Monday 1st June – Much Ado About Nothing – Boo Stylie

Much Ado About Nothing is a Shakespearean comedy. Regular readers of the Boo guide to Shakespeare will automatically stroke their beards at this point and pronounce sagely: ‘Ah! That means there must be dancing!’

 

Oh yes.  This is one of the happiest of the comedies and therefore has a much higher proportion of dancing.  Often in a Shakespearean comedy, particularly the darker ones, in which to the untrained eye, very little comedy actually appears to be taking place, the dance only takes place at the end.  This dance is the comedy full stop of the dramatic world.  It may, gentle reader be your only clue that what you have just seen has been ‘funny’.

 

Here, on the other hand, it is a job to stop them all dancing.  They dance in the morning when the world is begun, they dance in the moon and the stars and the sun, they come down from heaven and they dance on the earth, they dance at Messina where they have their birth. Hey nonny nonny.

 

There is also quite a lot of singing, which is where ‘Hey nonny, nonny’ comes in.  Shakespeare loved penning ditties and ballads.  When he got stuck for an ending for a rhyme he often threw in the words ‘Hey nonny, nonny.’  This along with ‘fol de rol’ is a classic English folk song ending.

 

You may think that English folk songs are all very boring and about milk maids and young swine herds sighing into their potato peelings.  This is not the case.  English folk songs are about people rogering each other senseless in hay stacks, gouging out their rival’s eyes with sticks and tupping the goose girl for good measure.  Hey nonny, nonny is folk song short hand for ‘I had her in the rhubarb patch.’ Just bear that in mind.

 

So, back to Messina where we begin our tale.  Leonato is governor of Messina.  He is very jovial about this, probably because he is extraordinarily well off and has hundreds of minions to do his bidding, and because it is in Italy, the sun shines all the time.  If he had lived in Swindon he would have been much more dour. 

 

Everyone lives with Leonato, his brother, his nieces, his mother’s sister’s uncle, his best friend’s dogs.  It is like the Waltons, but in Italy. Saying good night to everyone takes about three months.  It is much easier if you just imagine that Leonato’s house is the entire city of Messina with a roof on top.

 

The only person who doesn’t live with Leonato is his wife.  Leonato’s wife is mentioned once in passing and then never mentioned again.  It is not clear what has happened to her, but everyone seems very jolly and not in the slightest bit bothered that she has gorn, gorn and never called us mother, so let us not worry our pretty heads about it any more.

 

At the beginning of our tale, Leonato is hysterical with excitement about everything.  He is like that chap on the Fast Show: ‘Isn’t Messina brilliant? Aren’t my trousers brilliant? Life is brilliant! Ha, ha, ha!’   He is excited because his great friend Don Pedro, the Prince of Aragon has just won a battle and only lost a few mangled peasants who don’t really count.  Not only that, but he is dropping by for some dancing on his way back to Aragon. 

 

Despite the fact that Don Pedro is a ligger, and has brought along an entire entourage of starving soldiers and minor princelets to the gig, all of whom expect to be fed, watered and provided with dancing shoes at Leonato’s expense, he is chuffed to nuts.  Feeding starving hordes for a warmongering prince is a great honour and a privilege.  By this you can also see that a) Leonato is a bit of a star fucker and b) Leonato is a bit mental and c) Leonato never does his own cooking.  At the news from the messenger that Don Pedro is on his way, Leonato laughs and claps his hands while his cook commits suicide in the shrubbery.  This is the class divide writ large.

 

The hot news is that Count Claudio, a deputy of Don Pedro’s has done sterling service in battle and has been mentioned in dispatches.  Leonato is enormously pleased about this because Claudio is the Zac Efron of his day and Leonato’s daughter, Hero, has an almighty crush on him. Her bedroom is festooned with his etchings and she is rendered a dribbling idiot at the mere mention of his name. Leonato is just relieved that Claudio has not turned out to be a cowardly blouse of a boy and that the prince might give him fifty pence and a bag of grapes if he decides to marry Hero.  It might defray some of the expenses for their stay and pay for some dancing shoes.

