ABSTRACT
Much Ado is filled with playlets, staged shows, actors, and interior dramatists. Don Pedro and Don John both devise pageants designed to deceive specific audiences; most of Messina pretends to be someone else at a masked ball at the outset of the play; and the work ends with two shows involving Claudio: in one he plays the role of mourner before an empty tomb he believes contains his betrothed; in the other he plays the groom to a woman – really Hero – whom he believes to be Hero's cousin. Consequently, critics have often thematized the play as being “about” truth, illusion, and how to live in a world of deceptive appearances. 1 Viewed metadramatically, the play has yielded readings which have seen in its assorted dramatists and dramatic projects Shakespeare's self-reflexive meditations on his own theatrical craft. 2 Much of this criticism aspires to articulate an unchanging or universal meaning for the play – a task both impossible and impossibly idealist. Instead, I am interested in the historical contingency of meaning and want to explore Much Ado's preoccupation with theatrical practices in relationship to a body of Elizabethan texts overtly concerned with the nature, control, and “morality” of theatrical power: namely, the antitheatrical tracts. I will argue that these tracts – through their discussions of theater – were a site where anxieties about a changing social order were discursively produced and managed. The presentation of theatrical practices in Shakespeare's Much Ado, far from being “above ideology,” also participates in the process by which a historically specific understanding of a patriarchal and hierarchical social order is both secured against threats to itself and also laid open to their demystifying power. In contradistinction to a criticism committed to the drama's place “above ideology” and to its aesthetic and thematic unity, a political criticism of Renaissance drama will focus precisely on the silences and contradictions which reveal the constructed – and interested – nature of dramatic representations and on the ideological functions served by the plays as produced and read at specific historical junctures and through the mediation of specific theatrical and critical practices.
