correct the play and make the characters more likable, these productions paper over Shakespeare’s critique of the arbitrary construction—and violent enforcement—of social hierarchy. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida’s notion of the parergon, I show that Shakespeare’s deliberate narrative framing invites a more skeptical, disapproving understanding of his characters. My hope is that this discussion leads to an understanding of Much Ado About Nothing as a “problem play” rather than a “problematic” one.

1. Introduction

Following the “intertextual turn” in adaptation studies, scholars of Shakespearean performance and adaptation have embraced the interpretive possibilities offered by infidelity.1 Yet while adaptation theorists like Thomas Leitch (2003) have emphasized the impossibility of “faithfully” adapting a source text, Shakespeare studies has generally focused on the corrective potential of stagings and adaptations. As Douglas Lanier notes in his influential discussion of Shakespeare studies’ “putative post-fidelity moment,” for scholars of Shakespeare’s afterlife, “the dominant alternative to the fidelity model has become valuing adaptations according to the political work they do” (Lanier 2014, p. 27).2 Staging Shakespeare unfaithfully provides a means for practitioners to confront, reject, revise, or circumvent all of Shakespeare’s “problematic shit”.3

In this paper, I consider several recent examples of this sort of correction of Shakespeare, considering whether these practices are aesthetically or politically successful. I focus on two stage productions and one non-traditional film adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing: Kenny Leon’s 2019 Public Theater production of the play, Chris Abraham’s 2023 Stratford Festival production, and Will Gluck’s 2023 rom-com Anyone But You. All three productions are consciously unfaithful to Shakespeare’s text or setting. In their revisions, these performances strive to make the characters’ behavior more palatable to a contemporary socially liberal audience.

Such productions are not primarily valuable as progressive rewrites, however. I have previously argued that fidelity remains a valuable metric for the study of adaptation (Newlin 2024). Even an unconventional or unintended adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s plays may still invoke qualities of its original performance, thereby encouraging us to rethink what we consider to be familiar about Shakespeare. Similarly, by claiming not to be (wholly) “Shakespeare,” these productions indirectly make a testable claim about what “Shakespeare” actually is.4 When we compare these revisions with the original playtext, Shakespeare’s own views come into sharper relief, as does our contemporary inclination to identify with characters from whom Shakespeare’s immediate audience may have felt quite distanced. I argue that in their drive to correct the play and make the characters more likable—which is to say, more progressive in their social views and attitudes—these productions paper over Shakespeare’s critique of the arbitrary construction and violent enforcement of social hierarchy.5 Drawing upon Jacques Derrida’s notion of the parergon, I show that Shakespeare’s deliberate narrative framing invites a more skeptical, disapproving understanding of his characters. My hope is that this discussion leads to an understanding of Much Ado About Nothing as something like a “problem play” rather than a “problematic” one.6

2. Less than Full Numbers

The most widely celebrated recent staging of Much Ado About Nothing is surely Kenny Leon’s 2019 Public Theater production. Leon’s Much Ado was staged at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park as part of the Free Shakespeare in the Park series, and it was later televised on PBS as an episode of Great Performances. In 2017, the Public Theater attracted controversy for its modern dress production of Julius Caesar, directed by Oskar Eustis. That production’s Caesar, played by Gregg Henry, was clearly modeled on President Trump, and the resulting controversy led to pulled sponsorships and disrupted performances. Critics accused the Public Theater’s Caesar of indulging a liberal wish-fulfillment fantasy with the staged assassination of its Trump-like dictator perpetuo. While Leon’s production is similarly in conversation with the political climate of its moment, his Much Ado is far less antagonistic. Protest, this production assures viewers, is patriotic.

Leon’s modern dress performance features a cast made up entirely of Black performers; a title card at the beginning of the Great Performances recording informs viewers that the performance is set in “Aragon, Georgia”, a prosperous Black community, in the (then) near future of spring 2020 (Leon 2019). The elaborate set by Beowulf Borritt depicts a stately suburban lawn bordered by an ivy-covered white picket fence and featuring a tall flagpole waving the American flag. On stage left, an elegant red brick and fieldstone colonial home—Leonato’s house—is adorned with campaign banners reading “Stacey Abrams 2020”.7 The performance opens with an a capella medley, sung by Ursula, Margaret, Hero, and Beatrice, of “America the Beautiful” and Marvin Gaye’s protest anthem “What’s Going On”. When Don Pedro’s retinue appears, we see that the military “action” which precedes the narrative was in fact a direct action (Shakespeare 2015, 1.1.6). The prince and his company march onstage, in regimental uniforms, but instead of weaponry, they carry placards that read: “Restore Democracy Now”, “Hate is Not a Family Value”, “Now More Than Ever We Must Love”, and “I Am a Person”.

While the slogans are derived from a diverse history of American protest movements,8 the immediate context is that of Black Lives Matter, the social movement primarily dedicated to protesting police killings of Black Americans and which generated large-scale protests in response to the murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and others. The premise of Leon’s production is to set the play’s narrative within a kind of cease-fire in the middle of a series of public protests. The production ends sadly, with the post-nuptial dancing interrupted by a siren calling the men back to the battlefield—or protest line—and indicating that more demonstrations will be necessary for the foreseeable future.9 But most of the production is bright and joyful. Instead of presenting violent delights, as Eustis’s Caesar allegedly did, Leon stages Messina as a kind of progressive utopia offering a temporary retreat from the world bemoaned in Gaye’s song (“Picket lines/And picket signs/Don’t punish me/With brutality”).

As Atesede Makonnen puts it, “this production, very simply, loves blackness” (Makonnen 2021, p. 112). The performers reveal rich parallels between the rhythms of Shakespeare’s language and the variants of contemporary Black American speech. And the production affectionately showcases countless figures of Black culture: Margaret is seen reading a Sister Souljah novel; Hero and Claudio’s (first, unsuccessful) wedding features West African dancing and a performance of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s favorite hymn, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”; their (final, successful) wedding includes broom-jumping; during the eavesdropping scene, Grantham Coleman’s Benedick shouts “Kobe!” (as in “Bryant”) as he comically jumps behind a stone wall, clumsily trying to evade the benevolent plotting of Leonato, Claudio, and Don Pedro; and the production concludes with a reprise of “What’s Going On”, this time as a medley with “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, the hymn widely considered to be the “Black National Anthem”.

And, again, the production openly espouses a progressively liberal political perspective by explicitly endorsing Stacey Abrams’s predicted presidential run and by featuring a large print of Shepard Fairey’s famous “Hope” portrait of Barack Obama in Leonato’s foyer. However, in another respect, I think that Leon’s staging of Much Ado is quite conservative. Like many other productions of the play, Leon’s expects for us to find affinity with these characters. More than that, Leon reassures his viewers that these characters are essentially likable and relatable.

