Much Ado about Nothing by William Shakespeare (review)

148 LEITERS IN CANADA 1992 There is a double gain in this sort of reading: the play brings into sharp focus some of the tendencies of its time; and an awareness of those tendencies sharpens one's reading of the play. The Merry Wives of Windsor, on the other hand, is a conservative play, setting its view of an internally tolerant community doing its own justice against contemporary tendencies towards class stratification and the centralization of power in the hands of national authorities. The tact with which Slights makes these applications shows especially in her treatment of Much Ado about Nothing. She reminds us that the citizens of Messina are under the rule of a foreign power represented by Don Pedro, and that this was the situation that in history led to the Sicilian Vespers. At the same time she insists on the cheerfulness with which the characters accept Spanish rule: Much Ado 'is not propaganda for a Sicilian liberation movement.' In the current critical climate, in which, all too often, to read Shakespeare 's plays as involved in a hierachical society means to read them as melodramas of oppression, it is a special value of Slights's work that she insists on their coITric nature and the tolerance that goes along with this. This tolerance operates two ways: society and individuals can make room for, and adjust to, each other. At times her readings may appear too optimistic. When Katherina addresses old Vincentia as a 'young budding virgin,' Slights sees her as exercising, like Petruchio, a freedom to command time; she plays down the fact that Katherina is doing this only on Petruchio's orders. She tries to solve the notorious crux of Valentine's offering Silvia to Proteus by imagining that he knows Proteus will refuse the offer, and is simply giving him a chance to behave like a gentleman. All I can say to that suggestion is LNice try.' But the quibbles I have about this book are minor ones. It is a welcome addition to the growing body o( criticism of Shakespeare as a social artist, and it shows what that approach can achieve at its best. (ALEXANDER LEGGATI) William Shakespeare. Much Ado about Not/ling. Edited by Sheldon P. Zitner Oxford University Press. 214. $59.50 Much Ado about Nothing both delights and troubles. If Kenneth Branagh's recent film went to some lengths to obscure its troubling features, the same is not true of Sheldon Zitner's excellent edition, which judiciously traces the play's varied lines of effect. He is able, for example, to put Claudio in context (he 'exemplifies the social style of Honour') without exonerating' him, able to see his defects as a result of both callow youthfulness and a thoughtlessly held set of received ideas: 'wishfulness,' says Zitner, 'cannot explain away Claudio's defects, but criticism that isolates Claudio overlooks the ideological breadth of Shakespeare's unpleasant portrayal of Hero's accusers,' including the Prince and her HUMANITIES 149 own father. Hero too is not just the conventional submissive heroine; her vulnerability is linked to her social status and the consequently narrow (marital) options that define her horizon. The very ordinariness of both Claudio and Hero should not hide the fact that they are also 'painful historical portraits.' Such analysis helps us to understand this play not simply as a comic romp, as Branagh made it, but as a humane dramatic commentary on the displays and the behaviour of a historically specific brand of masculinity and on the perennial questions of courtship as they are touched by social assumptions about gender. Shakespeare from this perspective looks forward to Jane Austen, not backward to the conventional tale from which he drew his plot: JIn Benedick and Claudio the relation between Timbreo and Girondo (from the source) is transformed from a historically backward -looking sexual rivalry to a forward-looking moral distinction.' Even the most conventional elements of the plot, such as Don John's ruse, are given social roots: Zitner reminds us of the 'provincial overtone in the strain felt by Leonato' as he gets ready to entertain his noble guests and of the permissive domestic scene which he informally oversees...