Much Ado About Nothing -- Ashland Oregon Shakespeare, 2024

  The Ashland Much Ado About Nothing was a typically lavish, extravagant celebration on the Elizabethan (outdoor) stage. 

Its most notable twist was a number of original songs, with trio accompaniment, woven through the drama. That maintained the spirit of comedy however tragic the Claudio-Hero subplot shadows the drama. One repeated motif left the entire drama feeling like a dance. 

The most significant lyrical addition was the last. Where Shakespeare leaves the resurrected Hero speechless after her wedding to the remorseful Claudio, here she stands apart from the general festivity and sings a modern assertion of a woman’s independence. She can forgive Claudio for his public humiliation and rejection of her, she sings, but can she ever live with him?  

We’re left with that open ending, which is more contemporary in consciousness than Shakespeare’s patriarchal culture might have allowed. 

Or was that open ending his intention in not giving Hero a verbal response to her unfaithful lover’s distrust and apology? Thus the more modern ending is not incompatible with the bard’s but a fair extrapolation..

Amy Kim Waschke’s Beatrice is exuberantly comic. Jordan Barbour plays Benedick straighter, except for the same farcical extremity they both indulge in their respective, deceptive eavesdropping scenes. 

        However extreme the production’s farce, however, it only serves to heighten the dramatic force of the newly discovered lovers’ bonding scene, Beatrice’s command: “Kill Claudio.” And of course the tragic shadow of Hero’s ostensible death and resurrection.

The title declares the play’s rich focus on nothing, but also noting (declaring and especially eavesdropping) and no-thing, i.e. emasculation. The latter includes Claudio’s by his “ocular proof” of Hero’s sexual experience, Benedick’s by Beatrice’s superior wordplay, which bests him every time, and — in a comic replay of the central characters’ themes — Dogberry’s self-exposure by his pompous malapropisms. 

Paradoxically, Claudio’s over-articulate rejection of Hero and Beatrice’s relentless wit prove the characters’ undoing — or at least the obstruction of their self-discovery and happiness. But the heroes are saved and the villains exposed by the bumbling watch, especially the play’s outrageously incompetent speaker, Dogberry. Language here proves a false agency.

By the way, amidst the significance of the characters’ names, while Beatrice means provider of blessings and Benedick the blessed, the deflationary Dogberry connotes the berry of a dog, i.e., a turd. He embodies the bathos of a presumptuous language.

Oddly, Much Ado bears a striking similarity to Othello. Both feature a heroine of non-feminine assertiveness, the “fair warrior” Desdemona and the whip-smart Beatrice. Both involve a woman’s destruction through a convincing, false report. Remember, that “ocular proof” is what Othello demands — and Iago rigs to provide. The villainous Don John here shares Iago’s “motiveless malignity,” i.e., an evil that goes far beyond any given motive or explanation, and also the undetermined promise of a severe, perhaps unimaginable, punishment. Even beyond the Hero subplot, this comedy early approaches the territory of the tragic.