This is especially evident with the production’s portrayal of Leonato. In Leon’s production, Chuck Cooper plays the role of Leonato as both suave and stately. Besuited and with long, grey dreadlocks pulled back, his Leonato is equally comfortable mixing it up with Danielle Brooks’s feisty Beatrice as he is augustly chiding Don Pedro in the final wedding scene. He is, in a word, likable.

But consider the revisions Leon needs to make to the playtext not only to make Leonato likable but also to make the production’s entire premise—that is, conceiving of Don Pedro’s military campaign as a nonviolent protest on behalf of a subjugated minority group—legible:

Leonato. I learn in this letter that Don Pedro of Aragon comes this night to Messina.

Messenger. He is very near by this. He was not three leagues off when I left him.

Leonato. How many gentlemen have you lost in this action?

Messenger. But few of any sort, and none of name.

Leonato. A victory is twice itself when the achiever brings home full numbers. I find here that Don Pedro hath bestowed much honour on a young Florentine called Claudio.

(Shakespeare 2015, 1.1.1–9)

“Say Their Names” is a common refrain heard in recent protests over police killings of Black Americans. This slogan serves as a reminder both to memorialize victims and to maintain vigilance in the pursuit of social justice. Given the overt sympathies of Leon’s production, his revisions here are understandable. This Leonato cannot open the play stating that some lives do not matter and some victims of Don Pedro’s war with Don John need not be memorialized, remembered, or named. These cuts to the playtext mark the significant difference between Leon’s vision of the play and Shakespeare’s, and when we read Leon’s revisions against Shakespeare’s original playtext, I think we can ask whether a character like this was ever meant to be likable in the first place. In the playtext, Leonato engages in the sort of curious arithmetic that plagues many of Shakespeare’s characters.10 Told that a “few” soldiers have lost their lives, Leonato hears that none have and concludes that the returning “full numbers” makes the victory “twice” its actual, measurable worth. Leonato, of course, is only concerned with the lives of the nobility here. Anybody without such a “name” literally does not count.

Leonato’s opening lines are the sort of dispensable, problematic material that is often corrected in a modern production. Leonato is meant to be likable, the thinking goes, and this sort of thing is no longer likable. Yet while military losses are often discussed this way in early modern drama,11 Leonato’s lines could have been just as distasteful to Shakespeare’s initial audience. Discussions of Much Ado, whether in an academic publication or a classroom, invariably address the play’s many puns on the word “nothing” (e.g., if men have a “thing,” women have a “no thing”). It is less often noted that the play’s title reflects a general concern for the matter of human worth and how it is assessed by those in power. In other words, it surely matters that in the very first lines of the play, one of the primary characters indicates that he believes that some people are truly worth nothing.

Leon may be correcting Shakespeare here, but I do not think he is improving him. Indeed, it would have been of interest to Shakespeare’s initial audience that Leonato only expresses concern for the survival of noble lives. The audiences on the Bankside may have been primarily comprised of that “sort” that Leonato would count as “nothing”.12 More to the point, many of the audience members’ lives would have also been touched, in one way or another, by the ongoing, calamitous war in Ireland. (As the Elizabeth scholar Leah Marcus puts it, Ireland was effectively “Elizabeth’s Afghanistan”) (Marcus 2014, 41–42).13 Consider the likelihood of an audience member who had lost a son or a brother in the Nine Years War, or who witnessed the degradation of its returning, impoverished veterans. Surely, they would have bristled at Leonato’s description of a victory “twice itself”—that is, one waged on behalf of and survived entirely by the nobility.

Leon’s decision to frame the play symmetrically, with matching returns from and to the “battlefield”, aptly reflects the design of Shakespeare’s play. Much Ado is framed by violence. The playtext begins with news that the fighting between Dons Pedro and John has ceased; it ends with news that the bastard son has been captured and that he will be subjected to “brave punishments” (Shakespeare 2015, 5.4.126). How a dramaturge or a reader conceives of this opening “action” and these closing “punishments” will determine their understanding of the play as a whole, even as these actions of violence are never directly staged and serve only to frame the action that we are privy to.

But the fact that the violence that frames the play’s narrative goes unstaged may make it even more significant for determining the play’s meaning. In The Truth in Painting, Jacques Derrida argues that the matter of framing is pivotal for any discussion of the “great philosophical question[s]” of aesthetics (“‘What is art?’ ‘the beautiful?’”). The frame of a portrait, for instance, might merely provide garish ornamentation that distracts the viewer from an engagement with the image. An effective frame—what Derrida, following Immanuel Kant, calls the parergon—is necessary for determining a work of art as a work of art. The parergon of the work is “neither work (ergon) nor outside the work [hors d’oeuvre], neither inside nor outside, neither above nor below, it disconcerts any opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work. It is no longer merely around the work” (1987, 9).

Somewhat paradoxically, the “outside” framing of the parergon can determine the “internal” meaning of a work of art—we conclude something about what a poem “means” based on its placement within a certain collection, for instance. At the same time, the “deepest”, most central meaning of a work of art has a way of expanding outward and clarifying, through a critical reading, the “whole” of the work itself. Acknowledging the determinative “thickness” of the parergon invites questions about the nature of judging a work of art—if we cannot determine fully where the work begins, how can we determine when it is aesthetically successful?14 With the design of Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare invites a similar, though more insistently moral or ideological, interrogation of the staged narrative. Just how central is this framing violence to the construction or understanding of Messina?

Much Ado has been framed as a war play before. For example, Christopher Luscombe’s (2014) RSC production set the action in 1918, with Messina reimagined as a grand country house commissioned to serve as a recovery hospital for soldiers returning from the front of the Great War.15 This does not quite align with what we can infer about the war from the playtext, where Beatrice can safely wager that she will eat all of Benedick’s killing—since presumably there will be so “few” casualties of “any sort”. Similarly, Leon’s attention to the narrative parergon of Much Ado About Nothing inadvertently highlights the incompatibility of his vision of the play with Shakespeare’s. In Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, the violence that frames the play’s action is state violence. Don Pedro and his men fight a war and torture enemy combatants on behalf of the status quo, instead of in opposition to it. When we compare Leon’s production with the text he is adapting, Leon’s Aragon, Georgia is almost the exact inverse of Shakespeare’s Messina.

Leon’s infidelity to Shakespeare’s playtext would be of little concern if it did not subvert the production’s premise in other respects. Some reviewers who praised Leon’s production for its proud, joyful representation of Black America and for its amplifying of liberal causes like the #MeToo movement also faulted the production for “fail[ing] to completely overcome the play’s inherent misogyny” (Cruz 2023). But the play’s depiction of misogyny is only a problem if we assume that Shakespeare endorses this behavior, which is to say, if we think that a character like Leonato is supposed to be likable. In this respect, Shakespeare’s original playtext is far more ideologically coherent than a corrective contemporary production might be. Leonato’s misogyny rhymes perfectly with his initial expressions of prejudice against the poor, those he counts as nothing. (I have again noted Leon’s cuts in my excerpt.)

Do not live, Hero; do not ope thine eyes!

