Study Guide to Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645425755
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Manuali di studio
• Subtopic: Guide di studio

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, thought to be written as the author approached the middle of his career. As a theatrical comedy of the late sixteenth century, Much Ado About Nothing poses the question of how love expresses itself. Moreover, it suggests to readers that people who get swept up into fits of passion do so because of everyday situations and emotions. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Shakespeare’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including
essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

FACTS VERSUS SPECULATION

Anyone who wishes to know where documented truth ends and where speculation begins in Shakespearean scholarship and criticism first needs to know the facts of Shakespeare’s life. A medley of life records suggest, by their lack of inwardness, how little is known of Shakespeare’s ideology, his beliefs and opinions.

William Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564, as “Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere”; the evidence is the parish register of Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, England.

HUSBAND AND FATHER

On November 28, 1582, the Bishop of Worcester issued a license to William Shakespeare and “Anne Hathaway of Stratford” to solemnize a marriage upon one asking of the banns providing that there were no legal impediments. Three askings of the banns were (and are) usual in the Church of England.

On May 26, 1583, the records of the parish church in Stratford note the baptism of Susanna, daughter to William Shakespeare. The inference is clear, then, that Anne Hathaway Shakespeare was with child at the time of her wedding.

On February 2, 1585, the records of the parish church in Stratford note the baptisms of “Hamnet & Judeth, sonne and daughter to William Shakspere.”

SHAKESPEARE INSULTED

On September 20, 1592, Robert Greene’s A Groats-worth of witte, bought with a million of Repentance was entered in the Stationers’ Register. In this work Shakespeare was publicly insulted as “an upstart Crow, beautified with our [“gentlemen” playwrights usually identified as Marlowe, Nashe, and Lodge] feathers, that with Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde [a parody of a Shakespearean line in II Henry VI] supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.” This statement asperses not only Shakespeare’s art but intimates his base, i.e., non-gentle, birth. A “John factotum” is a servant or a man of all work.

On April 18, 1593, Shakespeare’s long erotic poem Venus and Adonis was entered for publication. It was printed under the author’s name and was dedicated to the nineteen-year-old Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton.

On May 9, 1594, another long erotic poem, The Rape of Lucrece, was entered for publication. It also was printed under Shakespeare’s name and was dedicated to the Earl of Southampton.

On December 26 and 27, 1594, payment was made to Shakespeare and others for performances at court by the Lord Chamberlain’s servants.

For August 11, 1596, the parish register of Holy Trinity Church records the burial of “Hamnet filius William Shakspere.”

FROM “VILLEIN” TO “GENTLEMAN”

On October 20, 1596, John Shakespeare, the poet’s father, was made a “gentleman” by being granted the privilege of bearing a coat of arms. Thus, William Shakespeare on this day also became a “gentleman.” Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden Shakespeare, was “gentle” by birth. The poet was a product of a cross-class marriage. Both the father and the son were technically “villeins” or “villains” until this day.

On May 24, 1597, William Shakespeare purchased New Place, a large house in the center of Stratford.

CITED AS “BEST”

In 1598 Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia listed Shakespeare more frequently than any other English author. Shakespeare was cited as one of eight by whom “the English tongue is mightily enriched, and gorgeouslie invested in rare ornaments and resplendent abiliments”; as one of six who had raised monumentum aere perennius [a monument more lasting than brass]; as one of five who excelled in lyric poetry; as one of thirteen “best for Tragedie,” and as one of seventeen who were “best for Comedy.”

On September 20, 1598, Shakespeare is said on the authority of Ben Jonson (in his collection of plays, 1616) to have been an actor in Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour.

On September 8, 1601, the parish register of Holy Trinity in Stratford records the burial of “Mr. Johannes Shakespeare,” the poet’s father.

BECOMES A “KING’S MAN”

In 1603 Shakespeare was named among others, the Lord Chamberlain’s players, as licensed by James I (Queen Elizabeth having died) to become the King’s Men.

In 1603 a garbled and pirated Hamlet (now known as Q1) was printed with Shakespeare’s name on the title page.

In March 1604, King James gave Shakespeare, as one of the Grooms of the Chamber (by virtue of being one of the King’s Men), four yards of red cloth for a livery, this being in connection with a royal progress through the City of London.

In 1604 (probably) there appeared a second version of Hamlet (now known as Q2), enlarged and corrected, with Shakespeare’s name on the title page.

On June 5, 1607, the parish register at Stratford records the marriage of “M. John Hall gentleman & Susanna Shaxspere,” the poet’s elder daughter. John Hall was a doctor of medicine.

BECOMES A GRANDFATHER

On February 21, 1608, the parish register at Holy Trinity, Stratford, records the baptism of Elizabeth Hall, Shakespeare’s first grandchild.

On September 9, 1608, the parish register at Holy Trinity, Stratford, records the burial of Mary Shakespeare, the poet’s mother.

On May 20, 1609, “Shakespeares Sonnets. Never before Imprinted” was entered for publication.

On February 10, 1616, the marriage of Judith, Shakespeare’s younger daughter, is recorded in the parish register of Holy Trinity, Stratford.

On March 25, 1616, Shakespeare made his will. It is extant.

On April 23, 1616, Shakespeare died. The monument in the Stratford church is authority for the date.

