Much Ado About Nothing
by William Shakespeare · first published 1600
40% recommend40% neutral20% critical
Shakespeare's comedy play Much Ado About Nothing pivots around the impediments to love for young betrothed Hero and Claudio when Hero is falsely accused of infidelity and the "lover's trap" set for the arrogant and assured Benedick who has sworn of marriage and his gentle adversary Beatrice. The merry war between Benedick and Beatrice with the promptings of their friends soon dissolves into farcical love, while Hero's supposed infidelity is shown to be little more than "much ado about nothing".
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…and others who feel the same way: personally, I think Shakespeare really only comes alive in a live performance where characters have additional context to help you understand what's happening. I think Much Ado About Nothing is one of the most enjoyable performances I've ever seen, but reading Much Ado About Nothing several years earlier only made me resent Shakespeare as it does for so many. Shakespeare's works weren't intended…
on “Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read” ↗…be a badly chosen set of "classics". Romeo and Juliet is so overdone in pop culture there's nothing interesting there, and the one or two others we had to read were just boring. But then I ran across Much Ado About Nothing (while still in school) and remember it being actually good.
on “Dostoyevsky Isn't Difficult” ↗I had a similar experience. Schools seem absolutely determined to force the most boring parts of Shakespeare on us, then years later when I was almost done with school I ran across Much Ado About Nothing - and that was a good one. I liked that one. That should have been one of the ones used to introduce us to him.
on “My ranking of every Shakespeare play” ↗…Shakespeare (possibly due to being forced to read his plays in school) and that’s fine. I'm one of them, but after one of my English teachers decided to bring us to see one of his other plays as a treat (Much Ado about Nothing), I can't help but think it's because schools are obsessed with the bad plays. I've never gone out of my way to read/see other plays, but that one was actually entertaining and I think if it was used…
on “The genuine polymath is still one in a million” ↗I ‘studied’ Much Ado About Nothing in school (as the author wished for) but it was lost on me. Probably the issue is not normally the specific choice of play. But there are lots of things that are hard about Shakespeare in school, even…
on “My ranking of every Shakespeare play” ↗…merits is like the joke about an economist who sees a hundred dollar bill on the street and says, "If that were a real bill, someone would already have picked it up." He also dismisses the "plot twist" in Much Ado About Nothing (when Beatrice asks Benedick to kill Claudio) as "illogical" and the province of characters who are "one-dimensional and unrealistic" because "I mean, come on—kill someone because ... his fiancée is cheating…
on “Sam Bankman-Fried found guilty on all charges” ↗"Naughty" would rather be "anziehende" for Cantor; note Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing. EDIT: yet another GrIneq! Any motivation for it? Max Cut clearly has applications in fratricidal hardware (see Bombers, Strategic) and it's also dual use (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40701284…
on “'Equals' has more than one meaning in math” ↗