‘Much Ado About Nothing’: Self-Awareness and Respect in Relationships

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Discussion
Conclusion
Works Cited

Introduction

Much Ado About Nothing is a Shakespearean comedy written around 1598. The content of living joy, rich philosophy. The story’s main themes are masks, disguises, or games, while the characters explore self-awareness, honesty, and respect in relationships.

Discussion

The character Benedict raises the theme of the cuckold in the tension of the whole play. At the beginning of the play, Benedict appears as an aristocratic soldier, witty and intelligent. Benedik’s unusual self-portrait about his relationships with women is readily amenable to psychoanalytic reading. Moving nonstop from conception to upbringing and cuckolds, he merges his relationship with his mother and wife into one, destroying past and future, memories and fears. He said: “ That a woman conceived me, I thank her; that she brought me up, I likewise give her most humble thanks. But that I will have a recheat winded [i.e., a bugle-call blown] in my forehead or hang my bugle in an invisible baldrick, all women shall pardon me. Because I will not do them the wrong to mistrust any, I will do myself the right to trust none” (Shakespeare, p. 153). What seems to unite all these stages of a man’s life is the humiliating dependence on a woman, starting with the support of the infant on the maternal woman in terms of energy and upbringing (Fonagy, p. 45). However, this early dependence, instead of being outgrown, is considered a forerunner of later sexual humiliations of an adult man.

In psychoanalytic concepts of male suppression, the absence of the mother’s phallus is an alarming image for the child — an image of his fear of castration and subordination to another man (Barry, p. 102). Nevertheless, for Benedict, a returning soldier, this fear of women seems not so much general as personal: the horns of the cuckold, which he imagines as his future headdress, are precisely the horns of a defeated soldier who lost his horn because of another soldier (Barry, p. 111). However, in the drama of that period, there is a noticeable discrepancy between the frequency of jokes and the rarity of adultery. There are far more falsely accused wives than guilty ones.

Conclusion

Thus, this discrepancy between natural guilt and fear of betrayal suggests that we should focus not so much on the infidelity itself but on the natural source of patriarchal anxiety, which was the patriarchy’s inevitable dependence on an inability to verify the virtue of wives and mothers.

Works Cited

Barry, Peter. “Psychoanalytic Criticism.” Beginning Theory (fourth edition). Manchester University Press, 2020, pp. 97-122.

Fonagy, Peter, et al. “Reconciling Psychoanalytic Ideas with Attachment Theory.” Guilford Press, 2018.

Shakespeare, William. “Much Ado About Nothing.” One-Hour Shakespeare. Routledge, 2019, pp. 147-206.

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‘Much Ado About Nothing’: Self-Awareness and Respect in Relationships

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