Much Ado About Nothing: Prologue

From The Mystical Art of Shakespeare Volume I

In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare is in his artistic element, conveying a deep message for humanity with a masterpiece of rapturous brilliance, lyrically beautiful and profound.

There is little need to ask what the central theme of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing is. The answer stares us in the face. It is much ado about nothing, literally. Shakespeare makes no secret of it; he tells us point blank, since it is exactly what the title says. Yet, surprisingly, this was not evident for centuries.

The three Shakespearean techniques used in Much Ado About Nothing clarifies the meaning of the play. If we heed the cohesive unity, focused allegorical scenes, and particularly, the thematic resonance in the play, its main theme is obvious. Being an uncomplicated theme, Much Ado About Nothing ideally illuminates how Shakespeare weaves his meaning through the incessant echo of his motifs. From beginning to end, the thematic resonance is intense and relentless.

Shakespeare’s plays often portray our human condition, a mundane state of being constrained by our failure to grasp the truth. We live in a disquieting world where thoughts and actions are frequently born of misperception. Much Ado About Nothing focuses on this aspect of our lives, its central theme summarized by three complementary motifs:

• Our partiality—attraction or aversion—is an arbitrary projection based on imputed qualities not inherent in the object of our feelings.
• Our feelings of liking or hating are often conjured up by a misperception of reality.
• These arbitrary feelings, born of misperception, often create unnecessary strife and turmoil, and hence “much ado about nothing.”

Thus, the title, Much Ado About Nothing, expresses the message in the play. The strife and discord—the “much ado”—arise from feelings and attitudes that are mere imputations projected upon an object or situation; these feelings and attitudes are not intrinsic in the object or situation, and hence are really “nothing.”

For example, our friends are “our friends” not because it is inherent in their nature; neither are our enemies “our enemies” because it is inherently so. These relationships are readily altered by external circumstances. Liking or disliking is an extraneous property we unnecessarily project onto an entity, thus making our reactions to this projection a case of much ado about something not real, i.e. nothing.

Our misperception of reality has serious consequences. In Buddhism, for example, ignorance (taken more in the sense of delusion) is considered the root cause of our cycle of suffering. This state of ignorance or delusion results in a distorted view of reality that leads to our purely subjective partiality that is not caused by anything inherent in the object concerned. Our unwarranted attraction or aversion, in turn, causes our suffering and strife. This is the spiritual message Shakespeare conveys in Much Ado About Nothing.

The play displays all the characteristic techniques of Shakespeare’s mystical art. It is easy, however, to miss the relentless echo of the play’s dominant leitmotif because the behavior of the characters (apart from the comic ones) appears so natural. It is this very point that makes Shakespeare’s message so vital, since it indicates the prevalence of this very motif in our real lives.