Imagine it’s your wedding day. You’re standing next to your father and your cousin in front of your entire community, about to marry a man you hardly know. You’ve seen him once before when he was passing through for work. He proposed to you about two days ago. Except he didn’t propose to you really, he had his boss do it for him. He asks if your father will freely give you away. Your father says, yes, of course. You smile at him, ready to tell him, ‘I do’. Suddenly, he pushes you into your father, calling you names and accusing you of cheating on him in front of all the guests. You protest your innocence, but the only one who believes you is your cousin. He leaves in a huff, and your family decides the best course of action is to fake your death. The next day, you’re proven innocent. He feels horrible, and, thinking you to be dead, agrees to marry some stranger who looks like you to make up for his past actions. That stranger is actually you, so you marry him anyway.

The scenario described above is completely ludicrous. Who is this horrible man? Why on earth would anyone agree to marry him in the first place? Why would anyone agree to marry him a second time? But it’s the implausible scenario that must be handled by any current director who wants to make an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. The love story described is one of the two key romances in the play: Claudio and Hero’s. Claudio, an Italian mercenary, comes to stay at Messina, Italy on his way back home after a war campaign. He’s a typical Italian gentleman of the time, trying to make a name for himself and gain social status through success in combat. His commanding officer Don Pedro, a prince of Aragon and Messina’s feudal lord, agrees to broker a marriage between him and Hero, the governor of Messina’s daughter. He then is tricked into believing Hero has cheated on him. Instead of talking to her about her supposed infidelity, he decides to reveal his suspicions to the entire city at their wedding. His actions ruin Hero. She fakes her own death, planning to run away to a convent if her family is unable to clear her name. Hero’s family manages to convince Claudio of her innocence, and Claudio agrees to marry a cousin who looks like Hero as penance. Hero reveals herself, and she marries Claudio, wrapping up Much Ado About Nothing.

Shakespeare had three forms of play to work with: history, tragedy, and comedy. Technically, Much Ado About Nothing falls into the comedy category, and the ending should leave the audience feeling overjoyed at Claudio and Hero’s nuptials. So, a director putting on a modern adaption must make a choice: either try to present Claudio and Hero’s marriage as a happy ending or embrace the play’s inherent peculiarity. Joss Whedon and Kenneth Branagh directed some of the most notable film adaptations of Much Ado About Nothing. Their versions of Much Ado couldn’t be more different, from budget to artistic interpretation. Branagh guides the audience’s eyes away from the problematic aspects of Claudio and Hero’s marriage, while Whedon conspicuously displays the oddities in their love story.

Branagh presents Hero and Claudio’s marriage as conventional, using the beautiful setting and characters to present his audience from thinking too much about the two’s love story. He sets the play in a stunning villa nestled in the beautiful Italian countryside. The villa is presented as a self-contained village, and the only ‘outsiders’ who the audience ever sees are the mercenaries coming home from war. Serious matters have no place in the villa. In the opening scene, the inhabitants of the villa laze about, eating grapes and listening to the governor’s niece Beatrice orate. Shakespeare does not choose to have Much Ado open with Beatrice’s poem. The poem appears later in the play, and it bemoans the fickleness of men.

Branagh’s choice has two effects. Firstly, it lets the viewer know that men will be fickle, already preparing them for Claudio’s sudden rejection of Hero. It also adds to the general leisure of the scene, as the poem provides entertainment for the characters as they laze in the sun. Their postures ooze lethargy. They sprawl all over everything, casually touching anyone they feel like. The clothes are all white, and most are in some partially undressed state, whether it’s an open top or a critical button left undone. The scene seems sensual, setting the stage for the love story to come, marking the villa as a perfect environment for young love. The servants and the upper-class loll about together, and while it’s clear that Leonato, the governor, and his daughter Hero are the upper class from their more polished speech, especially compared to Hero’s vulgar maid Margaret, class distinctions are fluid. Shakespeare makes it clear that Leonato rules a town called Messina and that he owes fealty to the visiting Prince Pedro of Aragon. Branagh omits most of those details. He never provides anything concrete about the situation for the audience. His beautiful landscapes, loose, half-on-clothes, lazy postures, and general luxury create an absolute paradise, made even more ethereal by the lack of details. The audience feels whisked away to another world where happiness abounds and love is in the air. The audience doesn’t need to think too much about anything; they can instead focus on the gorgeous scenery and the radiant characters.

