Much Ado about Nothing 953Philostrate, Theseus’s houseman and designated
master of the revels of the upcoming wedding, is a
servant, but in the hierarchy of servants, he has the
most authority, and he is, with due deference, per-
mitted to venture a point of view about the relative
merits of the possible festivities at the wedding. He
clearly objects to Theseus’s choice of entertainment,
but he must acquiesce to the will of his master.
The next level of society that is introduced in act
1 is represented by Egeus, an elder statesman with
position, reputation, and money. He symbolizes the
patriarchy as surely as Theseus symbolizes the sys-
tem of law and justice. Hermia, Egeus’s daughter,
her friend Helena, and the two lovers Demetrius
and Lysander represent the upper class as well. As
adolescents looking to establish themselves through
marriage and alliance, they have less power than
Egeus, who is rigid in response to Hermia’s chal-
lenge to his authority. He seeks to establish his con-
trol over his daughter’s life by insisting that Theseus
put her to death if she does not follow his will.
Hermia and Helena and Demetrius and Lysander
will eventually end up lost in the woods. Shakespeare
uses this dislocation so that they may be freed of the
constraints of their class and obligations to society
as dutiful daughters or citizen soldiers. The natural
world gives them the opportunity to work out their
relationships away from the exacting and relatively
rigid strictures of civilized Athens.
The next level of social class in the play is the
working class: the “mechanicals,” or guildsmen and
laborers, who form the acting troupe that will perform
their play at the triple wedding celebration at the end
of the play proper. These are the workers whose trades
permit society to run smoothly on a day-to-day level:
a “bellows-mender,” a weaver, a carpenter, a tailor, and
a tinker. They form the low stratum of society, doing
double duty by standing in for the artist class. Their
little cache of creative imagination helps them gain
entry, if only briefly, to the world of the aristocracy.
Shakespeare shows us, however, that their spirits long
for creative expression, and while they may be too
literal minded, too poorly educated to achieve the
sublime, like much of the audience who would have
been viewing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, they long
for a transcendent experience to lift them from their
mundane lives for a brief time.
The fairies, an ephemeral, supernatural class,
stand in for religion and the world of the gods of
ancient Greece. The fairies also represent the natural
world, the imagination, sexuality, and sensuality,
and their society is as stratified as the society of
Athens. Like Theseus and Hippolyta, Oberon and
Titania have the highest authority in fairyland as the
king and queen, respectively; Titania, however, dares
to stand up to Oberon by asserting her ownership
of the Indian boy. In order to return the world to its
“proper” order, Oberon must interfere and assert his
higher male position.
Puck is the imp with the most authority after
Oberon, followed by the First Fairy and the group
of fairies who serve Titania. Puck, like Philostrate,
is essentially a servant, but since the fairyland is less
governed by impulse control, logic, and legislated
justice than aristocratic Athens, Puck is free to be
perverse up to a point. Puck’s interventions fre-
quently go awry, and he adds more to the play’s story
line than Philostrate, his aristocratic double, does.
The narrative frame centered on the upper social
class closes after the parody of aristocratic love in
Pyramus and Thisbe. We do not see Egeus again,
but since Hermia and Lysander and Helena and
Demetrios are also married, we know that they are
taking their rightful places in Athenian society. The
mechanicals are amply rewarded by the aristocrats
who have been entertained by their artful, tragical
comedy, and they return to their proper social place
outside the palace. When the three pairs of newly-
weds have withdrawn to their respective wedding
beds, the house is visited by Oberon, Titania, and the
other fairies, whose last act is to bless the unions of
the newlyweds. Moreover, Puck is given the play’s last
words as Shakespeare’s elfish mask. His important
final wooing of the audience on behalf of the world of
dreams lets us know that in Shakespeare’s hierarchy
of civilization, dream, imagination, and art come first.
Ellen RosenbergSHakESPEarE, wiLLiam Much
Ado about Nothing (1600)
Much Ado about Nothing by William Shakespeare was
published in 1600, though written and performed
earlier, probably in 1598–99. Shakespeare examines,