[In the following review, Collins contends that in his 1993 film version of Much Ado about Nothing, Branagh downplayed the tension regarding gender roles found in Shakespeare’s play in order to present the film as a romantic comedy in the popular Hollywood style.]

The availability of Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing on videotape has provided me a way of exploring some of the issues involved in staging Shakespeare's comedies. As many people have pointed out, Claudio's question to Don Pedro in 1.1, “Hath Leonato any son, my Lord,” and the Prince's reply, “No child but Hero; she's his only heir” (284-85), open up the possibility that Claudio's interest in Hero (despite his declaration of love in the lines that follow) is, to some degree, financial as well as romantic. At the same time, no matter how much he may love his daughter, Leonato seems to appreciate that her marriage to Don Pedro will bring about a desirable “alliance” (to use Beatrice's word in 2.1.314); for when Antonio mistakenly informs him that the Prince loves Hero (1.2), he says, “We will hold it as a dream till it appear itself. But I will acquaint my daughter withal, that she may be better prepared for an answer” (18-21). Later, in 2.1.65-67, he reminds Hero, apparently for a second time, that “if the Prince do solicit you in that kind [i.e., with a proposal of marriage], you know your answer.”

Leonato's instructions to Hero in 2.1, however, leave his motivations unclear. While they may be meant to suggest that he simply wants an alliance with the Prince through the marriage of his daughter, his instructions are given to her in the context of Beatrice's disparagement of men and marriage; they follow her advising Hero to tell Leonato “Father, as it please me”; and they thus may also suggest that with two women in his care, one of whom he believes, as Antonio puts it, “too curst” (20) ever to be married, Leonato wants to make certain that the other one will not refuse the Prince's attractive proposal.

Although this second possibility may offer the actor playing Leonato a more plausible opportunity to show affection for Hero and implicit concern for her happiness, neither suggests that he believes or desires that Hero should marry, as Beatrice advises, for love. At the same time, Hero's notorious reticence (she says nothing to her father, her uncle, or Beatrice) leaves her intentions and her feelings unknown. Thus, by the time Don Pedro draws Hero aside at 2.1.99, the play has, in some measure, called into question the romantic view of Hero and Claudio that it has simultaneously created.

In teaching Much Ado About Nothing, I try to bring students to recognize that, on the stage, a production will probably emphasize one reading and repress the other, to see the relationship of Hero and Claudio either as romance (the more likely choice) or as alliance for financial and social reasons. To help make that recognition possible (and, at the same time, to emphasize the openness of all of Shakespeare's scripts to interpretation), I ask students to look carefully at the scene in which the Prince brings Hero back on stage, ultimately reveals to Claudio that he has wooed and won her for him, and then proposes marriage to Beatrice (2.1.210-337). I first divide the students into groups of six (to play the six roles in the scene) and then provide them a series of questions to help them imagine how the scene might look and sound on the stage. The questions are designed to address three fundamental questions: how are the actors positioned on the stage; how do they deliver their lines; and what actions do they perform? I ask half the groups to imagine a staging that articulates a romantic relationship between Hero and Claudio and half a staging that suppresses it. Since they have already watched, in class, the conclusions of such popular romantic comedies as Sabrina and Sleepless in Seattle, they have less difficulty imagining the first possibility.

I am not entirely fair to my students when I ask them to imagine a staging that suppresses the romantic possibilities of the scene, for, unlike them, working out such a staging on their own, I have seen a production which seemed to do just that, a Much Ado directed by Matthew Warchus in 1993 for The Queen's Theatre in London, with Janet McTeer and Mark Rylance as an awkward and inelegant Beatrice and Benedick (see Shakespeare Bulletin 12.1 [Winter 1994]: 16-17). When Don Pedro, having wooed Hero for Claudio, returned to the stage with her, he kissed her and left her, with the large jacket of his naval uniform around her shoulders for warmth, standing upstage center, uneasy, entirely alone, looking occasionally to one side or the other, while, downstage right, he talked first to Benedick and then to Beatrice and Claudio. Sitting alone, downstage left, her voice suggesting an emotional detachment from the action around her, Beatrice watched intently as Don Pedro and Leonato gave Hero to Claudio and, after they kissed, comically mimed vomiting.

She then stood up, moved across to a bar downstage right and, while mixing a drink, refused Don Pedro's offer of marriage. Both Leonato, standing next to her at the bar, and Don Pedro grew angry, and the Prince, crossing to the edge of the stage, still angry, stood looking out at the audience until Beatrice, with some nervous laughter, made her apology. Having told his niece some three hundred lines earlier that she would never get a husband if she remained “so shrewd” of tongue, Leonato looked angrily at her, apparently for letting the Prince's offer (and the alliance it would bring about) go by.

