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Much Ado About Nothing: Three Responses To Shakespeare's Play

Abstract

The paper looks at Shakespeare's comedy Much Ado about Nothing, as well as two film adaptations of the play, from a reader-oriented perspective, offering samples of an expert reading of the play, an initiated reading and a so-called "innocent" reading. We compare the three approaches taking into consideration the reception of the play's motifs (such as the bedtrick) and the conventional reaction of the readers to them.

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DOI 10.1515/rjes -2015-0014

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING: THREE RESPONSES

TO SHAKESPEARE'S PLAY

DANA PERCEC, CODRUȚ A GOȘ A

West University of Timiș oara

Abstract: The paper looks at Shakespeare's comedy Much Ado about Nothing, as well as two

film adaptations of the play, from a reader-oriented perspective, offering samples of an expert

reading of the play, an initiated reading and a so-called "innocent" reading. We compare the

three approaches taking into consideration the reception of the play's motifs (such as the

bedtrick) and the conventional reaction of the readers to them.

Keywords: reader-orientedness, expert, initiated and innocent reading, reception .

1. Introduction

In the past several years, there have been substantial transformations of approaches in

literary and cultural studies in undergraduate, graduate, postgraduate education in English. An

important role of departments of Eng. Lit has been to create interpretations of the texts of

various historical periods, including – if not especially – Shakespeare. The key to progressive

educational policy in departments of Eng. Lit worldwide today is combining the values of

canonical literary texts with the values of universal access, presenting literature as an occasion

for education, not merely a subject matter. This comes as a result of a complex set of relations

between critical thinking about literature and the politics of education.

The academic study we propose draws on the receiving end of Shakespeare's work,

more precisely on reader-oriented theories. We are broadly interested in how Shakespeare's

work is viewed and interpreted and, for this reason, we are conducting an exploratory case

study which focuses on the comedy Much Ado about Nothing and two of its best known film

adaptations. The interpretations we instantiate in the study are done by three different kinds of

readers, what we labelled as: expert, initiated and innocent. An expert reading is provided, in

our view, by the academic-critical approach to Shakespeare's comedy, both in the traditional

line of expertise and in the context of contemporary, culturally-oriented studies. For the other

two types of readers, we conduct an experiment among representatives of two levels of

studies: an MA student who has been exposed to formal English literature courses in literature

in general and a course on Shakespeare, for the initiated reader, while an innocent reader is a

junior student, a fresh person in English language and literature BA study programme. Due to

the fact that the outcome of this entire endeavour cannot be reported in one sitting, in this

paper we will focus on the issues pertaining to the framing of our study and we will report on

the expert readership. The subsequent phases and outcomes of the study focusing on the

initiated and innocent readings will be reported on ot her occasions and the entire study will

constitute the substance of a larger research report.

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Reader oriented theories all start from the assumption that the receiver is active and

not passive in the act of perception and meaning making therefore – the literary text has no

real existence until it is read/viewed. Several concepts of reader-oriented origins were

considered as relevant for our study: phenomenology, horizon of expectations, and literary

competence and conventions.

When it comes to the study of literature, phenomenology refers to "a type of criticism

which tries to enter into the world of a writer's works and to arrive at an understanding of the

underlying nature or essence of the writings as they appear to the critic's consciousness"

(Raman, 1989:118). Our own endeavour has such a dimension since it draws on

phenomenology, more precisely on hermeneutics in the study of Shakespeare's work. Thus,

broadly speaking, we view Shakespeare as both a literary and a social phenomenon and we try

to explore and understand how he is experienced by different receivers. Furthermore, our

study is situated between the two extremes of a continuum in the study of literature. We

conceptualize this continuum as having at one end Russian formalism which completely

ignores the context in which the text was produced and at the other end social theories which

ignore the text. Consequently, we start from the assumption that, without ignoring the text

itself, its interpretation is highly dependent on the historical contexts in which it was produced

and in which it is read. Additionally crucial to the study is the belief that the interpretation of

a text is also dependent on the reader and his/her knowledge and skills. We call these two

aspects the contextual factor and the reader factor.

