Iyengar, Sujata
TR 11:10 AM
Park Hall 0145
Much Ado about Much Ado
Discover the original rom-com, complete with sparring lovers, in Shakespeare's best-loved play, Much Ado About Nothing. We'll start with the basic story Shakespeare developed from the Italian writer Matteo Bandello (1554, 1573) via the prose romances of the French author François de Belleforest (1559-82) and Lodovico Ariosto's poetic mock-epic Orlando Furioso (trans. 1591). Then we will look at the text of the play and its early performances and restagings, such as the Restoration mash-up with Measure for Measure, The Law Against Lovers (1662), by William Davenant (who claimed to be Shakespeare's illegitimate son). We view recordings of some twentieth- and twenty-first-century performances, including Kenny Leon's all-Black production for Shakespeare in the Park (2019). Finally we consider film adaptations, from those that are "faithful" to text and plot, such as Kenneth Branagh's sunlit Italian romance (1993) and Joss Whedon's edgy black and white house party (2012), to the queer couples and interracial contexts of the Candle Wasters' webseries Nothing Much to Do (2014) and the box-office cinema hit Anyone But You (2024).
We will be working intimately with the text of the play and reading secondary literature (scholarship and criticism) about the play. Assignments will include one in-class essay on how Shakespeare adapted his sources, an in-class commentary and annotation assignment, an in-class essay responding to a clip from a performance or a film, and a final take-home paper that uses secondary reading to make a literary argument about the play or one of its adaptations.