 

Beatrice gambols in at this point.  She is Leonato’s niece.  She is considered a wit and a half, and Leonato likes to wheel her out at parties to crack jokes, down vodka jellies and make inappropriate asides. A word of warning here, we are talking about old style wit. Beatrice does badinage, word play and complex punning.  Please don’t expect her to tell you one about the bishop and the show girl, or light her own farts.  It’s not that kind of party.  No. For that kind of party you want the folk singers convention down the road in Padua.

 

As well as being witty, Beatrice is also considered an old maid.  This means that she is at least twenty two and still not married.  Much like the ghetto fabulous slums of Leicester, in medieval Messina, if you weren’t a grandmother by the time you were out of training bras you were considered insane and elderly. 

 

Despite this, everyone likes Beatrice, but in much the same way they like Joan Rivers.  They don’t want to be excoriated by her rapier like wit but they will happily point her in the direction of anyone who needs bringing down a peg or two and watch while she mentally flays them alive.  At the same time they all secretly can’t help thinking that her lack of husband pushes her squarely into freak territory.  Everyone wants to talk to Beatrice about when she’s going to get a husband, particularly during weddings that aren’t hers. She is contemplating getting a subscription to Guns and Ammo and going postal at the next nuptials.

 

Beatrice is unsure where she stands on the whole unmarried thing, which means that much like Bridget Jones, she spends quite a lot of time scoffing at the fuckwittage of her smug married friends, and the rest of the time stabbing her pen into her secret diary and wondering if she’s not just an unholy mess who deserves to be rounded up and shot for letting the side down. 

 

She is also massively pissed off, because her one shot at romance, with the sprightly Benedick of Padua, Claudio’s best friend, and aide de wit to the Prince of Aragon went horribly wrong.  He promised her the sun, the moon and the stars if she’d snog him in the arbour and let him feel her corsets, and then buggered off without a by your leave to live the life of a gay bachelor and bon viveur.  She spends equal amounts of time wishing him dead and wishing him in her bed.  She is, in modern terms, conflicted. 

 

It is at this point that Beatrice finds out from the messenger that Benedick has not been killed in the war and is in fact new best friends with Claudio the stupid sex god.  This means he will be hoving into view with his dancing shoes akimbo at any moment.  Part of her is annoyed that he didn’t die horribly in battle.  Part of her is relieved.  Mostly she just wants to repeatedly kick his shins and tie his shoe laces together during the eightsome reel.  And then maybe lick him a bit.

 

Just then Don Pedro, Claudio and Benedick arrive in a sweaty, manly, back from the wars type way.  They are accompanied by Don John. Don John is Don Pedro’s bastard brother.  By this I mean illegitimate, although, as it turns out, he is also a bit of a bastard as well.  If you’ve already got the title you might as well live up to it.  Waste not, want not.

 

Don John is an Olympic grade brooder.  He is the sort of man never to forget a grudge.  If you have an argument with him he will be the first to say things like: ‘And anyway. I’ve always hated you. Don’t you remember the Great Tea Tray Disaster of 1403?’ shortly before cataloguing everything you have ever said or done since then.  This is the only time he is what one might call chatty.  The rest of the time he prefers to communicate via the power of the monosyllabic grunt.  He is the Kevin the Teenager of his day, complete with flicky hair and a fine line in petulance.

 

Don John hates everyone, but particularly his very successful brother, Don Pedro.  It turns out that shortly before Act 1 he had a big fight with Don Pedro because he didn’t like the way Don Pedro looked at him like that, and Don Pedro had a nicer dressing room.  He looked at him in that way that says: ‘I have a bigger cod piece, more money and a nicer house, AND I am legitimate. Nah ne nah ne nah nah.’  Admittedly most poorer, illegitimate sulkers would find this hard to take, and Don John is no exception.  Unfortunately for him it turns out that Don Pedro also has a larger sword, and has whupped his illegitimate ass good and proper.  Sorted, banging, techno, etc.

