Sythesizing Much Ado, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night
The titles of these three Shakespearean comedies seem to say, “Whatever.” Much Ado
About Nothing, As You Like It, and What You Will* all sound like the Elizabethan ancestors of
Adam Sandler’s fluffy, frivolous romcom, Just Go With It. But I think that these plays are meant
to be much more than knee-slappers. These are plays with revolutionary female characters.
They examine love, relationship, and the human instinct to seek significance just as incisively as
any tragedy does. The difference is just in the context: we laugh, rather than cry, at the
moments of catharsis.
Now that I’ve rejected the idea that these plays are nothing but fun diversions, what is up
with those titles? As I sit here puzzling over Shakespeare’s intentions, I realize that these titles
serve as Shakespeare’s wry replies to everyone’s wonderings about what his plays mean.
“What are your plays about, Bill?” Elizabethan critics must have asked. “Oh, as you like it, what
you will,” he replied. “It’s all just much ado about nothing.” I think Shakespeare suggests that his
plays will mean whatever the audience chooses them to mean: Everyone has their own
subjective convictions about the significance of experiences, even if there isn’t much at all to
make ado about. Throughout these three comedies, Shakespeare shows that all of life is just a
big Rorscharct test, onto which we project our own desires and fears, and thereby see a picture
we’ve created ourselves.
This Shakespearean Rorscharct effect explains why characters in Much Ado, As You
Like It, and What You Will are so gullible. In these plays, characters perceive overheard
conversations and unintelligible strings of letters as conclusive proof of things that are actually
totally false. Benedick and Beatrice each become convinced that the other has declared love,
just by overhearing their friends’ silly stage-whispered gossip. Neither Beatrice nor Benedick
believe Don John’s unfounded, implausible rumors that Don Pedro wants to woo Hero or that
Hero is cheating on Claudio. So what was more convincing about Pedro’s, Claudio’s, Hero’s,
and Ursula’s gossip? Nothing. The only reason Benedick and Beatrice believed the gossip is
because it fit in with what Benedick and Beatriced felt in their own hearts all along. Neither dupe
had actually declared love, but both eagerly ate up their friends’ fibs because the fibs confirmed
what each dupe was so desperate to believe.
The same was true with Malvolio. Maria is clever, but her letter was not such a coup-degrace of deception that Malvolio might not have dismissed it or failed to understand it entirely.
Malvolio really just believes what he wants to believe. This is demonstrated in the funniest
moment in Malvolio’s duping; when he reads the line “M, O, I, A” doth sway my life.” Malvolio
searches desperately for a reason to believe that these letters refer to him. “M, O, A, I; this
simulation is not as the former: and yet to crush it a little, it would bow to me, for every one of
these letters are in my name.” There is no reason to believe that these letters refer to Malvolio,
but he is so eager to believe that Olivia loves him and so he is duped. He really tricks himself.
Just as Malvolio is prepared to believe Maria’s, Toby’s, and Fabian’s lies, Claudio is very
prepared to believe Don John’s. Claudio is insecure, especially about his masculinity, and so he
is jealous and paranoid. He probably angsts all day, worrying that Hero will turn to more
appealling men. (Why else would he jump to conclude that his friend Don Pedro was courting
Hero? To be fair to Claudio, it probably doesn’t help to hear Benedick constantly jeering at the
“horns” of married men.) Claudio probably comforts himself with the idea that “it’s all in my
head”, but then Don John accuses Hero and so Claudio concludes that his suspicions were
correct.
If Jacques watched all these mad-cap misunderstandings, he would definitely agree that
it is all much ado about nothing. I bet Jacques would say the ease with which lies become
reality in the minds of the Messinans shows just how illusory all of their realities are-they’re just
changing from one “part” to another. Jacques would especially smile ironically at Benedick’s
“Doth not the appetite alter?” speech. In “The Seven Ages of Man” soliloquy, Jacques declares
that throughout life, humans can assign themselves different identities, and play many parts. But
in the end, they crumble to nothing.