The contextual factor starts from the concept of "horizons of expectations" whose

proponent was Jauss (1982). In Jauss' view, it would be wrong to say that a work is universal,

that its meaning is fixed forever and open to all readers in any period. The criteria readers use

to judge literary texts vary in time and place. In this line of thought, interpretations instantiate

(or not) a reader's ability to move between past and present. In other words, an interpretation

of the text depends on the questions prompted by the reader's own culture and/or their

knowledge of the past (i.e. the period in which the text was produced).

The reader factor in this study mainly refers to what Culler (1975) first labelled as

literary competence and which he later on (1997) claimed them to be conventions of reading.

Literary competence should clearly be delimitated from reading conventions as they put forth

very different constructs. Thus we take the view that literary competence comes in various

degrees and shades and refers to the reader's exposure to knowledge of various literary

theories as well as practice in the actual analysis of various texts. Reading conventions, on the

other hand, we view as being culturally rooted and putting forth the values, beliefs, and

practices emerging from a particular culture. In the same line of thought, Torell (2010:371)

argues that stereotypes and clichés as reading conventions can be mistakenly taken as

internalized literary conventions.

2. Some Ado about Expertly Reading Much Ado

Much Ado about Nothing is one of Shakespeare's very few plays written almost

exclusively in prose. It features a fashionable, Italianate plot, about the tribulations of

suspicious, jealous lovers, and a more original English subplot, about the war of the sexes.

Much Ado is also one of the most remarkably st able comedies in terms of its critical

reception, less vulnerable to newer academic approaches to Shakespeare, such as (mainly,

though not exclusively) postcolonialism and gender studies. It is, at the same time, a light,

romantic comedy, and a text containing the germs of a problem play. It is appreciated for

its elegance and aristocratic taste, its evidence of court life, being thus more typical of the

English Renaissance spirit than other instances of Elizabethan drama.

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Still, the play has a substantial potential for embeddedness, given the interplay of

meanings, announced from the very beginning by the pun in the title, between nothing , a

trifle, and noting , as the word was pronounced in the 16th century (Marion Wynne Davies

2001), in a play where observation and misobservation are the engines that drive the story.

The habit of noting makes the discrepancy between appearance and essence one of the

main themes of the play, materialized in the bed-trick. This is a rather common motif in

numerous comedies and problem plays, with variations, the main "trick" being the fact that

a male lover thinks himself in bed with the wrong woman or (less frequently) viceversa. In

Much Ado, the motif is complicated further by macabre elements, such as an alleged death

and a tomb. This has led critics to a newly coined term, a tomb-trick, which in Wendy

Doniger's opinion, is only a quasi-trick (2000:21). If a complete trick is available in the

tragi-comedies, where the eager male heroes cannot escape the amorous traps laid by the

women who love them but are not loved in return, Much Ado offers only a half of several

tricks: the bed-trick is incomplete because neither Claudio nor Hero go to bed with anyone

and the tomb-trick places Claudio in front of an empty grave and then in front of a falsely

resurrected bride. Thus, the trick in this play is not only a technical element in the

development of the plot, but a mise en abyme, by means of which Shakespeare explores the

discomfort of jealousy, the tension between monogamy and promiscuousness, the fragile

borderline between sex and gender, between power and identity. The bed-trick hints at the

gap between physical closeness and mental alienation, between reality and imaginary

projection. George Volceanov (2003:19) regards the bed-trick as a ritual of deception

which becomes, in Shakespeare's plays, an archetypal situation. To understand this motif,

one must read and watch the play with the eyes of the 17th century spectator, in a cultural

and material world which was very different from ours. Once the nights have grown less

dark, due to artificial lightning, once the intimacy of coupl es has increased, making the

sexual act less ritualized and conventional, the bed-trick has started losing its likelihood,

the modern reader and watcher growing more sceptical. Apart from this pragmatic aspect,

the ethic connotations have also made traditional critics impatient (Muir 1965:47), as with

