Much Ado About Foreshadowing

Hinting at the future. Foreshadowing. This literary device is used in many ways in many novels, and Much Ado About Nothing by the great William Shakespeare is no different. ,Much Ado About Nothing is a romantic comedy, with much of the humour coming from the swearing off of love. In the early stag es of the play, a group of men arrive at the castle of Leonato. The conversations that follow are, in my mind, some of the most humourous in the play. Now, for anyone who has seen a movie, it is obvious when two characters are destined to fall in love. The relationship between Beatrice and Benedick starts as if they were eight; insulting each other to hide their true feelings. This is seen through immediately by the audience, as no juvenile teasing could be taken as anything other than deep flirting. The humour in this section comes not only from the childlike playing of the characters, but also by the resolvement of each character to never marry. Benedick is quite vocal about his ideas, stating that  “I may go the finer, I will live a bachelor.”(21). As someone who enjoys watching plays, I searched for a visual form of this work, and I found that the actors who portrayed the role of Benedick said these lines with enough sarcasm that a newborn would understand the true intentions of Shakespeare. It is clear that Beatrice and Bendick have a history of insulting and teasing each other- it’s all that's seen in the first scene! Within reading the first few lines of the script I knew that these two characters would fall in love, and spent the remainder of the play rooting for the foreshadowing of romance between the flirtatious characters to come true.