“Personally, I would not have married him, because if he’s not going to believe me when I’m being honest, there’s no trust in that relationship.”
“Claudio just thinks he sees Hero, kind of like how Hamlet thinks he sees his dad’s ghost.” (Things that we assume are true but may not be true.) “Unlike Hamlet, the truth comes out in this movie.”
“Even though they make it seem like Hero died, the main drive of that was not avenging Hero’s death by punishing Claudio.”
“But Dogberry is kind of like the gravediggers. Or maybe Polonius.”
“At the end of this it seems like the characters have learned something, and they’ve corrected a flaw they had.”
“If this were modernized, I don’t think it would go down this way. Like, because she’s a woman she’s not seen as a person with her own mind. Like, when Claudio’s accusing her she doesn’t really get to speak her mind, and because she’s a woman, her word is never going to be taken as seriously as a man’s.”
“Benedick is very influential in what Claudio does, and he goes up to Claudio and is like, ‘hey, what you did to that innocent woman is not okay.’”
“Much Ado About Nothing says: Believe women.”
“I think both Much Ado and Hamlet both deal with a desire for revenge, but in Much Ado, there’s more forgiveness. Claudio ends up begging forgiveness, though he originally wanted to enact revenge.”
“it could have easily turned into Romeo and Juliet.”
I thought it was weird that Don Pedro didn’t keep any kind of watch over Don John, even after he’d...led a coup against him? Okay, I get that it was a small coup and didn’t take a lot of effort to overcome, but still, nobody is even keeping tabs on him.”
“Borachio admits what he’s done wrong and is sorry. He’s the villain, or one of them anyway, and he does that.”
“Not only does (Don John) have no credibility, he has negative credibility.”
“Okay, first of all I’d like to say that ‘I would eat his heart in the marketplace’ is the best line I’ve ever heard, as an expression of that female rage, where she really wants to kick his ass, but she...can’t.”
“Claudio didn’t question for a moment what he saw, and even though this was the person he was supposed to be in love with, he didn’t even talk to her at all.”
“From the beginning Claudio was very mistrusting of Hero. He assumed she was going to marry the prince, early on in the play. In general, the men in the play don’t seem to trust women.”
“I think one of the big things that turns tragedy into comedy is communication. And the communication in this play overall was rather good. Like the guards, they didn’t always communicate perfectly, but they got the job done. But one place this communication fails is during the wedding ceremony. I don’t know about not even talking to her about it until the ceremony. That was a little sketch. ...She doesn’t really have time to defend herself in that situation.”
“The problems would have been solved a lot more quickly if everyone involved wasn’t a complete moron. While Dobgerry and the night watch are part of the lower comedy arc—they’re just bumbling around and being idiots—they’re still part of the high comedy plot.”
“Women’s sexuality was villanized in both plays.”
The “misinformation” is “humorous in the end” of this one, instead of extreme and tragic, as in Hamlet.
“Even the villain—Don John—is dragged back and will get his justice. Whereas in Hamlet, not only do we not get a happy ending, we don’t really get a resolution to any problems at all.”
“Everything that happens in this play is hearsay. Nobody has any firm evidence of the things they believe.”
“Everyone’s talking about it being hearsay, and that plays into the female roles again, like when Hamlet messes around with Ophelia—‘you’re so dumb, you love me but I don’t love you,’ and all this stuff. Then Claudius accuses Hero—‘you look virtuous, but you’re not’ which is like...Queen Gertrude all over again.”
"What changes this from a comedy into a tragedy is that ordinary people speak up—there is no guarantee that the guards will overhear the crucial piece of information, but there’s a decent chance that SOMEBODY in this whole society will discover SOMETHING. When they do, they act on it. Bumbling and imperfect, but they care and they act.”
“In a lot of other plays, noblemen are the cause of a lot of the problems. Tragedy is with the higher class. SO I think he’s just saying that lower class people in general aren’t as prideful or ambitious as some of the other characters, and cause less problems because of it.”
“But the lower class characters were more like...charactertures.”
“The priest that stuck to her and didn’t give in to outside influences... People stayed by her. I thought htat’s what made this movie into a comedy and not a tragedy.”
Peace,
Mrs. Swan