something which, seen once, presents no potential for a repeat. Although no one ends in

bed with other fellows than the intended ones, most of the characters are victimizers or

victims in this game of deception and doubling. Hero makes Beatrice believe Benedick is

in love with her, Don John makes Claudio believe Hero is unfaithful to him, Don Pedro

woos Hero for Claudio, Leonato gives Claudio a bride he believes to be Hero's cousin,

after he mourns Hero over an empty grave. This partial enumeration successfully proves

that, instead of one complete trick, the play offers a multitude of quasi-tricks which, in

quantitative terms, come to dominate the entire story. Still, the most relevant scenes which

are conventionally labelled as "tricks" are scene 3 Act III (the quasi -bed-trick, in which

Claudio is reported to have seen a woman wearing Hero's clothes in Borachio's arms),

scene 4 in Act V (the quasi-tomb-trick, in which Claudio believes Hero has been

miraculously brought back to life) and the final reconciliation scene, in which yet another

trick (a full trick, this time, I would argue, a perfectly orchestrated optical illusion, in fact)

solves the previous two quasi-tricks.

In this play about noting , watching and eavesdropping are obsessive, each character

understanding, as it happens in the romantic comedies, "what they will". In Act I, the

noblemen of Aragon "note" Hero's distinguished figure, which persuades them of her

honesty. However, the same figure carries signs of betrayal and debauchery in Act IV. The

blood in her cheeks is, for Claudio, a mark of lust, while for the good friar, it is a note of

maidenly innocence. At the wedding, Claudio does not note the real woman behind the

veil, though he swears to note well all her virtues. This almost deliberate confusion is

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backed by the attitude most characters declare to have towards slander. Ironically, the first

one showing eagerness to practice "honest slanders" (III, 1) is the very victim of slander,

Hero herself, who makes up things about her cousin Beatrice in order to force destiny and

see her married. Of course, the oxymoron has a tinge of irony. Hero's lie may be innocent,

but it is a lie all the same. Hero and Don Pedro invent a love stor y between Beatrice and

Benedick in order to bring them together, a false and shaky scaffolding which could

collapse at the slightest perturbation. When the two pseudo-lovers realize they are the

victims of "honest slanders", it is too late – they are already genuinely infatuated with each

other. The slander against Hero is dishonest but only apparently different from the

"honest" ones, as the mechanisms are the same. Claudio is shown a woman wearing his

fiancée's dress and needs no further evidence of Hero's infidelity. Leonato, the girl's

father, needs even less, since he accuses his daughter of treason having only Claudio's and

Don Pedro's words. This impatience would seem a gross exaggeration if one forgot, like in

the case of the bed-trick, the background to which the play explicitly alludes several times.

One of the most frequent "jokes" of this comedy is about cuckolding: when he introduces

his daughter to Aragon and his men, Leonato joins this witty exchange:

DON PEDRO

You embrace your charge too willingly. I think this is your daughter.

LEONATO

Her mother hath many times told me so.

BENEDICK

Were you in doubt, sir, that you asked her?

LEONATO

Signior Benedick, no; for then were you a child. (I, 1)

Leonato hides behind words, avoiding the sophisticated irony of the Aragon court,

but exposes his daughter, whose vulnerability grows later. The fact that Leonato's line is

not random is proved by Benedick, who repeats the joke about the cuckolded husband,

symmetrically, in the last act, when he addresses Don Pedro: "Prince, thou art sad; get thee

a wife, get thee a wife: there is no staff more reverend than one tipped with horn." (V, 4)

The script being already known by the male characters, they do not hesitate to

repudiate Hero at the slightest innuendo. Her dishonesty being presented as vraisemblable

by her father, it takes very little thinking for her fiancé to accept Don John's fabricated

evidence as true. Both Claudio and Leonato react violently: the lover expected "chaste

Dian" and found a "witch", while Leonato wanted his only child to "have his head on her

shoulders for all Messina" and, in exchange, thinks she is a false mirror of his good name.