For did I think thou wouldst not quickly die,

Thought I thy spirits were stronger than thy shames,

Myself would on the rearward of reproaches

Strike at thy life. Grieved I, I had but one?

Chid I for that at frugal Nature’s frame?

O, one too much by thee! Why had I one?

Why ever wast thou lovely in my eyes?

Why had I not with charitable hand

Took up a beggar’s issue at my gates,

Who smirched thus, and mired with infamy,

I might have said: “No part of it is mine;

This shame derives itself from unknown loins.”.

(Shakespeare 2015, 4.1.123-135)

Cooper ably tries to lend the speech a mournful tone, rather than a violent one. (He’s not mad at his daughter; he’s just disappointed.) But Leonato’s lines are among the most vicious in Shakespeare’s canon, anticipating nothing less than Lear’s attacks on Goneril. These lines also echo Leonato’s answer to Don Pedro’s messenger. Here, again, we see the slipperiness of Leonato’s arithmetic in measuring the value of human life. One goes from being not enough (“grieved I, I had but one?”) to being far too much (“one too much by thee!”) within two lines. Leonato objects to the fact that Hero is not literally nothing, by which he means not a member of the lowest social class (“a beggar’s issue”) and without a name (“unknown loins”). If that were the case, he could forget her easily—just as he forgot those “few of any sort” as soon as he heard them mentioned by Don Pedro’s messenger.

The authors of early modern antitheatricalist tracts were as concerned with class transvestism as they were with gendered transvestism.16 It seems likely that the censors could only worry about subversive portrayals of the nobility on the public stage if, at least occasionally, those worries were confirmed. It is Shakespeare who likens misogyny and class prejudice here. Leonato draws upon the exact same language of calculation and commodification in his attack on his daughter as he does in his dismissal of the existence of the poor. Moreover, when we consider Shakespeare’s revision of his own sources, we find that Shakespeare not only chooses to make his Leonato far less likable than the character’s literary antecedent but that doing so appears to be a deliberate strategy meant to highlight issues of social prejudice. In Matteo Bandello’s story of “Timbreo and Finicia”, the charge of infidelity is disputed by all who hear it (“all the citizens firmly believed that [Claudio’s antecedent] Don Timbreo had invented the lie about her”) (Bandello 1958, p. 122). Contra Shakespeare’s Leonato, Bandello’s Lionato responds to these accusations by proudly defending his daughter and by pointedly accusing Don Timbreo of class prejudice. Responding to Timbreo’s messenger, Lionato says,

Friend, I always feared, from the first moment when you spoke to me of this marriage, that Sir Timbreo would not stand firm to his request, for I knew then as I do now that I am only a poor gentleman and not his equal. Yet surely if he repented of his promise to make her his wife, it would have been sufficient for him to declare that he did not want her, and not to have laid against her this injurious accusation of whoredom. It is indeed true that all things are possible, but I know how my daughter has been reared and what her habits are. God who is our just judge will one day, I believe, make known the truth.

(p. 118)

I have dwelled on Leon’s presentation of Leonato here because I think that these revisions are representative of a general inclination on the part of contemporary practitioners to identify with figures toward whom Shakespeare’s own audience may have felt suspicion. A production that softens Leonato’s rhetoric—or, for that matter, excises the other characters’ casual use of slurs17—does not correct a reactionary vision of society; it rather ignores the implicit, though persistent, critique of social class that pervades Much Ado About Nothing. This is a play that depicts the nobility acting ignobly.

In his appearance on the Folger library’s podcast, Shakespeare Unlimited, Leon indicates that he believes that Shakespeare’s “comedies have more political impact these days” than the tragedies or histories (Bogaev 2019). With its bright production design and loving presentation of Black culture, Leon’s Much Ado clearly fits into a tradition of presenting joy as an act of resistance.18 It is less clear what it is that Leon means by the “political impact” of Shakespeare’s comedy itself, and the politics of this production—as other reviewers have noted—are somewhat garbled.19 In the final moments of the production, as Don Pedro’s entourage responds to the siren calling them back to the protest line, Brooks’s Beatrice addresses the audience and sings a reprise of Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On”, placing particular emphasis on the couplet “War is not the answer/Only love can conquer hate”. For Shakespeare’s characters, though, war is precisely the answer. In the play’s final lines, Benedick confirms that showing love and grace is ineffective for managing such a “plain-dealing villain” as Don John (Shakespeare 2015, 1.3.29-30). Only “brave punishments” will suffice (5.4.126).

Leon’s production retains the lines promising the characters—and audience—that Don John will be tortured. Even more to the point, if the performance’s sung final message directly contradicts the playtext’s final lines of scripted dialogue, it is also at odds with the production’s own imagery. It is hard to take the lesson “war is not the answer” seriously alongside the affectionate display of the iconic portrait of a President who ordered airstrikes in seven different countries and who, despite his mournful rhetoric, was not especially opposed to the use of “brave punishments” either.20 Shakespeare may not be owed fidelity by practitioners. At the same time, it is worth noting when a socially conscious production revises Shakespeare’s fairly consistent social critique in order to produce something much less consistent.

The character of Leonato can be redeemed by virtue of trimming his more troubling lines from the playtext. Claudio’s behavior is harder to excise, as his rejection of Hero drives the action of the primary plot of the play. However, if Claudio cannot be made likable per se, he too can at least be punished.

3. Stuffed Men

The question of whether Claudio is sufficiently chastised within Shakespeare’s playtext is central to Chris Abraham’s 2023 Stratford Festival production of Much Ado. On the surface, Abraham’s production seems conventional, even old-fashioned. The actors are costumed in period-appropriate outfits and perform in the round, and Shakespeare’s language has been retained for most of the performance. But Abraham’s production is even more proudly unfaithful to Shakespeare’s playtext than Leon’s. If Leon’s production broadcast its progressive–liberal perspective with the set’s campaign banners, Abraham’s production does so by complementing Shakespeare’s verse with “additional text” by the feminist playwright Erin Shields. Shields’s additions include a lengthy prologue by Beatrice—played by Shields’s occasional collaborator, Maev Beaty—and an extended dialogue added to the final scene, where Hero upbraids the men who doubted and slandered her, and Claudio learns a valuable lesson in gender equality and sex positivity.

Shields adds a substantial dialogue to the play’s concluding wedding scene, all driven by a wounded, resentful Hero. Interrupting the Friar’s attempt to heal Messina’s wounds by letting “wonder seem familiar” (Shakespeare 2015, 5.4.70), Hero rebukes Claudio and Leonato and purity culture writ large:

I dress’d as would become a pious maid,

And dutifully obey’d my father’s word.

My purity, I guarded, turn’d my eye

Way from gentlemen, that no one might

Mistake a smile for lustful invitation.

So I recoil’d from the unchasten’d gaze,

That I might not betray my maidenhood.

Yet all my effort eas’ly were undone

By vengeful act of cruel duplicity.