By answering the questions about the staging of the scene and trying, as the final part of the exercise, to stage and act it for themselves, students come to see more clearly not simply its ambiguity, its simultaneous potential for a romantic or an ironic reading, but also the ways in which it can be staged to articulate one or the other. At this point, I ask them to look at the scene in Branagh's film of the play, for, having worked through the script carefully themselves and having seen some broad and rudimentary stagings of its possibilities, they are now better prepared to recognize the decisions Branagh makes to achieve a remarkably beautiful and effective presentation of its romantic possibilities. In Branagh's version of 2.1.210-337, Hero enters smiling, alone with Don Pedro (and not also, as the conventional stage direction states, with her father). Although she has no lines, she remains next to Don Pedro, laughing and enjoying with him the good-natured teasing of Benedick about Beatrice. At the same time, as he does in the earlier exchange between Benedick and Claudio, where, for example, “Do you think the Prince would have served you thus?” is spoken to suggest that Benedick is correcting Claudio's mistaken conclusion, Branagh cuts all the lines in which Benedick expresses his belief that Don Pedro has betrayed Claudio and wooed Hero for himself. When he says, for example, “I told him, and I think I told him true, that your Grace had got the good will of this young lady” (213-15), the cuts here and earlier make the line mean Benedick has told Claudio that Don Pedro has won Hero for him, although, as we have seen in Claudio's response, he does not believe him.

When Beatrice enters with Claudio, she also brings Leonato, Antonio, and Ursula with her. The jocular tone shifts soon after she enters, for she is embarrassed and momentarily hurt by Benedick's “I can not endure my Lady Tongue” (272) and what Branagh's script calls her “rueful, rather sad” response (Much Ado About Nothing: The Making of the Movie. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. 33) quites the scene and leads naturally to the exchange between Don Pedro and Claudio. Gently, Don Pedro tells Claudio he has won Hero for him. Leonato then steps forward and, smiling with great affection, gives Hero to Claudio (“Count, take of me my daughter, and with her my fortunes”). The camera focuses on Hero, who smiles happily at Claudio and, with Beatrice's gentle, playful encouragement (“Speak, cousin; or, if you cannot, stop his mouth with a kiss and not let him speak neither”), moves toward him. The two young lovers embrace and kiss, while, as the script has it, “the others laugh, cheer, and clap” (35). The subsequent exchange between Don Pedro and Beatrice is equally gentle and affectionate, and it ends with Don Pedro alone on a bench, speaking softly to himself as he admires Beatrice's pleasant spirit.

Everything in the scene conspires to make it a moving moment in the film, to evoke in its audience the feeling of satisfaction that often marks the end of a romantic comedy: the cuts Branagh makes, the focus of the camera on the joyful faces of the lovers, the music, the pleasure all the characters seem to take in one another, the apparent affection they have for one another. Hero, who has no words in the scene, joyfully accepts the man she loves: her laughter with Don Pedro at Benedick, her concern at Claudio's discomfort, her happiness as she looks at him and kisses him all put to rest any doubt about her feelings for Claudio that her silence, as it did in Warchus' production, might otherwise evoke.

Much Ado About Nothing was released in early summer 1993, coincidentally at about the same time as the spectacularly successful romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle. The films have more than their time of release in common, however, for Branagh seems to have decided to suppress the play's uneasiness about the roles that gender imposes upon both men and women and make his Much Ado resemble, as far as possible, one of Hollywood's popular romantic comedies. I do not speak critically. Branagh has done what, it seems to me, all directors of Shakespeare's comedies must finally do: decide whether to emphasize in performance the conventions of the genre with its happy ending or those elements, always present in Shakespeare's comic scripts, that call the conventions of the genre into question. Branagh chose to affirm the conventions of the genre and thus made Much Ado About Nothing into a beautiful, enjoyable, and commercially successful romantic comedy.

While I always enjoy the pleasure most students take in the film, I use it in the classroom, with either the acting exercise I have described here or a similar one for the last scene (i.e., 5.4.53-128, where both Kate Beckinsale as Hero and Emma Thompson as Beatrice make the appropriate romantic choices) primarily for other reasons. First, since the actors make clear choices to achieve clear effects, the film allows students, after they have worked though parts of the script themselves, to see how Branagh produced, as all directors do, a reading, an interpretation of Shakespeare's script. Then, the film makes clear as well how particular issues in a script can (through cuts, actors' choices, and directors' decisions) be ignored or suppressed, how even a complex script can be reduced to formula, a reduction which, in this case, blurs, to some degree, the differences between Beatrice and Benedick and Hero and Claudio, thereby obscuring the questions about the roles and status of women those differences often raise. Finally, the film suggests the power of actors and acting to shape both a production and our response to it: none of the doubts that the script raises about the love of Hero and Claudio are invited to make any impact on us in the film because John Sean Leonard and Beckinsale can convince us, even without much dialogue, that they are deeply in love, as they do at various moments in the film before the broken wedding and, most effectively, as they tearfully and silently embrace one another when they are reconciled at the end of the play. But, as students come to recognize, such acting finally makes Hero not a real woman but a conventional figure playing a conventional role, and thus it helps turn Shakespeare's complex, disquieting script into Branagh's simpler, more comforting, but undeniably enjoyable film.