S. P. Cerasano (in Barker and Kamps 1995:31) correctly points out that, in Shakespeare's

age, guarding one's reputation was harder than avoiding slander. The evidence lies in the

countless slander trials recorded in the early modern age. If, in earlier centuries, slander

was controlled by the laws of the Church, in the 16th century, the line between lay and

religious authorities grows dimmer and the trials held by civil courts seem to be all the

more hostile when the complaint is issued by a woman. The trials were problematic

anyway, since the woman could make an appeal only with the approval of a male protector

and the object of the trial – the woman's reputation – was volatile. Still, the great number

of such court appeals shows both how vulnerable women were to slander and how eager

they were to protect one of their few assets, their good name. In many Shakespearean tragi-

comedies, a woman's reputation is the synonym of physical survival. In Measure for

Measure, a stained reputation is enough to send anyone to the scaffold and Isabella, a

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promised nun, would rather see her brother dead than her good name put to shame. In The

Winter's Tale and Cymbeline, a wife stays alive after a husband's wrath only by means of

travesty and concealment. In Much Ado about Nothing , Hero faints and is believed dead,

which, if guilty, in the men's eyes, would only serve her right. It takes the rehabilitation by

means of yet another trick for the men to rejoice the sight of her being alive and well.

It is not by accident that the slander is uttered and annulled in the church, under the

surveillance of the good friar (a constant figure, who is also the final solution in Measure for

Measure). He orchestrates the tomb-trick and makes the truth finally evident to the men who

build and destroy Hero's life. The monk turns out to be the only person who sees clearly,

although everyone is watching carefully. More realistic than Beatrice (who, convinced of

Hero's virtue, asks Benedick to kill Claudio and av enge her cousin's shame), he suggests the

only possible solution for a woman with a bad reputation: "die to live" (IV, 1). Since her

compromised life cannot continue, only the resurrection, which implies purification, is

acceptable. According to tradition, this would have implied the discretion and penitence of a

convent. Since this is a Shakespearean comedy, the good friar, with the father's approval,

offers another way out. The strategy works well literally, as Don Pedro and Claudio receive

the "new" Hero not as a rehabilitated person, but as someone who has risen from the dead.

The interplay between deception and verisimilitude is one of the play's great assets,

but also one of the major problems in the process of reception and adaptation. Reading and

interpreting the play conventionally is very different from a pragmatic, sceptical approach.

This is not such a far cry from the Romantic desideratum formulated by S.T. Coleridge as "the

suspension of disbelief". It does take such a conventional suspension to assimilate the

intricacies of the Much Ado plot. Good examples of how such a conventional reading – an

expert reading, in the terms we used in the theoretical part of this paper – operates are the two

film adaptations of Shakespeare's comedy, Kenneth Branagh's 1993 and Joss Whedon's 2013

works. The 1993 version, featuring Branagh as director and male star in Benedick's role,

received surprisingly little critical acclaim despite the cast, the quality of the film features and

the interventions in the original storyline, most observers regretting the absence of naturalness

and spontaneity (Canby 1993). The film's success in reading the bed-trick and the tomb-trick

"expertly" (and then conveying them to the public in the spirit of verisimilitude) lies in the

choice for an atemporal (possibly Italianate) décor, with an impressive number of extras,

including soldiers in brightly coloured uniforms and Messinan citizens in white, under the heat

and light of a continuous summer sun, giving the impression that the characters' only goal is

the single-minded pursuit of pleasure. All the actors are surprisingly young and healthy, with

the plain Hero interpreted by the beautiful Kate Beckinsale, the evil Don John by the

handsome and exotic Keanu Reeves, or the royal Don Pedro by Denzel Washington. The

whiteness of the costumes, the universal gaiety, the dancing and singing and frolicking give

the impression of a game, perhaps an extension of the costume party evoked in the second act

of the play, which contributes to the "suspension of disbelief" effect.

