My friend Rowan and I have a bit of an Emma Thompson thing going. We’re planning a grand rewatch of all her movies (except Maybe Baby and Henry V) that will end with Sense and Sensibility. Tonight we were watching Much Ado About Nothing. I don’t think I’d seen it since it came out when I was 15. It was the first movie I ever went to see twice at the cinema – I loved it.
Seeing it tonight was a little different; I no longer consider Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh the perfect celebrity couple (which is good because neither do they). But we found one plot-line distressing.
Like most Shakespeare plots it’s quite ridiculous. Claudio and Hero are betrothed and the villian* sets it up so Claudio will think that Hero is having sex with another man. Claudio confronts Hero at the wedding, throws her across the room. Her father is also abusive. Hero then pretends to be dead, but than makes no sense at all.
We couldn’t listen to it; we changed the language to Polish so we wouldn’t have to deal with how awful Hero’s situation was. There were some nice moments – Emma Thompson was taking it all seriously, and Kenneth Branagh was backing her up, and choosing the abused women over his abusive friend.
But then Claudio and Hero marry – and we’re supposed to be joyful about it.
There is a version of this play that I could watch – where the horror of Hero’s situation was given weight, where their marriage is not a joyful event, but one the audience dreads. I feel the same way about Taming of the Shrew, from what I’ve read a feminist version of the play is usually one where Katherine implies she has some sort of power. I disagree, a feminist version would be one that played those events absolutely straight. Taming of the Shrew is a tragedy; a tragedy that occurs far more often than young lovers commit suicide because their parents don’t like each other.
* Played by Keanu Reeves! He’s only the second worst actor in the movie too – Robert Sean Leonard plays Claudio and we cracked up when he tried to act sad when it was revealed how wrong he was.
As a more feminist version of Much Ado, I highly reccomend the BBC version that came out last year, with Sarah Parrish, Damien Lewis and Billie Piper. Not only was the villain given a much more sympathetic twist (not that I felt for him; more that he seemed like an actual person than a cardboard-cutout Evil Villain) but Hero actually gets to have some growth and does a marvellous job of telling Claudio what a bastard he was.
Me, I get through the original by ignoring Claudio and Hero entirely.
you have to figure that a guy whose greatest art was writing some of the most miserably obsessive “love” sonnets set to paper is not going to write very feminist-friendly plays. shakespeare very eloquently shows up some of the deep flaws in the whole fashion of romance/courtly love literature going back to chretien a troyes – at the very least, in his own attitude about male-female relationships. but one has to wonder if there’s something missing from the folios we have in terms of direction, or something that directors are missing or are not getting, because his other works paint very believable portraits of brilliant and capable women…even if most of them are evil. lady macbeth, etc. i feel reluctant to come to the conclusion that all the smart, strong, disobedient women in his plays had to come to bad ends, and that the ones who fared best were the most subservient to men. there has to be more. there has to. but if not…well, chalk one more up for the patriarchy i guess. this is another of several reasons why i tend to dislike romantic comedies in general, which always seem to give the women the shaft somehow and whose final resolution seems to always be about the men making the decision that they must be together in the end, and prefer tragedies, and sympathize/take sides with the “bad guys”.
A friend of ours, Joan Silsby, penned a book and play which was a sequel to this drama, called “The Devil’s Bride”. In it she does visit this disturbing issue between Hero and Claudio, though she doesn’t try to undo anything in Much Ado. She also revisits the original issue of why the villain wanted revenge in the first place, owing to the fact that many of the “good guys” in Much Ado weren’t very good to begin with. I definitely recommend this for reading and viewing.