 

Don Pedro likes to savour his victories.  Instead of smacking Don John on the bottom and sending him to bed with no tea and let that be an end to it, he is in the process of dragging it out.  He has decided that Don John is not to be trusted with sharp implements (ever since he caught him in the middle of the battle, running with scissors), or in fact with anything at all. He has decreed that Don John must be part of his retinue and spend all his time fawning and dancing, where he can keep his beady eye on him.  This has not gone down well.  Don John is brooding himself up into a fine lather of hatred and Leonato’s cheery greeting, and the news that Don Pedro is staying for an entire month’s worth of country dancing finishes him off.  He hates dancing and has a bunion which has been giving him gyp, and which he blames for losing the fight with Don Pedro.  All is not well, and even though Don John is the villain of the piece, one cannot help having pangs of sympathy for him at this point.

 

They all go in to tea while Leonato remembers to get the under butler to French chalk the ball room and tune up the Hammond organ.

 

While tea cakes are being toasted Claudio is confessing to Benedick that he has the horn for Hero.  Benedick is baffled because Hero is a weedy, wet of a girl, only good for sewing a fine seam and simpering girlishly. Claudio may be as thick as a whale’s armpit, but at least he has a good left hook and fantastic taste in doublets.  Hero on the other hand, has nothing to recommend her at all, being flat chested and with a giggle that unblocks drains.

 

Claudio appeals to Don Pedro, who is kinder about the whole thing and suggests that as Claudio has all the finesse of a paper bag and about as much wit, it would probably be easier if he wooed Hero on his behalf.  This will be simple because not only are they going to have a ball that evening, but it is going to be a masked ball.  Don Pedro will pretend to be Claudio and Hero will never work it out because she is nice but dim and despite lusting after Claudio for months, couldn’t pick him out in a Where’s Claudio? book if her life depended on it.

 

Happy with this fiendishly over complicated plan they all retire to practice their pas de deux.

 

In the mean time Don John is attempting to hatch plans of his own.  His are much more eviller because it is too hot, nobody has thought to teach him the idiot dance (big fish, little fish, cardboard box, trolley, trolley, oy, oy, oy) which would have saved him a lot of grief, and he just wants to go home and drown the cat in the rain barrel.  He is a man of simple pleasures.  But he can’t drown cats when he is at the mercy of his vastly annoying elder brother, who is making him share nicely with that simpering fool Leonato. He is going to make them all pay. Oh yes.

 

Unfortunately Don John is not a very good evil villain and his plans are rubbish.  They involve things like standing on centipedes and piddling into people’s wine.  He spends far too much time sulking and kicking the furniture and not enough time cackling and being inventive.  In fact he is so utterly rubbish at plotting that he has had to hire two evil servants called Conrade and Borachio.  It is they who add the ‘Mwahahahaha’ to the ‘I hate you’s’ and ‘See if I care’s’.

 

While he has been sullenly fiddling with his bottom lip and thinking about writing ‘bum’ in lipstick on Hero’s dressing room mirror they have been down to the servants’ hall to get the gossip about Claudio and Hero.  They recount this to Don John in the hope that he will use his remaining evil brain cells to come up with a splendidly evil plan and in the manner of ‘Faking It’, show that all their evil mentoring has paid off. 

 

Unfortunately he is still crap and merely pronounces darkly that there may be a chance to make mischief.  Even the use of the word mischief is rubbish, and Borachio and Conrade weep into their hankies at the unpromising material they have to work with, leaving Don John to hope that the cook has poisoned everyone at tea to save him the mental effort of having to come up with a plan.  See? Rubbish at being evil, AND lazy. Tut, tut.

 

At the party Leonato is trying to get Beatrice a husband.  She is having none of it.  Leonato probably has plans to move a small village into Beatrice’s room and charge them rent.  She is not falling for this and stubbornly refuses to play ball, preferring to look for chances to spend the evening making Benedick suffer in the time honoured tradition of spurned women the world over.

 

During the party everyone has a fine time pretending that they have no idea who they are dancing with and insulting them roundly.  All that is except Hero, who is a total dullard and is happily being wooed by Don Pedro whilst believing herself to be in the company of Claudio ‘I make Jean Claude Van Damme look intellectual’.  This wilful stupidity is one of her finer qualities, the others being utter dullness, failure to own a personality and the ability to wail so loudly she can split wood.