In 2013, when Hollywood offered a new version of Much Ado , Joss Whedon was a

novice of Shakespearean adaptations. However, although Branagh was a consecrated

Shakespearean actor and director (Hamlet and Henry V being only the most obvious

examples), his Much Ado was less acclaimed than Whedon's, who was trained in fantasy

thrillers like The Avengers . Moreover, while Branagh's film had cost a fortune, Whedon's

version was a low-budget movie, shot exclusively in the director's own house, with virtually

unknown actors. Still, the 2013 film was a genuine critical success. The elements that

contributed to this are those which also secure "the suspension of disbelief". Shot in black and

white in a Hispanic Californian villa, with the Aragon court and Don John looking more like

Prohibition gangsters, the film is presented as a farce, in the spirit of the screwball comedy

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(Shoard 2012), a genre which was very popular in the glamour age of the 1930s and 1940s

movieland. The characters return from "abroad", give casual parties and keep "hanging out".

In a story about watching and hearing, the house where the plot unfolds has thin walls and

poor acoustics, where no secret can be kept for long – a technical detail which completes the

message of the original Shakespearean text. The conventions of the screwball comedy, with

male and female heroines exchanging witty repartee, also contribute to a general farcical

atmosphere, which makes the tricks deployed by the plot acceptable and convincing.

3. The Reception of Much Ado. A Case Study

The expert interpretation which represents the first phase of our study presented

above has also served the purpose of generating our main hypothesis for the second phase. It

can be framed as follows: the less expertise the reader has, the more difficult it is for them to

suspend disbelief and to accept the conventions of the dramatic text . With little or no

background about the tricks so massively employed by the Shakespearean comedy, we

assume the readers will attach little credibility and even less vraisemblance to the scenes

which are the epitome of illusion and deception, as these concepts were employed in the

classical theatre. Our secondary assumption, we aim to validate, during this semester, when

we applied the experiment and discussed its outcomes of reading and watching Much Ado

about Nothing with one senior and one juni or student at Research Methods tutorials, is that

the two film adaptations facilitate the reception of the play's tricks and the conventional

acceptance of illusion and deception as the major engines of the plot.

The instrument we used for eliciting the response to the texts proposed took the shape

of a task sheet. When designing this task sheet we tried to be as less prescriptive as possible.

First, we thought of adopting a purely open-ended, uncontrolled approach in the form of a

reflective account. Then, we took into consideration the danger of ending up with entirely

irrelevant (to our micro-theory presented above) data. Consequently, we designed a more

guided instrument that served the purpose of directing the respondents' thoughts towards our

research interest, without however, planting ideas into our respondents' minds and at the same

time allowing for reflection and prompting both introspection and retrospection. Both

retrospective and introspective methods seek access to the "invisible", i.e. to what goes on in

the head of the respondent. Nunan (1992:115) defines them as being "The process of

observing and reflecting on one's thoughts, feelings, motives, reasoning processes and mental

sates with a view to determining the way in which these processes and states determine our

behaviour."

The difference between them is time related and has some serious implications when it

comes to data analysis. Thus, introspective methods refer to techniques or instruments in

which the data generation is simultaneous with the mental tasks or events under scrutiny.

Retrospective methods, on the other hand, lead to instruments that elicit data some time after

the events have taken place.

This idea of "some time after" has triggered a fair amount of criticism, which mainly

says that such methods produce unreliable data because it is in our human nature to forget

things. To minimise this danger, it is advisable to ensure that the data are generated as soon as

possible after the event has taken place. The bottom line is that in the choice of an

introspective or retrospective instrument all depends on the interest and focus of research as

well as on the practical issues involved (for example, it might be difficult, if not impossible,

in some circumstances, to collect data in an introspective kind of way). In our case, we

wanted our respondents both to introspect while being exposed to the texts and to retrospect

by reflecting upon it in a very immediate circumstance. We thus prompted them to read the

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task before the texts in the hope that introspection would be automatically triggered, followed

then by the advice that they should actually set out to complete the task immediately after.

All in all, we aimed for our respondents to produce a written piece in which they

should, as Dörnyei (2007:148) puts it, "verbalise their thoughts process immediately after"

they have been exposed to the phenomenon investigated.