I feel the same way about Taming of the Shrew, from what I’ve read a feminist version of the play is usually one where Katherine implies she has some sort of power. I disagree, a feminist version would be one that played those events absolutely straight. Taming of the Shrew is a tragedy;
I agree. The version in which Katherine still has some power (usually through manipulating Petruccio in a “nicer” way) is the “how to get power under the patriarchy by being a manipulating, yet overtly nice and obedient, b!tch” version–in short, the traditional womanly woman version, not the feminist version. But Taming can be played as a tragedy without actually doing violence to the text. Consider the scene in which Katherine is forced by Petruccio to pretend that she thinks that what’s his name is a woman. This scene can be played as Katherine feeling humiliated by what she is being forced to do but seeing no alternative. Then there’s the end scene in which Petruccio shows how obedient he has made her and her father says something like “I’ll pay you not only the original amount I offered for marrying her, but the same again for giving me a new daughter.” (I don’t remember the exact words, but it’s something like that.) The clear implication is that Katherine has been destroyed. In a tragedy, the hero/heroine dies at the end of the play. So Katherine has died effectively. Sacrificied for the peace of the community, perhaps? Or even for Bianca’s happiness since Bianca, as the “good” daughter, does manage to hold onto some power by manipulating her husband. Which she might not be able to do so easily if Katherine were there scaring the men.
Found the quote I mentioned in the last post:
BAPTISTA
Now, fair befal thee, good Petruchio!
The wager thou hast won; and I will add
Unto their losses twenty thousand crowns;
Another dowry to another daughter,
For she is changed, as she had never been.
Katherine is gone, worse than dead for in the Renaissance world view one’s consciousness survived death. But Katherine’s soul could not survive Petruccio, her father, and her milieu.
If you are willing to chalk-up the anti-semitism to a product of the time, The Merchant of Venice is a more satisfying play from the feminist prospective. I find it much more complex than ol’ Billy’s other comedies. The woman actually displays her intellect, makes the man indebted to her, and gains the upper hand in the relationship by making the man base his vow on his love for his friend, as platonic male relationships were given more weight than marriages at that time. The woman gains power and it is still considered a comedy. I also found the situation and character of Jessica as fascinating, though I don’t recall precisely why. It has been a while–hence the absence of names for the characters. I also enjoy the character of Titania in Midsummer Night’s Dream, though that’s not a happy ending until she gives up her admirable moral stance and submits to her husband. On a side note, her and Oberon’s is one of the rare “successful” marriage’s in Shakespeare–most of the folks who start out married in his play meet a bad end.
Viola in Twelfth Night is smart, strong, and disobedient. She fares pretty well, although she is technically a man’s servant for much of the play. Granted, having to pretend to be a man in order to be safe isn’t exactly overthrowing the patriarchy, but it does at least subvert it a little.
Love the Helen Hunt version of Twelfth Night!
I hadn’t heard of the Helen Hunt version, but now I really want to check it out, if only for David Patrick Kelly (Jerry Horne on Twin Peaks). Really, I’m ridiculous enough about TP that just about any actor from it is enough to get me to watch something, which includes those seasons of Sex & the City that had Kyle MacLachlan.
Ew, but not whatever law show it was that had Lara Flynn Boyle. She scares me, and the Donna from Fire Walk With Me was way better. OK, I’m stopping now.
One of the least feminist Shakespeare plays I can think of is Winter’s Tale – what with the murdering one’s wife on suspicion of adultery and the whole statue-as-woman thing – but I do love the stage direction [Exit, pursued by a bear].
There are three modern interpretations of Shakespeare that I like: My Own Private Idaho (also with Keanu Reeves, and River Phoenix; directed by Gus Van Sant) (King Henry IV Part I); Romeo +Juliet (directed by Baz Luhrmann and starting Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes); and Hamlet (Ethan Hawke and Julia Stiles).
Shakespeare had big B.O. ~~~ he appealed to the highest and lowest common denomiantors, would be called a sell-out today but be the guy churning out the blockbusters. He was his era’s Tabloid King, was crazy about the cult of celebrity/royalty, loved the trash people talked and exposing human behavior at its worst and at its best, loved intrigue as much as humor, figures with bipolar disorder as well as figures with major depression solely or mania on its own, and went Weekly World News on his audiences quite often having an affection for fairies, witches, and ghosts, etc. That’s primarily of how I think of him; I think it’d be a mistake to try to peg him as pro-anything or anti-anything in particular.