 

Luckily Claudio shares these same traits, thus making him her perfect match.  Unluckily he has fallen into Don John’s less than evil clutches.  Don John would be no match for anyone except thicky Claudio, his evil plan merely consisting of telling Claudio that Don Pedro is actually wooing Hero for himself instead of Claudio.  Genius.

 

Claudio who is as gullible as he is stupid, believes this instantly despite the fact that it is a well known fact that Don John is a repugnant and bitter man who would sell his own granny for a fiver.  Conrade and Borachio can be seen in the background of this scene exultantly high fiving each other.  They cannot believe their luck at picking such an easy target. Result.

 

Claudio storms over to Benedick and has a tantrum about how some people who call themselves friends are just utter bastards and how he hopes they choke on their own ruffs.  Benedick is totally baffled, as is everyone else until Don Pedro says: ‘Duh! Count Thicky of Thick.  I have wooed this lady for you.  Take her away now please.’  He does not add; ‘For her conversation is so dull I have been considering drowning myself in a vat of Chianti for the last half an hour,’ but we all get the idea.

 

Claudio and Hero make goo goo eyes at each other and say things like: ‘you hang up,’ ‘no, you hang up,’ for about fifty years, while everyone else sticks their fingers down their throats and makes vomiting noises.  Their incessant billing and cooing is so bad that Don Pedro comes up with a plan to break the utter monotony of the evening which unbelievably has not even been improved by a quick jig.  He suggests that to liven things up before the impending wedding day that they spend their time hatching a plot to get Beatrice and Benedick to fall in love with each other.  The rest of the company fall on this plan with the eagerness of drowning sailors being thrown a life raft and they all go off to compare notes and drown out the simpering of Hero and Claudio licking each other’s eyeballs.

 

Don John in the meantime is cursing his ill fate, while Borachio and Claudio look at each other in that resigned way that says: ‘It was too good to be true.’  Don John has now been trying to come up with a new plan for about six hours.  So far he has come up with ‘piercing Hero’s hot water bottle with a pin on a stick in the hope she might catch pneumonia and die.’  It is not good.

Borachio sighs and comes up with the goods.  He is going to shag Margaret, Hero’s maid.  He is going to do this in the window with all the lights on whilst shouting: ‘Oh Hero! Baby! Yes! Yes! Do it to me now!’  While this is happening Margaret will just think this is part of his elaborate sex play, like the time he got her to dress up as a lute player, and get on with it with a total lack of suspicion.  In the meantime, Don John will lead Claudio and Don Pedro to a convenient spot where they can watch the action.  Claudio, being of a less than mighty intellect, will instantly believe that Hero is doing the nasty with someone else and call off the wedding, thus ruining everyone’s Thursday.  Job done.  They go to bed feeling smug.

 

After breakfast and a spot of light dance practice, Benedick is strolling through Leonato’s extensive grounds (Tuscany) and patting himself on the back for not having married Beatrice and being a gay young bachelor who looks fine in a pair of dance hose.  Don Pedro, Leonato and Claudio seize this moment of unutterable smugness to enact their cunning plan to trap Benedick into marriage.

 

They stroll about the shrubbery loudly declaiming that Beatrice is madly in love with Benedick, and may die because he is so cruel to her.  Benedick falls for this hook, line and sinker, which proves that he is not quite as clever as he makes out, and explains a lot about his continuing friendship with Claudio, which up to this point was completely baffling to everyone. 

 

It turns out that his mighty posturing about preferring to lick a cat’s bottom rather than marry anyone was just fear of being exposed at being no good at kissing, and he is in fact a big old softy underneath.  Upon hearing the trump of the pipe and slippers calling he dashes towards it like a rabbit meeting a friendly Range Rover.  He decides that he will put Beatrice out of her misery and marry her.  How kind.

 

The others send Beatrice to call Benedick in to dinner.  He behaves so bizarrely that she is convinced that he has early onset Alzheimers and is thinking of calling the apothecary and bungs a couple of leeches at him. 

On her way back in to call NHS Direct she bumps into Hero and her serving women discussing the Benedick situation.  She hides in some convenient foliage in order to see whether it is worth spending the next four hours of her life on the phone, only to be told to administer Calpol and damp flannels.

