Much Ado About Nothing: Reflections and Comparisons to Elizabethan Theatre Production Messina of Silica, a city thrives in the history of ancient Rome, where mountains and breezes transform the land and shapes its people in its unique ways. This is where our story began, in a lustrous city where battle wary troops return from afar, a place of peace and tranquility. This is the setting for Shakespeare’s Play, Much Ado About Nothing. The class watched a scene from the first act of this play, where soldiers and citizens are introduced for the first time, men and women appeared on the stage with lights and car used as props for the play (Duncan). This version of the scene does not recreate the true appearance of a play in the Elizabethans
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There, Leonato and his family came out to welcome the returning heroes, which come to our first discrepancy. In Shakespeare’s play character introduction only Leonato, Hero, and Beatrice are present, but if you watch the video closely you can identify an extra character that the scene implicitly determined to be Leonato’s wife and Hero’s mother (Duncan). But that is not the core of the difference. In an Elizabethan play, female characters will not be played by female actors. In fact, only men can become performers in a play (Brockett 100). That is just the way things were hundreds of years ago. Women were second class citizens, to put it bluntly, women were properties and not equals. While in the modern version of the play, as seen in the video, men and women are equally represented on stage by performers of the correct gender. The norms of society changed since the Elizabethan time, women have rising in prestige in our time. Their struggles for equality opened the horizon for them and future generations, one step at a …show more content…
If you play a prince an outfit for nobles will be prepared and a fancy, colorful garment for super natural beings (Brockett 109). Such dress code for performers are uniquely only for Elizabethan theatres. As for modern theatres, in the video each character is differentiated by their own costume. Leonato dressed in a striped pink dress shirt with white kaki, but lacks that upper class gentlemanly posture one would attribute to an Elizabethan’s version (Duncan). Beatrice sitting on the floor, smoking cigarette, drinking beer, dressed in shorts and a blue top playing as a well-educated woman with wisdom and sharp words (Duncan). This portrayal of Beatrice is nothing short of a crime. An upper-class woman showing this much skin and terrible demeanor would not be found on an Elizabethan stage. As a time controlled by class and hierarchy, such disrespect to the upper class maybe warrant criminal charges. But, time changes and societal norms transformed, forbidden custom are now not, uneducated women are now humanity pillars of wisdom, each time has its own judge and standards so that our standards are not better than others, just
There, Leonato and his family came out to welcome the returning heroes, which come to our first discrepancy. In Shakespeare’s play character introduction only Leonato, Hero, and Beatrice are present, but if you watch the video closely you can identify an extra character that the scene implicitly determined to be Leonato’s wife and Hero’s mother (Duncan). But that is not the core of the difference. In an Elizabethan play, female characters will not be played by female actors. In fact, only men can become performers in a play (Brockett 100). That is just the way things were hundreds of years ago. Women were second class citizens, to put it bluntly, women were properties and not equals. While in the modern version of the play, as seen in the video, men and women are equally represented on stage by performers of the correct gender. The norms of society changed since the Elizabethan time, women have rising in prestige in our time. Their struggles for equality opened the horizon for them and future generations, one step at a …show more content…
If you play a prince an outfit for nobles will be prepared and a fancy, colorful garment for super natural beings (Brockett 109). Such dress code for performers are uniquely only for Elizabethan theatres. As for modern theatres, in the video each character is differentiated by their own costume. Leonato dressed in a striped pink dress shirt with white kaki, but lacks that upper class gentlemanly posture one would attribute to an Elizabethan’s version (Duncan). Beatrice sitting on the floor, smoking cigarette, drinking beer, dressed in shorts and a blue top playing as a well-educated woman with wisdom and sharp words (Duncan). This portrayal of Beatrice is nothing short of a crime. An upper-class woman showing this much skin and terrible demeanor would not be found on an Elizabethan stage. As a time controlled by class and hierarchy, such disrespect to the upper class maybe warrant criminal charges. But, time changes and societal norms transformed, forbidden custom are now not, uneducated women are now humanity pillars of wisdom, each time has its own judge and standards so that our standards are not better than others, just