Abstract
In Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, Hero, one of the central female characters, functions as the dramatic means of defining and performing masculinity for the male characters around her, and her palpable silence in the unfolding of her own “romantic” plot can point to the similarity of the gender politics of romance and marriage between Elizabethan England and 21st century India. The comedic "resolution" of the play's central conflict through marriage depends crucially on the performance of gender roles that privilege “masculine” codes of honour and allegiance at the expense of “feminine” desire and agency.
Highlights
Reading Much Ado About Nothing (c.1599) in a course on Renaissance literature, students of M.A
In a class where a majority of the students were female – studying literature and the arts in India being still considered a more appropriate choice for women than for men – the play presented a surprisingly rich ground for a comparative analysis between the literary construction of “romantic love” through the conventions of Elizabethan drama and the gender politics of family and marriage in contemporary India. The students, from both rural and urban centres in southern India, identified and responded to the dominant code of masculinity operative within the Shakespearean play as one that informs their own understanding of the genre of romantic comedy as well as exposes the dramatic and cultural inequity underlying such generic representation of relations between men and women
My attempt in class was to critically examine how Hero, one of the central female characters in the play, functions as the dramatic means of defining and performing masculinity for the male characters around her, and how her palpable silence in the unfolding of her own “romantic” plot can point to the similarity of the gender politics of romance and marriage between Elizabethan England and 21st century India
Summary
Reading Much Ado About Nothing (c.1599) in a course on Renaissance literature, students of M.A.
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