Day 10: Much Ado About Nothing, by William Shakespeare

I think I've found my gender-appropriate Shakespeare role. I really feel like I could get my teeth into playing Beatrice. Shame she seems to lack any sufficiently lengthy speeches for audition.

Moving on to a more general feeling of the play though. This is a familiar piece, and I know as a kid I engaged most with the comedies when it came to Shakespeare - well, I enjoyed them the most anyway. I don't think it was so much an issue of "boring Shakespeare" with the rest, so much as having grown up on cartoons and fantasy books, I had no interest in politics or complicated relationships... but this one has at least on the surface a funny story and reasonably easy to follow plots that are laid out pretty clearly. I found I remembered the Beatrice and Benedict thread to the play from previous readings/viewings, (according to the notes in the Cambridge Schools version which I've been working with today, the "original" part of the story, where the Claudio/Hero thread was a much older device which featured a lot in various older works) but not so readily the rest. I think that's likely to do with not really understanding the darker, more underhand and involved plotline when I was younger, or just ignoring it in favour of the funnier, lighter parts which seemed to be leading inexorably to a happy ending.

Reading with a more grownup eye, it's interesting to see how all of the different threads come together at the end, including the initially seemingly unconnected inept guard scene. (Clearly put in so that someone outside of the court actually gets to witness what's happened, and be unbound by conscience to any specific party and so be able to go and tell the "elders" involved what was going on.)

I think what keeps me focussed on the Beatrice and Benedict thread now is having been through a similar thing myself on a couple of occasions - friends, or in one case an apparently sworn enemy, have become boyfriends (the latter really stumped everyone who knew us... of course it didn't last and I'm not convinced at any point either of us would have called it love, but there was a certain amount of heel-snapping that went on before and afterwards). My current relationship certainly involved friends getting involved and trying to make us realise that we were pretty much the only ones who didn't "see it" and it was a shock to exactly nobody when the penny finally dropped. Bringing all those experiences into the character of Beatrice might make for a bit of a heady ride, but I don't think it's so close as to be one of those I'd have trouble getting out of, or dealing with the emotions.