In The Invention of the Human, The critic Harold Bloom says that Jacques soliloquy is
profoundly nihilistic. Jacques reflects that life is a journey to mere oblivion. Men and women
may search for significance in themselves, for an eternal essence, but one essence gives way
to another until the final end result of existence arrives: nothingness.
Much Ado, As You Like It, and What You Will, can all hold their own with great tragedies
when it comes to exploring human search for meaning. But these three plays share an element
that no other Shakespeare play (other than the Merchant of Venice) does: a female character
who broke all the traditions of women in theatre. Audiences had already seen strong, dangerous,
female characters like Clytemnestra or Electra. They had seen intelligent, eloquent, profoundly
imaginative women like Juliet. But the theatre had never produced characters like Beatrice,
Viola, or Rosalind. Beatrice, Viola, and Rosalind transcend gender. They break all the rules of
feminine behavior in the way they soliloquize, the way they form the centers of the action, and
most of all, in the way they interact with men.
Beatrice, Viola, and Rosalind all wind up married, as per comedic tradition. But not one
of them has a traditional courtship, and not one of them will play the role of wife as it’s
traditionally played. Beatrice’s real courtships with Benedick are her arguments with him. They
don’t fall in love at first sight, under a balcony, and they don’t even fall in love during the trick
played on them in the garden at the end of Act II. They fall in love over the many years of their
“merry war of words”. The traits that attract them to each other have nothing to do with gender.
They flirt by exchanging insults. They bond over their flair for repartee and their mutual disgust
for marriage and the opposite sex. When Beatrice and Benedick marry in Act V, it is a “marriage
of true minds” which transcends sexual attraction. The sexual attraction that must surely exist
between them is just an added bonus to the competitiveness and likemindedness of their
relationship.
Viola has pretty much the polar opposite of a traditional courtship. Her closeness with
Orsino comes about over a series of man-to-man talks, in which they share in the aggravating
mysteries of women. They bond while sharing in the experience of being a man! How much
more unlimited by her gender could Viola be, when her male lover first comes to confide and
trust in her out of her understanding of his male experience?
The scholar Emma Smith suggests that Orsino wants Viola to hold on to her alternate
male identity, Cesario, even when they’re married-Orsino wants to be able to interact with
Cesario every once in a while. This makes sense because Viola is most witty, most clever, most
understanding, and most herself when she is playing a man. Society’s expectations of what
women should be limit her and prevent her from displaying the full spectrum of her emotion and
intellect. (Men don’t have it much easier—our society has decided that only certain emotions
and opinions are appropriate for each gender.) Viola and Rosalind were probably the first
female characters with whom men felt more in common as men, than those men did with the
other men onstage. This is why Viola and Rosalind are such creative triumphs for Shakespeare.
He created characters whose universally human traits shone out so brightly that the audience
(and the other characters in the play) do not notice or care about those characters’ gender.
Rosalind’s courtship with Orlando is the most unconventional of all, which is fitting,
because she is the most universal and the most gender-transcendent of all Shakespeare’s
women. Rosalind courts Orlando while pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman in
order to teach another man about women. Rosalind transcends both the femininity she is
disguising and the masculinity she is assuming, in that she can interact with someone as if she
were a man, while teaching that person the workings of a woman’s mind. The reason Rosalind
understands and relates to both men and women so easily is that the traits that make men and
women different are incredibly superficial compared to the traits common to all human beings.
Rosalind, with her insight and her talent for empathy, understands these traits better than
anyone else. She draws on her own experience to imagine what goes on in other people’s
hearts.
In this way, she is a bit like Shakespeare, who could portray men and women equally
well, because he could speak to common human experience. It’s not absurd to think that a
writer could know things about human being, because all he has to do is look within himself. As
James Joyce said, “In the Particular is contained the Universal. The introspective Rosalind has
a remarkable understanding of herself, which she uses to empathize with, relate to, (and
manipulate) others.
