Read Along,  Shakespeare,  Show Notes

Episode 262: “Much Ado About Nothing” by William Shakespeare, Acts 2 & 3

Welcome back to our series on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing here on The Literary Life Podcast. Our hosts, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks, open the episode with some thoughts on disguises and appearance versus reality in Shakespeare. They talk about how the eavesdropping in this play works together with the things not being as they seem. Angelina shares some clarifying ideas on discussing characters and their function in the story without pulling them out of the story and psychoanalyzing them. Other topics they discuss in this episode are: the importance of the song lyrics in this play, Dogberry and his companions, Claudio’s instability, and the shape of comedy. Join us next week for the final two acts of Much Ado About Nothing.

You can now find the replay of Addison Hornstra’s webinar on Alice in Wonderland, Through a Looking Glass Dimly, as well as Jen Rogers’ upcoming mini-class on the Inklings, Words of Power.

The seventh annual Literary Life Online Conference is now open for registration. Please visit HouseofHumaneLetters.com to sign up for that as well as all the other upcoming webinars of 2025!

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Commonplace Quotes:

Morality has spoiled literature often enough…The truth is, it is very bad to read the stage of thinking deeply and frequently about duty unless you are prepared to go a stage further.

C. S. Lewis, from On Stories

Disguise indeed is the very link Shakespeare was seeking between the realm of illusion and the dominion of fact.

Clothes! that is a metaphor that sums it up, and from The Comedy of Errors to The Tempest there is not a more persistent metaphor in Shakespeare. Being versus seeming! that is the theme which underlies it all, and there is not a more persistent theme in Shakespeare’s plays.

Now words, as well as actions, are the medium of drama. Because words are the garments of thought, they are indispensable instruments for obtaining and maintaining the effect of duality in life and on the stage.

Harold Goddard, from The Meaning of Shakespeare

Maiden Name

by Philip Larkin

Marrying left your maiden name disused.
Its five light sounds no longer mean your face,
Your voice, and all your variants of grace;
For since you were so thankfully confused
By law with someone else, you cannot be
Semantically the same as that young beauty:
It was of her that these two words were used.

Now it's a phrase applicable to no one,
Lying just where you left it,scattered through
Old lists, old programmes, a school prize or two
Packets of letters tied with tartan ribbon -
Then is it scentless, weightless, strengthless, wholly
Untruthful? Try whispering it slowly.
No, it means you. Or, since you're past and gone,

It means what we feel now about you then:
How beautiful you were, and near, and young,
So vivid, you might still be there among
Those first few days, unfingermarked again.
So your old name shelters our faithfulness,
Instead of losing shape and meaning less
With your depreciating luggage laden.

Books Mentioned:

Amazon Affiliate links follow

On Stories” by C. S. Lewis

The Omnibus of Crime ed. by Dorothy Sayers

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