Much Ado About Nothing: The Unsociable Comedy | Barbara Everett, Somerville College, Oxford
Barbara Everett, Somerville College, Oxford
Social workers sometimes speak of people 'falling through the net'. That's what it can seem that Much Ado About Nothing has done, critically speaking. Audiences and readers rarely like it quite as much as the two comedies by Shakespeare which follow it, As You Like It and Twelfth Night: they feel that by comparison it lacks some sort of magic. Professional critics can take this vague disappointment much further, almost echoing the nineteenth-century charge that the heroine Beatrice is an 'odious woman'. In case it appears that we have changed all that, it may be worth mentioning that what is probably still the only full-length handbook on the play describes Beatrice (at least in her earlier unreformed phase) as 'self-centred', 'the embodiment of pride', a person who 'cannot love', 'a crippled personality, the very antithesis of the outgoing, self-giving character [Shakespeare] values most...
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