Episode 264: “Much Ado About Nothing” On-Screen Adaptations

This week on The Literary Life podcast we are back with a fun episode all about film adaptations of Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare! Angelina and Thomas are joined by Atlee Northmore for today’s discussion, and you are in for quite a ride! Atlee begins the conversation with a general history of Shakespeare works on film, and the second half of the episode covers the two main film adaptations of Much Ado About Nothing. Whether talking about this play or the many others which have been made into movies, our hosts share thoughts on what makes a great adaptation work well and what interpretational choices make for a complete flop. Scroll down to view Atlee’s list of modern Shakespeare film adaptations.

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Commonplace Quotes:

To our age anything Delphic is anathema. We want the definite. As certainly as ours is a time of the expert and the technician, we are living under a dynasty of the intellect, and the aim of the intellect is not to wonder or love and grow wise about life but to control it.

When the intellect speaks, its instrument is a rational prose. The more unmistakable the meaning the better. “Two and two are four.” Everybody understands what it means, and it means the same to everybody. But “Become what thou art”; “Know thyself”; “Ye must be born again”; “I should never have sought thee if I had not already found thee”; “The rest is silence”: what do they mean? Will any two men ever exactly agree? Such sentences are poetry.

Harold Goddard, from The Meaning of Shakespeare

Your soul is full of cities with dead names.

Siegfried Sassoon

The point it, I think, that myth is to be distinguished from religion, science, and philosophy because it consists always of concrete images, appealing to imagination, and serving in one way or another to reveal or explain the mysteries of life. Yet there is a sense in which both the poetic and the mythic image at once reveal and conceal. The meaning is divined rather than defined, implicit rather than explicit, suggested rather than stated.

Alan Watts, from The Two Hands of God

Selection from A Few Figs from Thistles

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!
Faithless am I am save to love's self alone.
Were you not lovely I would leave you now;
After the feet of beauty fly my own.
Were you not still my hunger's rarest food,
And water ever to my wildest thirst,
I would desert you--think not but I would!--
And seek another as I sought you first.
But you are mobile as the veering air,
And all your charms more changeful than the tide,
Wherefore to be inconstant is no care:
I have but to continue at your side.
So wanton, light and false, my love, are you,
I am most faithless when I most am true.

Atlee’s List of Modern Shakespeare Film Adaptations:

• Ran (1985) – Dir. Kurosawa Akira
• Henry V (1989) – Dir. Kenneth Branagh
• Hamlet (1990) – Dir. Franco Zeffirelli
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990) – Dir. Tom Stoppard
• My Own Private Idaho (1991) – Dir. Gus Van Sant
• As You Like It (1992) – Dir. Christine Edzard
• Much Ado About Nothing (1993) – Dir. Kenneth Branagh
• The Lion King (1994) – Dir. Roger Allers, Rob Minkoff
• In the Bleak Midwinter (A Midwinter’s Tale) (1995) – Dir. Kenneth Branagh
• Othello (1995) – Dir. Oliver Parker
• Richard III (1995) – Dir. Richard Loncraine
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1996) – Dir. Adrian Noble
• Looking for Richard (1996) – Dir. Al Pacino
• William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) – Dir. Baz Luhrmann
• Hamlet (1996) – Dir. Kenneth Branagh
• Twelfth Night (1996) – Dir. Trevor Nunn
• A Thousand Acres (1997) – Dir. Jocelyn Moorhouse
• William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1999) – Dir. Christopher Dunne
• 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) – Dir. Gil Junger
• Titus (1999) – Dir. Julie Taymor
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999) – Dir. Michael Hoffman
• Romeo Must Die (2000) – Dir. Andrzej Bartkowiak
• Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000) – Dir. Kenneth Branagh
• Hamlet (2000) – Dir. Michael Almereyda
• O (2001) – Dir. Tim Blake Nelson
• A Midsummer Night’s Rave (2002) – Dir. Gil Cates, Jr.
• Deliver Us from Eva (2003) – Dir. Gary Hardwick
• The Merchant of Venice (2004) – Dir. Michael Radford
• She’s the Man (2006) – Dir. Andy Fickman
• Macbeth (2006) – Dir. Geoffrey Wright
• As You Like It (2006) – Dir. Kenneth Branagh
• The Tempest (2010) – Dir. Julie Taymor

Books Mentioned:

Amazon Affiliate links follow

The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Graham Greene Film Reader by Grahame Greene

Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

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