Oh come on. Put the play in its historical context. As a feminist, I hate the cult of virginity but it was very real in Shakespeare’s time, and in fact meant quite a lot more to a woman’s life than it does today.
In the time when the play was set, the fact that Hero is assumed to have lost her virginity would not only have made her unsuitable for marriage to Claudio, but to anyone at all. In an era when women were not allowed to make their own living in any societally acceptable fashion and could easily be banished from their homes for such an offense, the alternative was often prostitution. In other words, to have pretended otherwise would have been beyond Shakespeare (or any other author in his time period and general geographic location). In fact, without being able to re-convince Claudio to marry her, she’d be essentially a marked woman. it would be unlikely that with such a stain on her character she would ever find a suitable match again. Even if the allegation was proven false, it would be much like being accused of a horrific crime like child molestation in today’s world — people would always wonder, and wondering would be enough to make her unsuitable for marriage.
The fact that Claudio instantly believes hearsay against Hero is another story, but remember: at this stage in the play, Claudio and Hero haven’t actually known each other very long, nor have they even conversed particularly much. This, too, is in keeping with the general timeframe of the play. Courtship wasn’t a months-long process involving finding out each other’s interests and establishing a basis of mutual trust and intimacy for a long-term relationship. It was based on finding a suitable match in terms of economic equality and maybe, if the two were lucky, some sexual attraction.
This means that at the date of the wedding, Claudio doesn’t trust Hero. Nor does he have any particular reason to. Hero pretends to be dead for a very simple reason: she banks on the fact that Claudio is incredibly powerfully attracted to her, and assumes that if he feels guilty, the feelings of guilt will overcome his anger and he will return to her.
It’s true that, perhaps, their wedding shouldn’t be as joyful as it’s often portrayed. But that’s a matter that can be arranged depending on the production and director. In the end, though, the lesson is a very interesting one: the couple that falls “in love” (read: in lust) at first sight without bothering to really talk to one another except to blush at each other’s beauty ends up in a really problematic relationship that is almost ended by a cruel rumor, while the couple who bicker and argue things out — in other words, the ones who communicate themselves to each other — are the ones who actually end up happier in the end. That’s about as nice a lesson as you’ll get from any literature of that time period.
We just started watching Kenneth Branaugh play Iago in Lawrence Fishburn’s production of Othello. He is showing up everywhere. Brilliant actor. In school, we just watched him play Hamlet in his production of Hamlet. We had 40 minutes, in class, to write a full length essay on how the women in Hamlet, espiecally Ophelia and Gertrude, seem to make feminist statements though they have so few lines.
Hamlet might be one to look at if you want feminist-ish Shakespeare. Some good morals in it.
Perhaps Claudio isn’t that much of a prize, especially by modern standards, but for Hero to come out so far ahead of a very bad situation is admirable. Shakespeare uses the same “woman wrongfully accused of unchastity” plot in several plays (Much Ado, Othello, Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline), and the marriage only works out when the woman outsmarts the cruel, irrational, jealous lover. In any case, it’s a script, and Shakespeare leaves room in the text for the ending to be melancholy, or a qualified happy ending–if we’re “supposed to” be happy with the ending of Branagh’s film, the responsibility lies with Branagh, who has a tendency toward crowd-pleasing but ultimately conservative adaptations.
Yes, but Leontes is mentally flagellated by Paulina for sixteen years before Hermione is restored to him, so he doesn’t exactly get off scot-free. The later tragedies and romances that deal with potentially unchaste women don’t take an uncritical stance towards the male obsession with female chastity; Emilia gets in some wonderfully bitter lines about the unfairness of sexual double standards in Othello, for example.
I saw Taming of the Shrew for the first time last summer, and that’s exactly the feeling I came away with. I want to see it done as a tragedy.