The task sheet handed out was shaped as follows:

- A short background presentation

- The task per se

- Excerpts from the play to be read and analysed (see the Appendix)

4. A Reading of the Readings

Our two readers were Alex, an MA student in Literary Studies, who studied

Shakespeare for one semester during his BA English Major Studies and Bianca, a junior

student in Modern Languages, who was exposed to literature only adjacently, during

general courses of literary theory and literary translation. Their feedback, despite the

differences in approach and tone, are strikingly similar. Both respondents consider the

Branagh film version better. While Bianca has a sentimental approach, referring to the

1993 Much Ado as a film of the year when she was born, Alex has a canonical approach:

"it invites more attention to the Shakespearean text" and "it grasps the spirit of

Shakespeare's play". For Bianca, Whedon's version is "Surreal, inexplicably modern",

while Alex sees it as a "postmodernized" product, which "sacrifices the social and

historical conventions inherent to the setting of the play".

Secondly, the two students approach the church scene in a similar manner, despite

the fact that they start from fundamentally different assumptions. Bianca considers that

Claudio's emotional outburst in Branagh's film makes more sense, also commenting that

Emma Thompson's Beatrice in the same church scene is more credible, her desire to kill

Claudio coming more from grief than from hatred. Alex also observes Claudio's reaction,

which he considers more faithful to Shakespeare's original intentions. He notices the

clever change of order in the lines uttered by the characters at the end of the second church

scene (also the end of the play), "boosting emphasis on Hero's presence". While Alex

appreciates the church scene in Branagh's film for its accelerated tempo, Bianca thinks it

has more "warmth" than Whedon's garden party approach.

As for the two "tricks", both readers agree they are the ones to give the two films

the quality of dark humour inherent in Shakespeare's original text. Bianca thinks that

Whedon's Jillian Morgese gives her Hero more substance as a character who is "a person,

not only a victim" than Branagh's Kate Beckinsale, who obscures the original

Shakespearean female character. Alex, noticing that Branagh's Claudio bursts into tears in

front of Hero's tomb, considers him more humane in the 1993 version, his behaviour

during the tomb-trick absolving him of some of the guilt resulting from the bed-trick: "One

can't fully blame him for believing Hero has slept with Borachio". The tricks, given "a

strong and heavy tone" in the original play, remain "solemn" in Branagh's film, for Alex,

while Bianca regards Claudio's repentance as being "severely reduced" in Whedon's

farcical version.

In terms of credibility, both agree that Whedon's version works better for the

modern audience. Bianca argues that the 2013 Much Ado has "a more disturbing aura" in

the reconciliation of the Claudio-Hero couple, which, she assumes, is more in accordance

with the "dark" or "problem" potential Shakespeare's play must have had for the

Elizabethans. In this, the camerawork is more effective in the actual display of the bed-

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trick, as it is worked out by Whedon, with the shadows of two human figures, at a window,

engaged in sexual intercourse, where, in the original Shakespearean text, the scene was

only indirectly conveyed, in the narrative versions of several characters. Alex also

concludes that the 2013 plotline is made to have more relevance and credibility to a

modern audience because of its transportation in the house and gardens of a Los Angeles

millionaire, although "more attention is given to entertaining representation than to

substance".

5. Findings and Conclusions

The most interesting (and unanticipated) finding of our endeavour is the absence of

major differences in the way our two respondents read the texts proposed. They put forth

similar reactions, with only minor variations (in tone and language), mostly due to Alex's

more mature stance, rather than a more initiated one. These similarities encompass all the

aspects that were our main concern: from the general reaction produced by the texts to the

tricks and the credibility attached to them. Thus we cannot safely claim that, at least when it

comes to the first hypothesis, it has been confirmed. The degree of initiation did not impact

the way in which the respondents put forward anything connected to their suspension of

disbelief and the connection it has to the conventions of the dramatic text. In other words

more advanced literary knowledge and skills do not make, at least in the present case study,

for the way in which suspension of disbelief and drama conventions work. As for the second

assumption, film adaptations indeed seem to facilitate both the reading and the interpretation

of Shakespeare's text in general if not when it comes to the conventions of the dramatic text

in particular. It is similarly interesting to note that both respondents consider the most remote

in time (1993) version as being the better of the two when it comes to capturing the

Shakespearean essence (even though one might expect young audiences to connect better to a

film version of their times).