The entrance of the mercenaries further reinforces the idyllic image. Everyone is ecstatic to see Don Pedro, Benedict, and Claudio. Again, touches are carelessly exchanged, and the entire village strips, bathes, and changes into cleaner attire. The military men cleanse themselves from the dirty war they have just come from. By showing the mercenaries bathing, Branagh effectively communicates to the audience that war has no place in his Italian fairyland. The mercenaries wash away their dirt before entering. No physical reminders of serious matters can exist in Branagh’s Much Ado. Branagh already has encouraged the viewer not to question the nitty gritty details of the situation. What is the town? What war were the mercenaries coming from? How do they all know each other? The pretty scenery, lazy attitudes, and casual interactions encourage the audience not to think too hard.

In Branagh’s Much Ado, Claudio’s vicious accusation of Hero seems completely out of place. His denunciation brings seriousness into what should be a joyous affair. It also mars the perfect happiness that seems to exist in Leonato’s village. Claudio destroys the beautiful wedding decorations in his fury, disrupting the beautiful scenery that Branagh has carefully cultivated. Claudio’s actions are so jarring that the audience needs the situation to be fixed. When Hero and Claudio get back together, the audience doesn’t mind that Claudio’s been horrendous to Hero. They don’t question the friar’s suggestion that Hero fake her own death. They want the villa to return to the pretty paradise that it’s been for most of the movie. Up to this point, the movie has made no particular demands on the audience’s intellect. The audience has no reason to start thinking too deeply about Claudio’s behavior. Claudio and Hero’s marriage is the continuance of the blissful world the Branagh created. Their marriage is the kind of happy ending that Branagh’s fairytale world requires.

Branagh’s stellar casting also helps the audience make sense of Claudio and Hero’s union. He casts Robert Sean Leonard as Claudio and Kate Beckinsale as Hero. At the time of filming, both actors were extremely young. Their youth gives the audience a way to understand the immaturity of their actions. The credit for the young casting doesn’t go entirely to Branagh, of course. Shakespeare repeatedly describes both Hero and Claudio as youthful. Branagh takes Shakespeare’s casting suggestion and runs with it. Neither of his picks for Claudio and Hero look like they could be older than 20. The actors’ youth allows the audience to account for Claudio and Hero’s impulsive decision to marry, and Claudio’s decision to dramatically end his wedding. The two lovebirds make foolish choices because they are young. They do what silly teenagers who don’t understand the gravity of marriage would do: decide to wed impulsively and then end a wedding based on an unverified accusation.

The two actors are also stunning. They are individually so physically attractive that it makes sense that they’d fall in love with each other at first sight. Perhaps unfairly, very attractive individuals are considered nothing more than their looks. Because their beauty stands out, nobody considers their intelligence. In Branagh, Hero and Claudio are both so good looking that the audience focuses on their beauty instead of their judgment. It appears logical for two apparently brainless teens living in a fairytale to end up together.

Thus, Branagh makes Hero’s and Claudio’s unpalatable love story go down smoothly. He created a lover’s paradise and put in two young disarmingly lovely actors. Everything about the scenario is perfect, and Branagh’s set up is so good that the audience doesn’t even care about Claudio’s character defects or the implausibility of the match. It’s a match made in a literal ‘heaven’, and the audience enjoys seeing it succeed.

Branagh’s fairytale Much Ado is about as different from Joss Whedon’s as can be. Joss Whedon’s Much Ado was extremely low budget. He filmed the movie in about two weeks in his own home, funding its production himself. It has a cast of actors who had worked with Whedon before including Amy Acker, Nathan Fillion, Alexis Denisof, and Clark Gregg. It’s a group project compared to Branagh’s extravaganza. A low budget isn’t always a bad thing, however. It meant that Whedon didn’t have to please an audience to get a return on investment. He could do practically whatever he wanted with the play, even if his choices might make the play appear distasteful. Instead of trying to smooth over Much Ado’s unconventionality, he embraces it. He makes no attempt to explain Hero and Claudio’s love story.

To begin with, the entire setting is bizarre. His version of Much Ado is black and white, giving it an early forties His Girl Friday feel. But the characters use modern pieces of technology, including phones and iPads. The characters also wear business suits and dresses that aren’t modern but aren’t from an era like the forties. The setting is a blend of different times and eras that do not mesh well together. Whedon also makes no attempt to explain who exactly Don Pedro, Benedict, and Claudio are. They come to Leonato’s house having won a ‘war’, but they pull up in limos with their captives bound with zip-ties. What war did they just come from? Are they even soldiers? What’s with the zip ties? These questions practically scream themselves at the audience. Once Shakespeare’s plot is ripped from the realm of Italian city states—where mercenary warfare was a common way to social climb and where extended stays at acquaintances’ houses was normal—explaining needs to be done. Whedon doesn’t explain, though. He simply lets the audience continue with a feeling of vague uneasiness that something is off in this black and white movie with iPads.