BURIED IN STRATFORD CHURCH

On April 25, 1616, Shakespeare was buried in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford. Evidence of this date is found in the church register. A stone laid over his grave bears the inscription:

Good Frend for Jesus Sake Forbeare, To Digg The Dust Encloased Heare! Blest Be Ye Man Yt Spares Thes Stones, And Curst Be He Yt Moves My Bones.

DEMAND FOR MORE INFORMATION

These are the life records of Shakespeare. Biographers, intent on book length or even short accounts of the life of the poet, of necessity flesh out these (and other) not very revealing notices from 1564-1616, Shakespeare’s life span with ancillary matter such as the status of Elizabethan actors, details of the Elizabethan theaters, and life under Elizabeth I and James I. Information about Shakespeare’s artistic life-for example, his alteration of his sources-is much more abundant than truthful insights into his personal life, including his beliefs. There is, of course, great demand for colorful stories about Shakespeare, and there is intense pressure on biographers to depict the poet as a paragon of wisdom.

ANECDOTES-TRUE OR UNTRUE?

Biographers of Shakespeare may include stories about Shakespeare that have been circulating since at least the seventeenth century; no one knows whether or not these stories are true. One declares that Shakespeare was an apprentice to a butcher, that he ran away from his master, and was received by actors in London. Another story holds that Shakespeare was, in his youth, a schoolmaster somewhere in the country. Another story has Shakespeare fleeing from his native town to escape the clutches of Sir Thomas Lucy who had often had him whipped and sometimes imprisoned for poaching deer. Yet another story represents the youthful Shakespeare as holding horses and taking care of them while their owners attended the theater. And there are other stories.

Scholarly and certainly lay expectations oblige Shakespearean biographers often to resort to speculation. This may be very well if biographers use such words as conjecture, presumably, seems, and almost certainly. I quote an example of this kind of hedged thought and language from Hazelton Spencer’s The Art and Life of William Shakespeare (1940); “Of politics Shakespeare seems to have steered clear . . . but at least by implication Shakespeare reportedly endorses the strong-monarchy policy of the Tudors and Stuarts.” Or one may say, as I do in my book Blood Will Tell in Shakespeare’s Plays (1984): “Shakespeare particularly faults his numerous villeins for lacking the classical virtue of courage (they are cowards) and for deficiencies in reasoning ability (they are ‘fools’), and in speech (they commit malapropisms), for lack of charity, for ambition, for unsightly faces and poor physiques, for their smell, and for their harboring lice.” This remark is not necessarily biographical or reflective of Shakespeare’s personal beliefs; it refers to Shakespeare’s art in that it makes general assertions about the base - those who lacked coats of arms-as they appear in the poet’s thirty-seven plays. The remark’s truth or lack of truth may be tested by examination of Shakespeare’s writings.

WHO WROTE SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS?

The less reputable biographers of Shakespeare, including some of weighty names, state assumptions as if they were facts concerning the poet’s beliefs. Perhaps the most egregious are those who cannot conceive that the Shakespearean plays were written by a person not a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge and destitute of the insights permitted by foreign travel and by life at court. Those of this persuasion insist that the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere (whose descendant Charles Vere recently spoke up for the Earl’s authorship of the Shakespearean plays), or Sir Francis Bacon, or someone else wrote the Shakespearean plays. It is also argued that the stigma of publication would besmirch the honor of an Elizabethan gentleman who published under his own name (unless he could pretend to correct a pirated printing of his writings).

BEN JONSON KNEW HIM WELL

Suffice it here to say that the thought of anyone writing the plays and giving them to the world in the name of Shakespeare would have astonished Ben Jonson, a friend of the poet, who literally praised Shakespeare to the skies for his comedies and tragedies in the fine poem “To the Memory of My Beloved Master the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us” (printed in the First Folio, 1623). Much more commonplace and therefore much more obtrusive upon the minds of Shakespeare students are those many scholars who are capable of writing, for example, that Shakespeare put more of himself into Hamlet than any of his other characters or that the poet had no rigid system of religion or morality. Even George Lyman Kittredge, the greatest American Shakespearean, wrote, “Hamlet’s advice to the players has always been understood - and rightly - to embody Shakespeare’s own views on the art of acting.”

In point of fact, we know nothing of Shakespeare’s beliefs or opinions except such obvious inferences as that he must have thought New Place, Stratford, worth buying because he bought it. Even Homer, a very self-effacing poet, differs in this matter from Shakespeare. Twice in the Iliad he speaks in his own voice (distinguished from the dialogue of his characters) about certain evil deeds of Achilles. Shakespeare left no letters, no diary, and no prefaces (not counting conventionally obsequious dedications); no Elizabethan Boswell tagged Shakespeare around London and the provinces to record his conversation and thus to reveal his mind. In his plays Shakespeare employed no rainsonneur, or authorial mouthpiece, as some other dramatists have done: contrary to many scholarly assertions, it cannot be proved that Prospero, in The Tempest in the speech ending “I’ll drown my book” (Act V), and Ulysses, in Troilus and Cressida in the long speech on “degree” (Act II), speak Shakespeare’s own sentiments. All characters in all Shakespearean plays speak for themselves. Whether they speak also for Shakespeare cannot be proved because documents outside the plays cannot be produced.

As for the sonnets, they have long been the happy hunting groun...