(Abraham 2023)

Leonato and Don Pedro swear, in effect, that they sinned “not/But in mistaking” (Shakespeare 2015, 5.1.264-5); Austin Eckert’s Claudio responds by groveling and swearing his eternal allegiance to Hero: “Whatever proof you need, I’ll freely give/I’ll build a fortress up around our love,/Within, a temple made for you alone/There to be ever worshipp’d and ador’d” (Abraham 2023). But since this is the language of adoration already expressed in the play—“Now thy image doth appear/In the rare semblance that I loved it first” (Shakespeare 2015, 5.1.241-2)—it is not good enough. Hero asks Claudio how he would react if she really were “no more a virgin fair?”:

Suppose, in time before the war began,

Another handsome youth had caught my eye.

Imagine I permitted looks to stray,

Hands to wander, lips to find their mark.

(Abraham 2023)

Claudio interrogates Hero a bit about just how hypothetical this scenario really is (“This lover’s scene you now describe: is’t true?”), before finally acknowledging that he is the problem:

Were I your equal, I could truthfully claim

The actions of your past affect me not.

But still in me remains that Claudio

Who vilely did shame you in the church.

I fear I am no fearless Hero’s match.

Where I am hasty, you are circumspect.

Where I am jealous, you are confident.

I follow others, you look to yourself.

Your every quality surpasses each of mine.

I am not worthy of your love.

This approach does not work with Shields’s Hero either (“Is there no other man within who waits/To be released from valour’s tight constraint?”). What eventually does win Hero’s affection is not a vow to be perfect; rather, it is a promise to simply do better:

I cannot now profess to be remade,

Or that my actions will no longer be

Inform’d by lessons of my boyish youth.

Perhaps I’m not so old but I may learn

To mend my ways, to better serve your love.

For not to change when change is much requir’d,

Is to condemn one’s self to life alone.

Please let me learn to love you, Hero.

In Shields’s and Abraham’s production, a happy ending can be achieved when Claudio acknowledges his sense of erotic jealousy and replaces it with a vow to enter into a more enlightened marriage of equals “favour[ing] mutability” over “false” “constancy” (Abraham 2023).

In Shakespeare’s play, Claudio’s outburst reflects a strain of anxious masculinity found in early modern English verse—to say nothing of a more general, centuries-spanning taboo of (lost) female virginity.21 That Claudio’s behavior is conventional does not mean it is celebrated, of course. On the contrary, Shakespeare’s own attitude toward Claudio seems highly disparaging. He is presented from the outset of the play as precisely the kind of “stuffed man” mocked by Beatrice (Shakespeare 2015, 1.1.55). At the same time, a correction of Claudio or his behavior sacrifices the implied social critique the play makes with its concluding wedding scene, where all only superficially ends well.

By his own account, Claudio’s affections are fickle and conditional. Having first looked at Hero “with a soldier’s eye,” and only retrospectively allowing something like “soft and delicate desires” to take hold, he acknowledges that “my liking [of Hero] might too sudden seem” (Shakespeare 2015, 1.1.279, 284, 295). Benedick seems immediately skeptical of the quality of Claudio’s affections, reducing them to their basest possible expression: “Would you buy her that you inquire after her?” (1.1.170). Even if Claudio intends something more honorable than solicitation, his “liking” is dependent upon both the approval of his friends and social betters and on whether any nuptials will be materially worth the effort. He first asks whether Benedick and Don Pedro “note” Hero, and, second, about the size of Hero’s inheritance (“Hath Leonato any son, my lord?”) (1.1.154, 275).

Even if Shakespeare’s audience shared Claudio’s predisposition toward chastity—an unlikely scenario, considering the theater’s general association with prostitution and lascivious behavior, considering Leonato’s assurance that premarital sex between intendeds is no big deal (Shakespeare 2015, 4.1.44-6), and considering the bawdiness of the play’s title—they would have found it difficult to sympathize with his speech in praise of purity. For all the play’s concern for how Hero “seems” to be, it also insists that “semblance” is a construction of Claudio’s imprecise, perverse perspective (4.1.55-7, 31). When Claudio describes his affection in his own terms, he insists it is “as a brother to his sister [in showing]/Bashful sincerity and comely love” (4.1.52-3). The distastefulness of this metaphor would have been apparent to the ears of Shakespeare’s audience as much as it is to ours. Otherwise, Beatrice’s earlier joke about sibling incest could not have landed with the crowd (“Adam’s sons are my brethren, and truly, I hold it a sin to match in my kindred”) (2.1.56-7). Throughout the playtext, as it is written, Claudio is portrayed as fickle, spineless, greedy, bullying, defensive, prudish, perverse, and—for a kicker, in the play’s final moments, with his quip about “Ethiope[s]”—racist (5.4.38).22

Whether an obviously reformed Claudio is preferable to the more ambiguous situation found at the end of Shakespeare’s playtext is a matter of judgment for the individual reader. Surely, many viewers and readers chalk Claudio’s behavior up to a youthful indiscretion. Claudio’s childish naivety is noted in the play’s very first lines. As a soldier, he did “in the figure of a lamb the feats of a lion” (Shakespeare 2015, 1.1.14-15). This record of martial accomplishment reflects sexual immaturity as much as it does bravery—only after returning from war can he reckon with his previously unacknowledged “soft and delicate desires” for Hero (1.1.284)—and, moreover, it is not especially clear what those “feats” looked like in a war where “so few of any sort” actually died (1.1.7). Still, it is evident, when we compare progressive rewrites with Shakespeare’s original text, that Claudio was never understood as especially virtuous or repentant for either Shakespeare or his audience. As Carol Cook notes, the Friar’s plan fails (Cook 1986, p. 196). Claudio does not regret his actions “when he shall hear [Hero] died upon his words”, but only when he hears confirmation from Borachio that she was belied and he was deceived (Shakespeare 2015, 4.1.223). Shields’s and Abraham’s revisions are in line with a general impulse to make the play and characters more palatable to a contemporary audience.23 But there is no reason to believe that they were especially agreeable to Shakespeare’s. On the contrary, Hero and Claudio’s entire courtship would have likely been viewed as unnaturally choreographed and associated with the traditions of arranged marriage—which were increasingly stigmatized and almost entirely associated with the aristocracy (Sokol and Sokol 2003, especially pp. 30–41). Shields’s and Abraham’s additions to the play diagnose misogyny as a structural concern, reflected in widely-held stereotypes about “gentlemen” and “pious maids”, but that is still best corrected through individual acts of contrition, like Claudio’s vow to “mend [his] ways”. In other words, while Shields finds the source of the misogyny in Messina in personal expressions of male anxiety about sexual inadequacy, for Shakespeare, the source of the misogyny in Messina is a material problem rooted in anxiety about maintaining social class.24

