MovieChat Forums > Much Ado About Nothing (2013) Discussion > Eh, the shakespearn language kind of tur...

Eh, the shakespearn language kind of turned me off

posted 11 years ago by fettster777
4 replies | jump to latest

First off, before anyone bashes me and says how illiterate I am or something.

I love reading. I read TONS of books, mainly suspense and scifi and my favorite author is Michael Crichton...RIP .

I also love Joss Whedon, so when I saw ads for this movie and it had tons of Whedonverse stars in it I was instantly interested even if it was a movie based on a story by Shakespeare.

The black and white didn't bother me at all since I've watched tons of movies in B/W but I was expecting the movie to be modern interpretation of the story. Well, I was half right I guess.

The setting is modern, but the language was.....it was just super hard to understand.

I was never good at reading Shakespeare's stuff. We had to read several of his plays in HS and I struggled immensely with them. I almost made a D in 9th grade English because of Romeo and Juliet. So when I popped in the DVD I rented from Redbox and started hearing them talking I knew this wasn't for me.

I watched about an hour of it last night before it started to really bore me so I turned it off and plan on finishing it tonight. From what I have watched though, all I could gather is that two groups of people are trying to set up two other people secretly and then the guy getting married called off the marriage because he thought his fiance was sleeping around or something.

I guess I probably should have watched a trailer or did more research prior to going into this movie.

[–] PreachCaleb 11 years ago

Probably.

I've found the easiest thing to do with Shakespearean movies/plays is to read and understand the play first. Then you'll be able to keep up with the performances.

Straightedge means I'm better than you.

[–] fettster777 11 years ago

Before finishing the movie, I read the synopsis on wikipedia and I agree it was much easier to understand what was going on. I also went back and rewatched a few earlier scenes and understood them better.

[–] PreachCaleb 11 years ago

You should read this:

http://www.shakespeare-navigators.com/ado/AdoSceneTextIndex.html

The side notes will give analysis and background on all the word play.

Straightedge means I'm better than you.

[–] Franco_Zed 11 years ago

A couple of things about Shakespeare:

1. You have to just accept that you will not understand everything. (If somebody tells you that they understand everything then they are either guessing or lying or they have studied it in advance.)

2. The more you're exposed to it, the easier it gets. There are a handful of words that are used often in Shakespeare plays that are very rarely used today. Once you know a couple of these, you see them over and over again. Examples:

"anon"
"Have some wine ere you go."
"No one marks you."

I'm no where near a Shakespeare scholar, but I've read about half the plays, and seen maybe a dozen stage productions and a dozen films in Shakespeare's original dialogue. The first time I watched Whedon's Much Ado, it took me 20 minutes to get used to the Shakespearan English again. Even with a decent amount of exposure to Shakespeare, I still had to just accept that I wouldn't understand everything. (I also took a third year university English class, that was exclusively about Shakespeare.)

To understand all of Shakespeare's dialogue would take a lot of research. Many people, however, find his plays and his dialogue enjoyable even with this limitation.

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