This event will take place virtually at 4:30pm PST/6:30pm CST. Not in PST or CST? Check your time zone.
Join CAA Chicago as they are joined by Michael Shapiro, esteemed Shakespearean scholar, for a presentation on Much Ado About Nothing.
Much Ado About Nothing, like The Merchant of Venice, explores the tension between male friendship and heterosexual love, a tension that runs deep in the minds of many men in Western cultures. Here, a young soldier named Claudio falls in love with a girl named Hero, but spurns her at the altar because he believes, wrongly, that he has seen her in sexually compromising circumstances. The shock of this rejection seems to cause her death, but she miraculously revives when Claudio realizes his mistake and repents. Another soldier, his friend Benedict, encounters Hero’s cousin, Beatrice, a woman he was once briefly involved with but now claims to detest, as she does him. The two exchange witty insults until their friends finally make them realize their mutual attraction . . . and act upon it. Although these relationships may remind us of junior-high school romances, the play, like all of Shakespeare’s love comedies, ends in celebration of marriage, for, as Benedict declares, “The world must be peopled.”
This zoom talk is illustrated with clips from Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 film, available inexpensively from Amazon Prime Video.