The situation of Hero and Claudio’s nuptials is absurd, if not exactly comic. The match has to be arranged and directed by governing parties no less than three times in the text: first, by Don Pedro’s Cyrano-esque wooing of Hero in disguise; second, by obtaining Leonato’s good will (Shakespeare 2015, 2.1.275); and third, in the final scheme, where Hero assumes the disguise of Leonato’s “niece.” Productions which aim to make Claudio’s behavior more defensible,25 or his punishment clearer, link his attitudes with a general, patriarchal fixation on female purity. But Shakespeare already effectively identifies this attitude as the object of his satirical gaze here, which targets the arranged marriages favored by the aristocracy—and virtually nobody else.26

In Shields’s additions to the play, Hero waxes about a probable young romance, predicting Claudio’s likely, anxious response. As much as Shakespeare’s Claudio objects to marrying a “Venus” or one of those “pampered animals/That rage in savage sensuality” (Shakespeare 2015, 4.1.59-60), it may be that Claudio fixates on the image of Hero as a virgin “Dian” because that would be the only way to guarantee that she is not unfaithful (4.1.56). The source of the play’s many cuckold jokes is not anxiety about female purity as much as it is anxiety about female infidelity. The latter, unlike the former, is explicitly an economic problem. Whether a child sufficiently “fathers” herself (1.1.104-5), whether a maid will be deceived into being the “mother of fools” (2.1.262), whether it would be better if one could say of a disappointing child that “no part of it is mine” (4.1.134)—the play identifies the matter of questionable paternity to be an object of concern, since that may result in—to quote Claudio’s clear literary successor, Leontes—“rear[ing]/Another’s issue” (Shakespeare 2010, 2.3.190-1).

So, one would think that the real threat to the social order of aristocratic patriarchy in Messina is embodied by Margaret: the social-climbing upstart who wishes to have a “man come over me” lest she “always keep below stairs” (Shakespeare 2015, 5.2.9-10). The barely hidden implication here is that Margaret aims to use sex as a means of raising her station; it is not marriage that will get her out from beneath the stairs, but the bawdier and more pragmatic image of a man climbing on top of her first. Margaret jokes—or does she?—that her goal is to become pregnant in order to entrap a rich man into marrying her.

It is all the more remarkable then that Margaret is not subject to any serious punishment within the play. Having playacted as Hero, Margaret is guilty of precisely the sort of cross-class crossdressing that so worried the antitheatricalists and censors. Yet seemingly on Borachio’s word alone, Margaret is found not guilty by reason of holy ignorance. Borachio invokes nothing short of the language of the crucifixion when he declares that she “knew not what she did” (Shakespeare 2015, 5.1.291). Leonato does not appear to quite buy the claim that Margaret “hath been just and virtuous/In anything” (5.1.292-3); he concludes that she “was in some fault for this,/Although against her will” (5.4.5). At the same time, the qualifier “for this” seems significant here. Margaret is clearly guilty of bawdiness, social climbing, and likely of fornication, but none of that is worth punishing because all of that is to be expected. As long as she is not guilty of a conscious act of deception that disturbs the consolidation of wealth and power for the governing class—Claudio’s acquiring of the fortune that comes with Leonato’s only heir; the governorship of Messina’s alignment with the court of Aragon—she seems more or less free to do as she chooses. Even her plans to entrap a wealthier lover into marrying her out of her position below stairs is not rejected out of hand. It was hardly out of the ordinary for a member of the nobility to marry down in this respect.27

In a prologue by Shields added to Abraham’s production, Maeve Beatty’s Beatrice looks at Hero observing herself in the mirror. She postulates that Hero is wondering about those women who take lovers, “disappear into the woods”, or choose to present and live as men. She concludes that “most women” contain their “passions” and “wild imaginings” and do as they are told (Abraham 2023). When we compare Shields’s additions to Shakespeare’s original playtext, however, we see that Hero does not speak for “most women”. On the contrary, the play makes it explicitly clear that a character of lesser status than Hero is not held to the same moral standards as Hero. In this regard, the play is concerned with her O and her O alone.28

Whatever Antonio and Leonato may have to say about the matter, it seems likely that most of Shakespeare’s audience would have agreed, in principle, with Beatrice’s advice to her cousin:

Yes, faith, it is my cousin’s duty to make curtsy, and say, “Father, as it please you.” But yet for all that, cousin, let him be a handsome fellow, or else make another curtsy, and say, “Father, as it please me.”

(Shakespeare 2015, 2.1.46-49)

As B.J. Sokol and Mary Sokol note in their study of marriage in early modern law and practice, “a remarkable autonomy (almost unimaginable today) was theoretically available to men and women in Shakespeare’s England” (2003, p. 14). Two consenting parties, and those two consenting parties alone, could declare themselves married through the practice of “spousals”. All that was necessary for a legally binding nuptial was an agreement between bride and groom of “valid consent” that could be expressed or indicated by “a variety of signs, not all of them even verbal” (p. 15). Certainly, such arrangements could spark controversy. But they are indicative of a culture that widely agreed upon a consensual model of marriage.

The notion of being “ruled” by one’s guardian (Shakespeare 2015, 2.1.44), or having your “answer” to a proposal dictated by them (2.1.60), was outdated and associated almost entirely with the leisure class. Certainly, the stigma associated with arranged or enforced marriages may have been a byproduct of material conditions. (Working- and middle-class people often left home for work, so an arranged coupling was simply not feasible in many cases) (Adair 1996, 134). Regardless, objections to such arrangements were still fiercely held.29

Of particular objection was the matter of child marriages, which were widely viewed as child abuse (Sokol and Sokol 2003, p. 39). Hero’s extensive silence throughout the playtext suggests that the part was played by one of the youngest of the cast’s boy actors, and the playtext hints, strongly, that Hero—the “short” “very forward March chick”—is an adolescent (Shakespeare 2015, 1.1.200, 1.3.52). When we consider the misogynistic rejection performed during the first wedding scene as the climax of an arranged, enforced courtship coordinated not only by the bride’s father but also by her monarch, and directed toward a child, we can see that the play already expects its audience to view this marriage skeptically.

That the play itself prefers consensual marriages to enforced ones can be discerned by considering the case of Benedick and Beatrice—the couple whom we actually want to see end up together. At the end of the play, Benedick does not quite ask Leonato for his niece’s hand in marriage:

Ben. Signor Leonato—truth it is, good signor,

   Your niece regards me with an eye of favour.

Leo. That eye my daughter lent her? ‘Tis most true.

Ben. And I do with an eye of love requite her.

Leo. The sight whereof I think you had from me,

   From Claudio and the prince. But what’s your will?

Ben. Your answer, sir, is enigmatical.

   But for my will, my will is your good will

   May stand with our this day to be conjoined

   In the estate of honourable marriage […]

Leo. My heart is with your liking.

(Shakespeare 2015, 5.4.21-32)

Benedick is the only one giving enigmatic answers here, coyly joking about whether he is “bound” or coerced into marrying Beatrice, hedging each comment with a kidding-not-kidding “I think” or doublespeak (“for my will, my will is your good will”). Leonato, on the other hand, speaks directly, always emphasizing the import of consent for this union. It is important that we know both Benedick’s and Beatrice’s “wills” and to distinguish that will from any influence “lent” to them by the other characters. Benedick is expected to take responsibility for his own will—to not just consent to “honourable marriage” with Beatrice but to like it as well.