I’d have to agree with Molly: singling Shakespeare’s plays out as exceptionally misogynistic would be a gross anachronism, and overlooks the fact that Shakespeare’s heroines were often strong, intelligent women with rich interior lives – not something you saw too often in Elizabethan England. It’s frustrating when the comedies inevitably end with affirmations of the reproductive imperative, but Shakespeare’s plots were always the least interesting and most formulaic part of his plays. It was actually pretty remarkable that he managed to create these extraordinarily human women within fairly rigid narrative conventions. You always sense his human feeling butting against the hegemonic wisdom of the age.
Same thing with his depiction of Shylock. Compare it to Christopher Marlowe’s characterization of the Jew of Malta – Marlowe’s Jew was an evil, Christian-hating, homicidal stereotype. Shakespeare’s Shylock certainly doesn’t escape the period’s anti-Semitic stereotyping, but there are moments in “The Merchant of Venice” where it’s impossible not to feel for him. He, too, is infused with Shakespeare’s deep feeling for the marginalized sections of humanity.
dresseuse, I thought about writing this response the first time that was said, but by the time I got to it the conversation had moved on enough that it just seemed weird to. So, thanks for opening the opportunity again! Of course Shakespeare had no reason to be a feminist (I mean, the word hadn’t even been invented yet), so I agree that it’s not really a sound way of criticizing his work. For the point I was trying to make, I probably should’ve said “feminist-friendly,” since recognizing the time period still doesn’t make certain plays and scenes stick in my feminist craw any less. You’re very right that Shakespeare illuminated the humanity of groups that didn’t usually receive such treatment, and Merchant of Venice is indeed a great example of that. It really is possible to produce it in such a way that Shylock’s kinda just doing what he has to do to get by in a society that reviles him; it just takes more directing work than the traditional (and admittedly easier) more anti-Semitic presentation.
/theater geekery
In the time when the play was set, the fact that Hero is assumed to have lost her virginity would not only have made her unsuitable for marriage to Claudio, but to anyone at all.
I thought Maia meant the future husband throwing Hero across the room when she spoke of the horror of the situation.
This post reminds me of why I adore the Moonlighting version of Taming of the Shrew- the woman gets her own back, big time.
Actually, I saw the Moonlighting version long before I read the original, and was really excited and pleased by it. Imagine my disappointment when I finally read the play in school.
(defenestrated, excited that the DVD of TP season two is finally coming out?)
Pretty off topic, but woah nelly, am I ever ready for this. I’ve had it ordered for about a month now. It’s nice to see that other folks here are TP fans.
yes!
I have all the videotapes, but without a vcr or television, they can only be so useful. Fortunately…laptops :)
LAUGH! Oh man, the videotapes!
I have a set that I bought back in 1995 or something, so now the sound is all distorted in places, the opening theme sounds like it was done on a faulty synthesizer, and the picture quality is . . . not.
We’ve had some good times, those tapes and I.
I have two vhs copies of Fire Walk with Me. One is normal. The sound on the other is all screwed up, it sounds like a CD that skips every five seconds or so. I never, ever remember to separate or mark them when I watch it, so even after several years I have no idea by looking which is good and which isn’t. One day I’ll come up with some awesome project to do involving the skippy version, but I haven’t yet. I’m looking forward to the much-scrubbed digital version of TP, definitely. Is FWWM out on dvd, or slated to come out, does anyone know?
I’m sorry, Maia, for having taken your thread so horribly off-track. Feel free to lay the smackdown on me if you disapprove :)
Shakespeare included his reimagined medieval feminist ideals in almost all of his writings, including Much Ado About Nothing. Even King Lear, ostensibly a purely masculine play, contains some of the most original feminist writing I have ever encountered. Therefore, I strongly disagree with your belief that Shakespeare was so eloquently “fucked.”
http://analyzing-the-world.blogspot.com/
Whoa, I hadn’t watched that in a dog’s age. Every stage version I’ve seen, they weren’t physically violent with Hero, they just shouted at her a lot, and so it seemed that she died of grief.