As concerns the instrument used for eliciting our target readers' reactions to the texts

proposed for our study, judging the outcome and the role they played in producing the results

is fairly complicated. Since it did not elicit data clearly relevant for our hypotheses one might

(rightly) argue that they were inappropriately thought and designed. However, taking this

view is, we believe, too extreme and unjust. The instrument did fulfil its purpose in eliciting

interesting and useful data, only of a different kind. Consequently, this does seem to show

that, when it comes to the study of literary texts, a more open-ended approach might be better

suited (as our initial instinct told us), both when it comes to spelling out assumptions (or

hypotheses) to the design of the instrument and to the data analysis as such. Under any

circumstance further explorations into the nature of the instrument and its impact are still

needed.

Reader-orientedness and phenomenology, on the other hand, turned out to be highly

appropriate and rewarding. The receiving end of Shakespeare's work in itself is not only an

inexhaustible endeavour but one which never ceases to produce surprising and fresh results

and, to this end, we can safely argue its importance and relevance.

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in The Two Noble Kinsmen", in Britsh and American Studies , Vol. IX. Timiș oara: Editura Universităț ii

de Vest, pp. 17-25.

Wynne Davies, Marion. 2001. New Casebooks, Much Ado about Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew. New

York: Palgrave Macmillan.

http://gouk.about.com/od/forshakespearefans/fl/Happy-Birthday-Will-Shakespeares-450th-Birthday-

Celebrations-in-2014.htm.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/.

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Appendix

TASK SHEET

THE BACKGROUND OF THE TWO SCENES TO ANALYZE

Don John frames Hero, by preparing a masquerade in which another woman in Hero's clothes

is shown flirting with a stranger, under her fiancé's (Claudio) eyes.

This is how the situation is explained by Don John's henchmen:

BORACHIO

Not so, neither: but know that I have to-night

wooed Margaret, the Lady Hero's gentlewoman, by the

name of Hero: she leans me out at her mistress'

chamber-window, bids me a thousand times good

night,--I tell this tale vilely:--I should first

tell thee how the prince, Claudio and my master,

planted and placed and possessed by my master Don

John, saw afar off in the orchard this amiable encounter.

CONRADE

And thought they Margaret was Hero?

BORACHIO

Two of them did, the prince and Claudio; but the

devil my master knew she was Margaret; and partly

by his oaths, which first possessed them, partly by

the dark night, which did deceive them, but chiefly

by my villany, which did confirm any slander that

Don John had made, away went Claudio enraged; swore

he would meet her, as he was appointed, next morning

at the temple, and there, before the whole

congregation, shame her with what he saw o'er night

and send her home again without a husband.

THE TASK

1. Read the two scenes and watch their adaptations in Much Ado about Nothing (1993)

and Much Ado about Nothing (2013).

2. Write a reflective account (2 pages) about your emotional reaction to the text and film

adaptations in terms of similarities and differences.

3. Discuss the degree of credibility you attach to the two scenes.

4. What definition would you give to the concep ts of "bed-trick" and "tomb-trick", used

by critics discussing this play, after reading these scenes? Can you identify the two

tricks? Do you think they work, in the context of the play (as an effect on the

characters) and in the context of reception (as an effect on you)?

THE TWO SCENES TO BE READ AND DISCUSSED

SCENE III. A church.

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Enter DON PEDRO, CLAUDIO, and three or four with tapers

CLAUDIO

Is this the monument of Leonato?

Lord

It is, my lord.

CLAUDIO

[Reading out of a scroll]

Done to death by slanderous tongues

Was the Hero that here lies:

Death, in guerdon of her wrongs,

Gives her fame which never dies.