 

She learns that Benedick is pining away for love of her and may soon die of a broken heart, something which no amount of Calpol or flannels is going to fix.  As the Bridget Jones of Messina she is naturally thrilled to bits and goes back inside to sellotape back together her copy of Men are from Padua, Women are from Venice, and capers about gleefully to the ticking of her biological clock.

 

Amongst all this merriment Don John the Crap and his evil cohorts corner Don Pedro and Claudio and announce that they are going to take them to see something so shocking that they will probably vomit with horror.  Something which involves sex, nudity, dwarves and Hero (they were fibbing about the dwarves bit).  This intrigues them greatly and they trot off like a Dodo going off with a starving sailor for a nice walk along the beach.

 

At this point we have had no dancing for several scenes and the natives are getting restless.  Something needs to be done, and Shakespeare, bored of writing any more great dance classics, whips out his trusty comedic watch routine.  It’s a killer.

 

The Watch are presided over by Constable Dogberry and his trusty side kick, Verges.  Dogberry is insanely stupid, Verges is insanely stupid.  The Watch are as dumb as a sack of hammers.  After much capering about, hitting each other with planks, rubber chickens and strings of sausages it transpires that the Watch are to take extra care doing their watching at Leonato’s this evening because Hero is to be married tomorrow and Leonato doesn’t want any burglars nicking off with the George Foreman grill ‘n’ toast rack combo before the wedding meats are upon the table.

 

Several hours later Borachio and Conrade meet somewhere conspicuous and within earshot of the watch.  They spend several minutes loudly bragging about how they have ruined Hero and helped Don John to the crown of most evil villain in Messina.  They are just slapping each other heartily on the back when the watch pounce and arrest them for being knaves, varlets and scoundrels with hearts as black as pitch.  They all gambol off to spend the night in jail singing old songs and rattling cups along the bars.

 

The next morning Hero gets all spruced up for her nuptials, which seems to involve spending quite a lot of time tittering at prick jokes with Margaret and Beatrice.  This, and the next scene where Leonato is too busy wondering when the man is coming to blow up all the silver balloons to go and find out why the watch want him to go to the jail, are added for the sake of pathos and to make the tragedy to come even more tragic.  Oh woe. WOE. Etc

 

The wedding party are now ready.  All should be joy, but things are not looking good.  Claudio’s teen idol good looks are spoiled by a sticking out lip, a fiercely jutting brow and the visage of a man who has just been soundly spanked with a hairbrush and not enjoyed himself at all.  Don Pedro is not best pleased because now instead of a month of dancing he can expect a month of moaning, wailing and snivelling and he could do without it.  At this point Leonato’s relentless good cheer is really beginning to get on his pip and he is wondering whether declaring war on Messina and wiping them all out in a horrific blood bath might be the best way forwards.

 

Hero skips blithely towards her doom completely unaware of everything including the saturnine brow of her suitor.  She has already mistaken a bush, a tree and the third under footman for her groom to be, so it is not surprising.  Beatrice wonders whether to suggest a visit to Spec Savers but decides it can wait.

 

The friar announces the forthcoming nuptials, whereupon Claudio misses his cue and instead of declaring his undying love for Hero, declaims her as a strumpet, a whore and a filthmonger of the highest calibre.  His moral high ground is in fact, so high that he has a nose bleed just thinking about how wronged he has been. 

 

Hero swoons.

 

She rallies briefly but then swoons again when her father decides that if Claudio is going to call her a prostitute in front of the entire population of Messina he probably has just cause.  He turns on her and puts the boot in himself.  See my earlier point about him being a star fucker.  Better to be on the side of men with guns than women with vaginas.

 

This finishes Hero off completely.  She collapses hysterically and is no more.

 

The Friar, who is actually a reasonable sort of bloke, decides that she probably isn’t dead, but that at this moment she might as well be.  He announces that she has shuffled off her mortal coil and that there is nothing to see, so can everyone just move along please?  Which after about five hours of gawping, gossiping and eating the redundant wedding cake, the guests are more than happy to do.