Shields and Abraham, like Leon, modify the playtext in order to reassure their audience that Hero wants to marry Claudio. This subjects the text to something like the third-degree that Leonato subjects Benedick to. (Curiously, Abraham cuts Benedick and Leonato’s exchange on the value of consent.) Again, this corrects Shakespeare’s playtext, but I do not think that it is an improvement, either artistically or ideologically. Hero’s thoughts on the matter are ambiguously presented, like nearly all of Hero’s thoughts in this play. What the play explicitly does comment on is how Claudio’s consent to the marriage is coerced and marked as equivalent to a feminine position in such an exchange. To earn Hero, Claudio is subjected to a mirror experience of Hero’s. He faces a gauntlet of masked women—in a direct inversion of the masked ball sequence earlier in the play—and is wooed and betrothed by a character only barely in costume. Marrying Leonato’s niece is a form of restitution for the father’s “revenge” (Shakespeare 2015, 5.1.282); it is a “reckoning” for Claudio to repay (5.4.52). Seemingly for legal reasons, and to prolong the punishment, Leonato extracts Claudio’s consent to the union: “Are you yet determined/Today to marry with my brother’s daughter?” (5.4.36-7). Claudio’s distasteful reply (“I’ll hold my mind were she an Ethiope”) indicates how, well, distasteful he finds the entire situation to be (5.4.38). The condition that Claudio cannot see his bride’s face until he “take her hand/Before this friar and swear to marry her” borders on being cause for an annulment (5.4.56-7) as it bases the marriage on something less than the ideal of “pure and perfect” mutual consent.30 In short, the play cannot be said to think highly of the practice of arranged, enforced marriage if it positions an arranged, enforced marriage as an adequate punishment for (what Claudio believes to be) involuntary manslaughter. And the play also takes care to note that this experience of punishment and public shaming exactly parallels Hero’s initial position in the courtship ritual.

Claudio and Hero’s second—or is it third?31—wedding may not be quite as explicitly unlikable and unsettling as the unions at the end of All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure. Nor is it as transcendentally ambiguous as the remarriage at the end of The Winter’s Tale. But it is not far off from these situations either. If Shakespeare wants us to have doubts about the nature of this union—and of course he does; that is why he has Leonato interrogate Benedick as he does—he wants us to be suspicious of the world that demands this kind of union and that is almost exclusively the world of the elite. Jean Howard suggests that the play fails to contain the subversive qualities that it introduces and that the wedding is supposed to read as “a lesson in having faith in the authority of social superiors” (2005, p. 181). I do not think that is quite right. After all, Don Pedro is the play’s most highly ranked figure, and he is as subject to the Friar’s and Leonato’s machinations as anyone else. The festive world turned upside down is not yet quite righted. For the time being, “wonder seem[s] familiar,” the play’s couplings feel like a genuine “miracle,” and “man” can be understood conclusively as a “giddy thing” (Shakespeare 2015, 5.4.70, 91, 106).

But Benedick’s “conclusion” only brings us to the margins of the text (Shakespeare 2015, 5.4.107). Here, at the parergon, we are assured that violence will be meted out to reinforce the structures of society. If offering Don John “grace” did not work, why should we feel so assured that violent retribution will stamp out future threats to Aragon (1.3.21)? Abraham’s and Shields’s revised ending is open-ended too, of course. Their Hero and Claudio, who choose to favor “mutability” over constancy, are certainly more reassuring to an audience hoping that an individual offender might “learn to mend [his] ways”. By contrast, Shakespeare asks his audience to view the frame of his text with a difference, less assured than the characters that the structural bases of this society—patrimony, nobility—are as sound as they seem.

4. Suspecting Our Place

Both Leon’s Public Theater production and Abraham’s Stratford production make significant additions to and excisions from Shakespeare’s playtext. But they are also more or less “traditional” stagings produced for an audience interested in seeing Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. (Abraham’s production even features period costuming.) By contrast, Will Gluck’s 2023 film Anyone But You is a “slant” adaptation of the play, and it makes no claim to tradition and fidelity.32 More to the point, when Gluck does adjust Shakespeare’s plot or characters, he always chooses to make things nicer or more likable. Anyone But You is a kind of extreme case of the conventions of staging Much Ado that we have so far considered. And as is the case with Leon’s and Abraham’s productions, Gluck’s film is illuminatingly conservative in its revision of Shakespeare’s text—even as the film’s form reflects something of Shakespeare’s radical use of framing.

The film begins with a meet-cute between the protagonists Bea Messina (Sydney Sweeney) and Ben (Glen Powell), who carelessly offend one another after a chaste one-night stand. Years later, they reconnect at a glamorous destination wedding, when Bea’s sister Halle marries Ben’s roommate Peter’s sister Claudia. After Ben and Bea’s bickering spoils a welcome event, their friends and family plot to “return them to the night they were smitten,” by “get[ting] them to jump each other’s bones” (Gluck 2023). Of course, this plan is carried out via orchestrated eavesdropping, like that in Much Ado. This scheme tricks Ben, but not Bea (Bea, unlike Beatrice, is no “fool” (Shakespeare 2015, 3.4.10)). Realizing that the rest of the wedding party is only “trying to get us together” “so we don’t ruin the biggest event of [Halle and Claudia’s] lives”, Ben and Bea decide to feign romantic interest—hoping that their public displays of affection will also inspire Bea’s helicopter parents to stop encouraging her to reconnect with her ex-boyfriend, Jonathan, and will make Ben’s ex, Margaret, jealous (Gluck 2023).

The R-rated Anyone But You is a callback to the racy comedies of the 1990s. Yet what is most striking to any viewer familiar with the playtext of Shakespeare’s original comedy is not that Gluck’s film profanes Much Ado About Nothing, but the extent to which the film sanitizes Shakespeare’s comedy in order to make everybody and everything likable. Consider how Gluck revises the central incident in Much Ado About Nothing: the disastrous first wedding of Claudio and Hero. Early in the film, a drone shot captures a conservative-looking, highly-steepled church in a Boston neighborhood while “Canon in D” plays on the soundtrack. Inside the sanctuary, Peter officiates the ceremony between Halle and Claudia:

Peter: So, before I pronounce this newlywed couple, if anyone has an issue with these two wonderful people joining together in holy matrimony, speak now, or forever hold your peace.

Leo: I have an objection.

Innie: Leo, don’t do this.

Leo: I have to, Innie. It’s just not right. There’s no way I can bless this union… [points at Claudia and Halle].

(Gluck 2023)

Halle is played by the white actor Hadley Robinson; Claudia is played by the biracial actor, Alexandra Shipp. The viewer is given half a beat to ponder why Leo is objecting to his daughter’s wedding to another woman of another ethnicity. Will Leo say something racist? Queerphobic? Claudia’s mouth drops open in shock. And then the punchline arrives. Leo and Innie both stand, address the camera and finish their thought. Leo cannot bless this union…

Leo: …without their friends and family joining us to celebrate…

Innie: …in Australia!