So the life that died with shame

Lives in death with glorious fame.

Hang thou there upon the tomb,

Praising her when I am dumb.

Now, music, sound, and sing your solemn hymn.

SONG.

Pardon, goddess of the night,

Those that slew thy virgin knight;

For the which, with songs of woe,

Round about her tomb they go.

Midnight, assist our moan;

Help us to sigh and groan,

Heavily, heavily:

Graves, yawn and yield your dead,

Till death be uttered,

Heavily, heavily.

CLAUDIO

Now, unto thy bones good night!

Yearly will I do this rite. […]

Exeunt

SCENE IV. A room in LEONATO'S house.

Enter LEONATO, ANTONIO, BENEDICK, BEATRICE, MARGARET, URSULA, FRIAR

FRANCIS, and HERO

FRIAR FRANCIS

Did I not tell you she was innocent?

LEONATO

So are the prince and Claudio, who accused her

Upon the error that you heard debated:

But Margaret was in some fault for this,

Although against her will, as it appears

In the true course of all the question. […]

Re-enter ANTONIO, with the Ladies masked

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121

Which is the lady I must seize upon?

ANTONIO

This same is she, and I do give you her.

CLAUDIO

Why, then she's mine. Sweet, let me see your face.

LEONATO

No, that you shall not, till you take her hand

Before this friar and swear to marry her.

CLAUDIO

Give me your hand: before this holy friar,

I am your husband, if you like of me.

HERO

And when I lived, I was your other wife:

Unmasking

And when you loved, you were my other husband.

CLAUDIO

Another Hero!

HERO

Nothing certainer:

One Hero died defiled, but I do live,

And surely as I live, I am a maid.

DON PEDRO

The former Hero! Hero that is dead!

LEONATO

She died, my lord, but whiles her slander lived.

FRIAR FRANCIS

All this amazement can I qualify:

When after that the holy rites are ended,

I'll tell you largely of fair Hero's death:

Meantime let wonder seem familiar,

And to the chapel let us presently.

Note on the authors

Dana PERCEC is Reader in English at the Department of Modern Languages, the West

University of Timiș oara. Her PhD thesis was defended in 2005, on Shakespeare and the

contemporary theories on embodiment. Her published work includes books of Shakespeare

studies (The Body's Tale. Some Ado about Shakespearean Identities, EUV 2006, Reading

Cultural History in William Shakespeare's Plays, Jate Press 2014), collections of essays on

Romanian contemporary social issues (Logica elefanț ilor , All, 2014, Metafizica bicicliștilor ,

All, 2014, both being currently translated into Czech and Spanish for publication), and she is

editor of a series of literary theory studies at Cambridge Scholars Publishing (Romance. The

History of a Genre, 2012, Reading the Fantastic Imagination. The Avatars of a Literary

Genre, 2014). She collaborates with the general editor of a new Romanian version of

Shakespeare's Opere Complete, with prefaces to several plays: The Taming of the Shrew

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122

(Opere, vol. IV, Paralela 45, 2012), Antony and Cleopatra (Opere, vol. VII, Tracus Arte,

2013), Much Ado about Nothing (Opere, vol. IX, Tracus Arte, 2014). Together with Andreea

Șerban and Andreea Verteș-Olteanu, she publishes a series of English cultural history guides:

Anglia elisabetană (Eurostampa, 2010), Anglia victoriană (EUV, 2012), Marea Britanie

astă zi (EUV, 2015).

Codruţ a GO Ş A teaches in the Faculty of Letters, History and Theology, West University of

Timiş oara. She holds a PhD in applied linguistics awarded by Lancaster University, UK, in

2004. She specialises in research methods and academic writing. Lately she has developed an

interest in the theories and practices of text analyses, works of popular fiction included, and

she published three studies in this respect: Historical Romance: Between Pop Fiction and

Literary Fiction (2011), Sex and the Genre: the Role of Sex in Popular Romance (2012), and

From Fantastic Twilight to Fifty Shades Trilogy Fanfiction: Not another Cinderella Story...

(2014).

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