 

In the aftermath Don John leaves abruptly and heads for the hills.  Even he has the wit to realise that he is at best a very unreliable villain, and if he wants to kick the cat he had better go now, because it’s probably all going to unravel quite soon and he will undoubtedly be spending a lot of time getting acquainted with sphagnum moss and nocturnal beasties in a dank cellar somewhere.

 

Benedick takes the moment to declare his undying love for Beatrice, which is quite sweet, but massively inappropriate and to be regretted, as he finds out to his cost.  Beatrice claims the right to test his love by asking him to kill Claudio for her.  She has never liked him and his cheap good looks and cannot believe her good fortune in finding a decent opportunity to have him offed and out of the picture for good. Benedick charges off to challenge Claudio and question why he wanted to get married in the first place. 

 

Leonato has a heart to heart with his brother, and decides that he may have been somewhat harsh with his one and only daughter, who up to that point has been all that a stupid, brainless, patriarchal father could wish for in a girl, despite the giggle and the intellect of a dead lemming.  Now that his betrayal of her in public has half killed her he decides that this is probably punishment enough for the crime she did not commit.  He is too kind.  He will forgive her and make it up to her by killing Claudio and having a new dance invented about the whole thing. He too hot foots it to find Claudio and skewer his guts.

 

They all converge on each other in a melee.  Challenges are thrown out, thumbs are bitten and penises are measured.  As suspected, Claudio’s is found wanting, and Don Pedro refuses to play.  There is a lot of shouting and strutting and puffing out of chests. Claudio refuses to fight anyone, which just proves what a useless human being he is.  He is quite happy to attack his fiancé and humiliate her in front of the whole town, but too honourable to fight an old man and his best friend.

 

Dogberry and Verges arrive with the prisoners.  All is revealed.  Claudio now realises what a gigantic horse’s penis he is and everyone who wanted to kill him looks at him in a smug way and still wants to kill him.  If this were a tragedy there would be a gigantic blood bath at this point.  As this is a comedy we have to find an excuse for more dancing.  Consequently Leonato becomes wise and jovial once more after his psychotic blip of earlier.

 

He pronounces that he will waive his right to kill Claudio on two conditions.  First he must go to Hero’s tomb and tell the whole town what a gigantic horse’s penis he is, including diagrams, a full orchestra and the Messina male voice choir to put on a bit of a show.  Secondly he must turn up at Leonato’s tomorrow ready to marry another bride.  This bride, who looks amazingly like Hero is his brother’s daughter and not Hero at all.  Nope. Not one bit.

 

Claudio agrees reluctantly and trots off to compose a song about being a twit and a half.  This appeases Leonato, but not Benedick who knows that half measures avail Beatrice nothing, and unless he brings Claudio’s head back on a plate, he is never going to play hide the sausage.  He sighs off to Beatrice and buys some time, saying that he will kill him after he has seen Claudio telling the entire town what a tit he has been.  Beatrice agrees that this is worth prolonging his measly life for, pecks him on the cheek and promises that hide the sausage will commence after the bloodshed.

 

The next day Leonato leads the heavily disguised Hero to her wedding to her disgraced ex-fiance, who now has no social standing whatsoever and has proved himself to be a cowardly ignoble bastard.  Despite this, she is still stupid enough to think that marrying him will be lovely.  Although knowing that it will get her out from under Leonato’s tender care and his remorseless passion for dancing may explain her unnatural keenness to run away with twat boy. 

Beatrice is a bit pissed off that Benedick’s plans to off Claudio have now had to be put on permanent hold, but she is so pleased that she will now have an answer to; ‘So dear.  When is it going to be your turn?’ that she is prepared to overlook this disappointment.  She can always hope that Don Pedro accidentally puts him in the firing line in the next big battle.

 

The truth is revealed.  Claudio is overjoyed, although secretly pissed off that Leonato tricked him into last nights humiliationarama show.  Hero is overjoyed, although not really sure why, and Leonato is pleased because not only has he gotten rid of a daughter, he is also about to get rid of a niece and can free up two bedrooms for lodgers. 

 

As predicted, before the weddings can actually take place, some bright spark suggests a dance and they all prance off into the hedgerows with a hey nonny nonny.

 

Aaaaahhh