Electric Shivers

This year’s allotment of Shakespeare included four plays and fifteen sonnets. I continue to think that the plays I read over and over (about half the canonical list) are worth revisiting. By contrast, the sonnets more and more seem to include a handful of standouts and 140-something that I can ignore for the rest of my life.

About King Lear and Richard II, I will only say that I went into them this year as usual, thinking that they wouldn’t hold my interest so much this time, and I came out of them as usual, happy that they had each riveted my attention for five full acts.

Yes, Much Ado About Nothing is about nothing (it says it right in the title!), but it’s so good! Benedick and Beatrice are hilarious as they insult each other in lieu of admitting their mutual love. Their friends’ gentle trickery works quickly, with hardly any drama or farcical confusion, and the reader is glad that the pair don’t have to suffer any more than they already have. The Bard gives Claudio and Hero more of an actual plot: Don John arranges cruel deceptions in order to ruin their wedding. The dialog may briefly give a reason for his nastiness somewhere, but it seems to me he causes pain just because he’s a jerk. That wedding scene is intense, extremely so for a comedy. But remember that it’s all a big fuss about nothing. As soon as Don John’s schemes are revealed, Claudio and Hero are reunited.

The show-stealer, though, has nothing to do with young couples who eventually get married. Dogberry, a very English constable in a supposedly Italian setting, is surely the inspiration for every pompous but confused representative of the law that comes after him, from Oliver Twist’s Mr. Bumble to Mayberry’s Barney Fife. His malapropisms (Wikipedia says they can be called dogberryisms!) mostly take the form of substituting prefixes in Latinate words: “Dost thou not suspect my place?” for instance, in place of “Dost thou not respect my place?” In an aside about nothing, I will mention that they made me think this time about Slip Mahoney from the Bowery Boys movies. (Ah! Saturday afternoon TV in the ‘70s!) More to the point, they’re funny! And his pretentious repetitions are funny! “Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover, they have spoken untruths.” Wonderful! But the best joke of all is his way of insisting that all the culprits’ untruths and insults be put into the record accurately: when the sexton, who’s taking it all down, leaves for a moment, one rogue calls Dogberry an ass, upon which Dogberry exclaims, “O, that he were here to write me down an ass! But masters, remember that I am an ass, though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass.”

Now, when I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream right after Much Ado, I noticed that Bottom calls himself an ass, actually becomes an ass, and indulges in malapropisms. This is the same character, I thought! I’ll bet they were played by the same actor! So I looked it up, and sure enough, Dogberry was expressly written for William Kempe, whom Britannica calls “one of the most famous clowns of the Elizabethan era,” and scholars suspect that he also played Bottom. I will now send electric shivers through the world of Shakespeare scholarship by announcing with 99.2% certainty that, whether Kempe played Bottom or not, Shakespeare must have written the part with Kempe in mind. When that news becomes a well known truism, please remember that you read it here first.