The actors who play Hero and Claudio aren’t conventionally attractive either. Fran Kanz, who portrays Claudio, and Jillian Morges, who plays Hero, are not ugly by any means. They look like normal people, not the sort who dash off into a whirlwind spontaneous courtship. Hero barely speaks a word before Claudio decides he wants to marry her. Claudio’s decision would only make sense if Hero were truly a dazzling beauty. A Hero who captures a man’s attention without uttering a word would have to practically ooze feminine charm and beauty. Jillian Morges doesn’t, not in the way she holds herself, in the way she dresses, or in the way she moves. The first time Claudio sees Hero, she’s washing dishes. Nothing screams romantic like a little menial labor.

Whedon has his characters constantly drink alcohol. They drink when they’re angry, they drink when they’re happy, and they drink when they’re plotting. They even have martinis when they are snorkeling in a lake while moping about losing their girl to another man. No, that doesn’t happen in Shakespeare. In Shakespeare, Claudio asks his commanding officer to woo Hero for him and then is crushed when he believes Don Pedro wants Hero for himself. It’s Whedon’s decision to have him mope in the lake, snorkeling, with a martini. The scene is completely bizarre and adds a strange tinge to Hero and Claudio’s courtship. The constant imbibing makes it seem like all the characters are intoxicated, and this supposed intoxication could account for all weird behavior in the play, snorkeling scene and all. The ever-present alcohol gives the movie a tipsy feel. In a way, Whedon creates a dream world like Branagh’s. His dream world isn’t a fairy tale, though. It’s an alcohol-induced nonsensical hallucination that hovers on the edge of a nightmare. It truly takes a turn for the nightmarish when Claudio hurls Hero to the ground, denouncing her as a “rotten orange” and rejecting her because of her ruined virginity.¹

Claudio’s accusations are completely false and unexpected, for several reasons. Whedon departs from the original Shakespeare and opens his version of Much Ado with a one-night stand between Benedict and Beatrice, the other lovers in the play, modernizing the play for the audience. Whedon has Benedict walk out on Beatrice, and Benedict’s desertion could account for her bitter hate when she sees Benedict next. It does make Claudio’s infuriated tirade about sexual purity seem a bit out of place, however. Whedon never gives the viewer any indication that premarital sex is considered wrong until that point. Of course, Claudio could be mad about Hero’s supposed disloyalty, but most of his lines are focused instead on her purity. His furious emphasis specifically on the loss of her virginity seems like an overreaction.

He also gives her no warning and treats her awfully. His angry accusatory tone, his rough manhandling of Hero, and his complete disregard for all propriety when he publicly accuses her of cheating, leave the audience with a dirty taste in their mouth. But, in a strange way, Whedon has also made Claudio’s behavior make logical sense. He has set Claudio and Hero’s ‘love story’ in a peculiar, intoxicated world of clashing tropes where absolutely nothing makes sense. The audience has no expectation that Hero and Claudio’s story will either. So, when Hero and Claudio get back together and Claudio makes his apology, declaring that he “sinned not […] but in mistaking”² and he will marry this mystery girl “even if she were an Ethiope”, the audience isn’t even surprised.³ It appears that Claudio is a bigot who can’t even apologize properly. His and Hero’s love story is another bizarre part of a movie that has shown time and time again that it is not afraid to be bizarre. The ending doesn’t feel happy, but a ‘happy ending’ isn’t an expectation that Whedon sets up for the audience.

Both Whedon and Branagh make Claudio and Hero’s love story make sense in their own way. Branagh serves up Claudio and Hero’s relationship expertly, cleverly manipulating the audience into forgetting that Claudio is despicable and that Hero should have thanked her lucky stars when their first wedding goes south. The audience can sit back and laugh and feel happy inside when the marriage turns out well. Meanwhile, Whedon acknowledges that Much Ado is a strange play. He makes no attempt to apologize and exhibits Much Ado’s oddity unashamedly. He challenges the audience to make sense of the bizarre story he’s given to them and to manage their discomfort with the ending. They differ in audience engagement but still account for Claudio and Hero’s absurd behavior. As to which is better? It’s really a question of liking a whimsical romantic comedy or a bizarre fiasco that somehow ends at the altar.

N o t e s

1. William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), 4.1.31.

2. Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, 5.1.258–59.

3. Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, 5.4.38.