Fudging the Outcome of Much Ado About Nothing

This article asserts that in Much Ado About Nothing Shakespeare lays open the rottenness within an arbitrary system of government but does not dare carry the plot to its logical conclusion. The responses to events by the dominant nobles, a prince and a count, are not merely foolish and damaging, but, in light of the guidance of, among others, Girolamo Muzio and Baldassare Castiglione, deeply dishonourable. The playmakers, as the most talented team in the realm licensed for performance entertainment, create a historically credible set of characters, but, possibly because they wish to continue to benefit from their protected status and draw their regular customers, do not make explicit any radical questioning of rank and degree. An analysis of Margaret’s role suggests a strategic ambiguity within the jocular ending.

Much Ado About Nothing

Rather than leading to any sort of chemical model, recent research by Eddy Jiménez, Clémentine Gibard, and Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy serves only to underscore that their particular approach is unlikely to yield any clues about how life emerged. It is further evidence, if any were needed, that eminent synthetic chemists—and scientists in general—remain clueless about life’s origins.

Performing Patriarchy in Much Ado About Nothing

This article aims to restore the pairing of Claudio and Hero to prominence. The positioning of Hero by Claudio and the play’s other powerful men is central to the plotline, especially in terms of the “nothing” of Hero’s supposed sexual incontinence, as well as being dramatically pivotal to the play’s meanings and structure. The fact that the scene is absent from the play underscores the crucial symbolic importance of the role of Hero to the patriarchal system, drawing attention to the ways in which her function needs to be noted and understood. The analysis undertaken here therefore redresses the balance, since the pairing of Beatrice and Benedick seems so much more alive to modern sensibilities. This article argues that the reason for this lies in their seeming attractiveness as characters who are more easily recuperated to a historically later form of patriarchy from Shakespeare’s period, one that resonates powerfully with the rise of individualism to elevate them over Hero and Claudio.

Who’s It? Acting the Actress in Shakespearean Comedy

Comedy was the mainstay of the Shakespearean stage, which constantly adapted roles, methods, and plot elements from the Italians, who performed and disseminated both scripted and improvised plays. Using Italian sources about the playing and materials of star actresses, this chapter tracks their imprint in the roles of Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew, Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, Viola in Twelfth Night, and Helena in All’s Well that Ends Well. Each bears a distinctive comic profile with un-English female traits—such as improvisatory wit, Latin learning, violent passions, delight in acting, and showy poeticism—in ways that stress alien theatricality, agency, and glamour. Some aspects satirize racialized traits, for example Catholic deviousness, Sicilian violence, and Italianate “sexual strangeness.”

Ending and Wondering

Chapter 6 on endings discusses harmony and dissonance, and explores relevant Italian Renaissance comic practice and theories of comedy. The chapter leads into three final sections, the first (“Exclusion”) taking up the problem of how the “other” (here Shylock), seemingly excluded from the “harmonious” ending, can retain a ghostly presence; the second (“Delusion”) addressing the question of what protagonists and authority figures (and audiences) are left not knowing by the end, as seen in Much Ado About Nothing; and the third (“Forgiveness”) focusing on the special way that the comedies employ wonder to make forgiveness possible (as with Proteus, Claudio, Angelo, and Bertram), a process different from that of the late romances, where forgiveness precedes wonder. Here the problem of human and communal forgiveness moves beyond church strictures and takes illumination from present-day philosophical thinking.

The Return from the Dead

Chapter 5 argues for the lingering power of medieval values and imaginative forms in their relation to characters who seemingly return from the dead. Criticism has not recognized the extent of this motif in the comedies or the way that it figures in their ongoing actions as well as their endings. Among other values, return from the dead showcases the efficacy of desire on the part of those bereft and the sense of radiant new life that the revenant sometimes acquires. While this motif is usually oriented towards Shakespeare’s late romances, such as Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, it is strikingly pervasive, influential, and mysterious in the earlier comedies, as suggested by revenant characters ranging from Two Gentlemen’s Julia to All’s Well’s Helen. The chapter draws examples extensively from the comedies, including Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, and Twelfth Night. The motif lends uncanny power, emotional and intellectual depth, and memorability to Shakespearean comedy. It likewise helps us understand the persistence of medieval values into the early modern period.

Integrated reporting: Much ado about nothing?

Integrated reporting, which helps companies to share their value creation pro-cesses with their stakeholders, has developed rapidly in recent years. Due to the increased attention paid to the International Integrated Reporting Framework is-sued by the International Integrated Reporting Council, the number of companies worldwide engaging in integrated reporting is continually rising, which is presuma-bly driven by the claimed benefits of this practice. Through recourse to legitimacy theory and management fashion theory, here we provide a preliminary assessment of the development of integrated reporting, alongside considering the potential in-fluence of academic research in its growth. We review the existing body of aca-demic literature on this topic, ultimately identifying 123 claims about the benefits of IR from 29 papers published in 15 journals between May 2011 and September 2016, before proceeding to analyse both the sources and the level of substantia-tion of these claims. Our findings suggest that only a few of the purported ad-vantages of integrated reporting are supported by actual empirical evidence, while most of the claims only cite a limited number of primary sources. Based on these results and our assessment of the development of the concept of IR, we propose a future research agenda.