Much Ado About Nothing
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".
Stats for nerds
2recommend
7mentions
5people
2020–2026years
43% recommend43% neutral14% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I think Shakespeare might just 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.
- Here's what I'd say to you 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 to be read by audiences, yet for some reason that is the primary way we ask young people to experience with it.
The above is not an argument against translating Shakespeare to modern English, which I also support.
- 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.
- "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 ) in that pulling wholes apart (into parts which may themselves be amenable to decomposition) is the analysis step which (in general position) precedes synthesis.
- If you like that, you should hear what he had to say about Shakespeare:
"I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare ... but I really shouldn't need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that. When Shakespeare wrote almost all Europeans were busy farming, and very few attended university; few people were even literate—probably as low as ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren't very favorable." [Going Infinite, p29]
Now I get that Shakespeare doesn't appeal to everyone and is definitely an acquired taste, but to judge his work on probability when the work itself is right there to judge on its own 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 him?" As if no actual human being had ever killed out of jealousy, when it's usually one of the main motives for murder. It's like he's visiting from another planet or something.
- 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 ignoring the unfamiliar language. (A friend from another country said they studied some Shakespeare which had been translated into his language so didn’t sound so unfamiliar, but I can’t imagine something like that being done for english-speaking schools).
I feel like The Tempest is lower than I expected. I think it is often liked for not so easily fitting into one of the traditional genres. I feel like I see productions advertised reasonably frequently but I also did this at school so maybe I notice them more for that reason.
I think the OP has the same favourite play as fictional classics professor Jim Lloyd, which is interesting for some, I guess.