Claudia and Halle: We’re getting married in Sydney!

A new shot reveals that this ceremony was in fact a performed video attached to a wedding invitation sent via email and viewed on an unseen character’s laptop.

This moment provides reassurance for any viewer tracing the connections between the film and its barely unnamed source material. In this film, Leo will not be like Leonato, Peter will not be like Don Pedro, and Claudia will not be like Claudio. There will be nothing like the misogyny depicted in Much Ado’s wedding scene, and there will be nothing like the act of (inadequate?) penitence performed by Claudio or the act of (unearned?) grace awarded by Leonato and Hero. And since there will be no real transgression, neither will there be anything like the corrective dialogue inserted in the Stratford production, because it is just not necessary. These characters do not really need that much fixing.

Where Leon and Abraham softened the play’s “problematic” edges, the characters in Anyone But You seem to have no serious personal failings at all (even Jonathan, the film’s quasi-equivalent to Don John, is a “great guy” and the “best [boyfriend]” (Gluck 2023)). But Anyone But You highlights a quality of the play that productions so concerned with making Much Ado About Nothing palatable tend to obfuscate, namely, that this is a play that is centrally concerned with the goings-on of the wealthy. The equivalent of Messina here is a palatial, oceanside mansion cloistered away from the “real” world, with a pool, a tennis court, and a life-sized chess board. Of course, the fact that the characters are ludicrously wealthy does not preclude their voicing progressive views. In The Trouble with Tolerance, Walter Benn Michaels provocatively argues that contemporary progressive liberalism places a priority on the values of diversity and antiracism, as opposed to economic equality, because while the latter might oblige us to give “up our money,” the former merely obliges us to be “nice to each other” (2016, p. 17). In Anyone But You, everybody is very nice, and nobody is poor.

Still, given the utopian presentation of the film’s destination setting, it is all the more surprising that the film does tacitly acknowledge the mechanisms of power that would make such a retreat from the world possible. In the film’s prologue, during their first date, Bea confesses to Ben that she is thinking of quitting law school. Ben quips that, “it’s not too late to choose a more noble profession”. Bea sarcastically responds, “Oh, like you?” and glances toward the Bloomberg Terminal in the corner of Ben’s apartment. Ben concedes: “You’re right. Stick with it. I’m going to need a lawyer at some point” (Gluck 2023).

That Ben’s career in finance entails criminality is a running gag. His apartment features a large, bespoke portrait of Warren Buffet, as well as, for some unnamed reason, a stolen ATM machine wrapped with a heavy bicycle chain. Later, Ben drinks a cup of strong, Australian coffee and hyperactively rambles: “The coffee here. It’s like meth. I’m guessing. No, I’m not. I worked at Goldman [Sachs]. Partner’s wedding. You do what you do”. Ben reiterates the day-to-day misconduct of the Goldman Sachs Group in a scene where he and Bea fall off a yacht into Sydney Harbor:

Ben: We are gonna be fine. I once spent ten hours treading water off the coast of the Cayman Islands.

Bea: Goldman?

Ben: Yeah, it was a partner’s kid’s bar mitzvah. [Hold up his fingers in a pinching gesture.] [I smoked] a little bit of crack.

(Gluck 2023)

The Goldman Sachs Group is the institution understood to be primarily responsible for the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 and the resulting recession (the formerly left-wing journalist Matt Taibbi famously dubbed Goldman Sachs a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money” (Taibbi 2011, p. 209)). Over the course of the Great Recession, as many as 2% of all homes in the United States received foreclosure notices. Additionally, scholars link the recession with the uptick in suicide rates; in 2009, the number of suicides surpassed that of motor vehicle deaths “for the first time in modern history” (Houle and Light 2014, p. 1073).

Like the war in Much Ado, the Great Recession serves as a discomforting parergon for the mirth-making of Anyone But You. Gluck similarly draws upon Australia’s colonial legacy to frame the film’s lavish backdrop. Early in the film, Bea and Halle’s father Leo walks onscreen and goofily fiddles with a power adapter for his electric razor, grumbling, “why are [Australians] so weird about their plugs? I mean, this place is basically America. They speak English. They eat regular food. They have a complicated relationship with their past” (Gluck 2023). That specific “complicated relationship” is hinted at in another recurring gag. At several moments in the film, a character engineers an inelegant exit from an awkward situation by claiming to see the island of Tasmania (“Oh, hey, look. Is that Tasmania?”) and then walking away as if to take a closer look—even though, given that the film is set almost entirely in Sydney, they cannot actually see the island of Tasmania. Tasmania is the site of one of the most devastating instances of genocide in the British occupation of Australia; over the course of less than seventy-five years, the island’s entire initial Aboriginal population was decimated. Considering Leo’s quip about Australia’s “complicated relationship” with the past; considering the parallel running gag about Ben’s sleazy experiences working for Goldman Sachs (“you do what you do”); and considering the absurd claim to “see” something that’s not there—especially given the ongoing debates about whether the depopulation of Tasmania was “total” or not33—the “is that Tasmania?” gag can be read as another acknowledgment of the structures of exploitation that make the characters’ ludicrously fabulous Messina-like destination wedding vacation possible.

I am not suggesting that Anyone But You is a film about economic inequality in the same way that, say, Bong Joon-Ho’s (2019) Parasite is. Bong’s film is also concerned with the niceness of the upper class. After a character describes his employer, the wealthy suburban matriarch Yeon Kyo, as “rich, but still nice”, his wife corrects him: “Not ‘rich, but still nice’. ‘Nice because she’s rich’. […] Money is an iron. Those creases all get smoothed out.” In a moment demonstrating this sense of the smooth, pleasant naivety of the rich, Yeon Kyo chatters on cheerfully about her upcoming garden party. She happily notes that thanks to a torrential rainstorm, the skies will be clear and free of smog, all the while oblivious to the sour expression on the face of her chauffeur, who became homeless when his basement apartment was flooded by the same storm.34

For Gluck, on the other hand, his characters’ niceness—to say nothing of their national, racial, and sexual diversity—is sufficient. As another point of contrast, consider Joss Whedon’s 2013 film of Much Ado. Whedon’s film features a rare instance of Claudio’s “Ethiope” line, delivered in the style of “cringe comedy” that was popular in the first decades of this century.35 But as the wedding invitation-video in Anyone But You, which revises the play’s central, failed nuptials, clarified, Gluck’s protagonists are incapable of even an ironically racist or homophobic joke of this sort.36 Similarly, the characters’ direct acknowledgment of widespread criminality in high finance and the legacy of colonialism is proof that, whatever their advantages, they are fundamentally good people who check their privilege. (On board the glamorous yacht that serves as the venue for the rehearsal dinner, Peter quips, “Look how lucky we are. On a boat sailing back and forth with no real transportation or reason”.) Presenting the characters of Anyone But You as the deserving rich exemplifies Michaels’s critique of the strains of progressive liberalism that view “prejudice, not poverty” as the problem (Michaels 2016, p. 109) and, as a result, reduce politics to “nothing but etiquette” (p. 107). While Gluck’s film may be a non-traditional film adaptation loosely “inspired” by Much Ado, the emphasis on the characters’ niceness betrays a general sense of affinity seen in named, corrective stage productions of the play—which is to say, a tendency to identify most with the play’s richest and most powerful characters.

