Shakespeare's Notation: Writing Sound inMuch Ado about Nothing

Abstract

In Act 5 ofMuch Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare Dramatizes Two Consecutive Episodes in Which Writing Poetry is Mixed suggestively with singing, recalling, or imitating music. The first comes when Benedick sings or speaks several lines from the popular ballad “The God of Love.” The second is Claudio's musical rite of contrition for slandering Hero and (he believes) causing her death. In both cases, poetry is produced through writing practices that are interwoven with song. Indeed, Shakespeare yokes literacy and aurality together in the same keyword,noting, which referred both to writing and to musical notes, and which (as scholars have long observed) is hownothingwas pronounced in early modern English. Benedick seeks poetic inspiration from the notes of balladry, then bemoans his inability to versify in rhyme. Claudio not only sees that his epitaph is notated, read aloud, and hung on the tomb; he calls for a corresponding hymn to be sung. Taken together, the scenes attune us to forms of poetic making that are irreducible to writing or language—those overdetermined categories in literary studies that have enabled our neglect of the role that nonverbal sound has played in poetic composition.