Beatrice, Viola, and Rosalind all posess a remarkable talent for what Harold Bloom calls
“self-overhearing”. They are conscious of their own foibles, they can name the turmoil in their
minds. (Hamlet’s “O what a rogue” speech is probably the classic arexample of this.) Beatrice,
Viola, and Rosalind all know how crazily their love, their pride, and their other foibles make them
act. As Bloom writes, “it is so difficult to achieve a perspective on [these women] that [they
themselves] do not anticipate and share.” Their self-understanding helps the audience
understand themselves too. While people like me often struggle to articulate exactly how we feel,
these characters speak so lucidly and eloquently that their fears and desires become visual,
tangible, and tastable. Emerson wrote “In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected
thoughts.” When we hear Beatrice’s, Viola’s, and Rosalind’s brilliant speeches, we recognize
our own unexpressed feelings, and the feelings are so beautifuly expressed that we understand
them more fully than we ever thought we could.
In her final farewell, Rosalind invites us to “like as much of this play as please [you]”.
Good fiction is like a mirror; it shows each of us a different thing, but that doesn’t mean that the
reflection is skewed. We may all find different meanings in these three comedies of
Shakespeare’s, but that doesn’t mean that we’re just making up meaning that isn’t actually there.
In Much Ado, What You Will and As You Like It, there are profound truths about our significance
seeking brains, and the superficiality of gender, if we look for them.
Much Ado About Nothing * As
You Like It
[* plus, another comedy for Honors students]
Exploratory Synthesis Essay
ASSIGNMENT: In an essay that is sustained for 4+ pages (1300+ words) [HONORS—6+ pages (2000+ words)] (it may seem like a lot, but you have a lot to say), explore
one or more than one idea that distinguishes the two (or three) plays from the unit, something that you are passionate about or think is important for an interested reader to
consider. Try to synthesize the two (three) plays in a way that arrives at a meaningful and interesting idea about both (or all).
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Content (Clout)
o Honors
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Include another newly-read comedy in your discussion: Twelfth Night √
Include in your discussion, references to and citations from
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Bloom, Emma Smith
at least three
critical lectures or essays.
What You Will—you might refer to the play’s more commonly known title also at the beginning—
and even comment on the possible significance of the use of such a subtitle.
Your discussion of characters seeing what they want to should extend to As You Like It, too—and
not just with Jaques’s commentarty. Rosalind and Orlando might either be seen as imposing their
own wished-for truths onto a blank canvas—or even Duke Senior, perhaps.
Your comments about Rosalind’s virtues as both a man and a woman are excellently expressed.
Your final comments about self-understanding seems to be leading somewhere but is not a
separate section and also not a part of the conclusion. It has great promise (although I question
whether Beatrice has the same self-understanding as Rosalind and Viola) but is really an
undeveloped appendage.
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Organization (Clarity)—fine overall
o No title—Be sure to give your essay a title—significant more than as just a mere formality.
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Style (Class)
o Personal, passionate—strong, as usual
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Conventions
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(Cleanliness)
Spelling: Rorscharct ! Rorschach—make sure you get the spelling right for a word like this.
PRESENT TENSE. Be careful not to slip into the past tense at times.
USAGE: angst is not a verb: a person has angst.
Be sure to cite your quotations with act and scene
Remember to use italics for play titles: As You Like It
Your insights about the plays in your two major sections—characters painting their own desires
onto the events and the greatness of the three women—show your interested and energetic
reading. The essay’s various slips—missing some conventions and some format requirements—
do some, though not terrific, damage to the essay in that they distract the reader from your
important ideas. The notable lack of textual evidence to support your ideas is not so terrible,
since your reading is obviously strong—but their absence is apparent and be sure to cite the
scene and line when you do use the text. Your good insights can’t carry the day completely;
some polish is also important.
AR
B+