All the same, Gluck’s film concedes the role that structures of inequality play in the formation of its Messina-counterpart in a way that neither Leon’s nor Abraham’s productions do. And this is (perhaps inadvertently) closer to what Shakespeare shows us in Much Ado about Nothing. Unlike Anyone But You, Much Ado features a genuine instance of class conflict, when Dogberry responds to an insult by the “gentleman” Conrade (Shakespeare 2015, 4.2.15):

Dost thou not suspect my place? Dost thou not suspect my years? O, that he were here to write me down an ass! But masters, remember that I am an ass; though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass. No, thou villain, thou art full of piety, as shall be proved upon thee by good witness. I am a wise fellow, and which is more, an officer, and which is more, a householder, and which is more, as pretty a piece of flesh as any is in Messina […] —O, that I had been writ down an ass!

(4.2.76)

As he does elsewhere in his corpus, Shakespeare mines quite a bit of comedy from the buffoonish portrait of the working-class with his portrait of the Watch. However, he goes on to subvert that characterization by granting Dogberry a speech pleading for acknowledgment and dignity. With a few simple substitutions correcting Dogberry’s malapropisms and phrasing, we can replace the content of the text with the meaning just outside its borders. “Dost thou not respect my place?” “Forget not that [Conrade referred to me as] an ass”.

Dogberry is an ass. But his ability to say something other than what he thinks that he is saying permits him to perform an extended, negative appraisal of noble knaves like Conrade (and, by extension, Don John, and Don Pedro, and Claudio, and Leonato…). And while Dogberry’s lament is a plea for dignity, it is not a plea for equality (“All men are not alike”) (Shakespeare 2015, 3.5.38). His position and authority should be “suspected” because he is a landowner, an agent of the state, good looking, and reasonably affluent. In other words, some people should rest on the bottom of the ladder, but by all accounts, he should not be one of them. All the same, nobody benefits from Dogberry’s exclusion. Had he been better noted, the fiasco of Hero and Claudio’s first wedding may have been avoided.

As an upstart intruder in the aristocratic utopia of Messina, Dogberry balks at the reality that—despite his station as a householder, despite his service to the state and to the law—he will not be recognized or respected. And he is not the only one. Leonato’s subordinate position to the Prince is marked near the outset of the play when Don John needles Claudio with the comment that the Prince is “enamoured on Hero” and that “she is no equal for his birth” (Shakespeare 2015, 2.1.149-50). In the scene immediately following Dogberry’s plea for social recognition, Leonato and Antonio also square off against their social betters. Note how Leonato repeatedly, sardonically addresses his “lords”: “Hear you, my lords?”; “Some haste, my lord! Well, fare you well, my lord” (5.1.47, 48). Claudio and Don Pedro do not recognize Leonato’s self-professed wisdom any more than Conrade recognizes Dogberry as a “wise fellow” (“I speak not like a dotard nor a fool”) (5.1.59), and their offense is so great he is “forced to lay [his] reverence by” (5.1.64). The play opens with Leonato ignoring the very existence of the men who gave their lives in service of Don Pedro; near its end, he considers that he may be just as dismissible.

The press and marketing of Gluck’s film featured extensive scrutiny of the actors Sweeney and Powell, suggesting they were “really” a couple. This sort of conjecture has been central to Hollywood reporting since the silent era, but it also reflects the problem of likability so central to Much Ado About Nothing. Whatever a given audience thinks of Hero and Claudio, everybody wants Benedick and Beatrice to end up together. Their courtship captivates our attention not just because it is so funny and so charming, but because they appear to be genuinely virtuous.

Beatrice’s passionate defense of her cousin, phrased as a rejection of the signs and semblances of gender norms, regularly invites cheers from audiences (“O God, that I were a man! I would eat [Claudio’s] heart in the marketplace!”) (Shakespeare 2015, 4.1.304-5). Unlike Claudio and Leonato, Benedick never truly believes the slander against Hero (4.1.143-5, 259–60); though he initially balks at taking up Beatrice’s challenge to “kill Claudio”, he takes on the charge committedly (4.1.288). Even more significantly, he vows to “discontinue [Pedro’s] company” and leave his service (5.1.184). This resignation aligns with Beatrice’s earlier advice to Hero regarding an arranged marriage—“‘Father, as it please me’”—in its direct recognition that these characters have more moral agency than we might think, whatever their positions in society and their attendant obligations (2.1.49). They can refuse to be complicit. They can refuse to consent to being a part of a corrupted world.

5. Conclusions

Anyone But You’s credit sequence contains a montage of the cast singing along with the pop song “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield, occasionally addressing the camera as they dance and laugh and trip over the lyrics. This trope from romantic comedies is a close approximation of the jig that ended performances in the public theaters of Shakespeare’s London. Much Ado About Nothing is the sole play in Shakespeare’s canon that makes this convention a part of the play’s dramatic action. Within the same breath, Benedick vows to “devise” “brave punishments” to torture the captured Don John and calls to “strike up, pipers!” to begin this standard dance (Shakespeare 2015, 5.4.125-6). The juxtaposition of violence and joviality is striking, but so is the breaking of the frame between the play’s world and our world. As much as the fourth wall-breaking epilogues of The Tempest or As You Like It, Much Ado asks its audience to consider how responsible we are for the fate of characters like these. Simply acknowledging or noting them—tipping your hat to a complicated relationship with the past, joking about whether you might “need a good lawyer”, or fighting for a world where the those in power are just a little nicer (like that famous “good billionaire”, Warren Buffett)37—may not be sufficient. Such gestures are merely more signs and semblances of our sense of honor. All of which is why Shakespeare indicates that we can also find ways to “discontinue our company”, and which is why the ending—where that does not happen—is so troubling.

Shakespeare, as much as Derrida, is interested in frames, but only when they provide something more than empty ornamentation. Shakespeare directs our attention to the violence at the borders of his narrative because he wants us to consider how such a decidedly imperfect world is constructed. Progressive dramaturges and readers who correct the play find within its borders a series of rejectable offenses—slurs uttered, prejudices voiced, trespasses forgiven—that can be adjusted by fixating on the characters’ individual choices. Shakespeare’s vision, which breaks the frame of his audience’s perspective, is more attuned to the material structure of things. We might conclude that for many practitioners and readers who wish to correct Shakespeare, the problem with the play is not that it is too reactionary, but that it is too radical.38