Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more

A sight that has many ladies sighing.

I won't promise this won't melt into an infatuative drivel about Sir Ken, because my heart did just that when I first saw his film version of Much Ado About Nothing. I had always adored the antics of Benedick and Beatrice on the page, so imagine the ovarian explosions that occurred when I heard that he had, of course, taken the best male role in the play. Indeed, the film is Sir Ken in fine form, at the top of his game, as a most dashing mofo riding horses and getting baths and wearing tight pants...*ahem*... and this film represents perhaps his most successful achievement in making Shakespeare accessible to modern audiences. 

Much Ado being the original romantic comedy, and a quintessential one at that, it was a perfect choice for adaptation to the screen. And even considering Sir Ken's often... eccentric... casting decisions, this film's actors and actresses actually turned out more or less perfect for their roles. It's a grand delight and I don't believe I have to heap on any more praise than it already has to convince any lover of Shakespeare (or beautifully executed romcoms, which I usually distrust) to watch it for themselves. 

The song featured within the text has a naturally lilting quality that makes it so easy to memorize that I actually made myself memorize a second passage in a week. I chose one of Beatrice's shrewd rants against marriage, which suits my personal tongue-in-cheek position quite nicely. She and her antagonizing lover Benedick spend the entire play railing about love and the differences between men and women. Their war-like wooing is immediately a more passionate and emotional foreplay than the sweet, kind, and honest couple--Hero and Claudio--could ever muster. Their spiteful, witty, verbal thrusts and parries represent the most satisfying love story in all of Shakespeare, IMHO. They are the most intelligent individuals in the story, and the surface tension of their cynycism breaks with the catalyst of dishonor laid upon Hero and Claudio at their doomed wedding. Some things are sacred to these two, and as they eventually find out, they find each other more sacred than anything else.

As Benedick says, "Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably." In that small statement, using the formal "thou" instead of "you," he betrays the deep respect he has always had for Beatrice. They may ride off into the proverbial sunset knocking each other's heads with frying pans, but when they join forces, all is well... and fantastically entertaining.

Much Ado About Nothing, Act II, Sc. III

Balthasar: Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,

Men were deceivers ever,

One foot in sea and one on shore,

To one thing constant never.

Then sigh not so, but let them go,

And be you blithe and bonny,

Converting all your sounds of woe

Into Hey, nonny nonny.

Sing no more ditties, sing no mo

Of dumps so dull and heavy.

The fraud of men was ever so,

Since summer first was leavy.

Then sigh not so, but let them go

And be you blithe and bonny,

Converting all your sounds of woe

Into Hey, nonny nonny.


Act II, Sc. I
Beatrice: 
Just, if he send me no husband, for the which blessing I am

at him upon my knees every morning and evening. Lord, I

could not endure a husband with a beard on his face! I had

rather lie in the woollen...

What should I do with him? Dress him in my apparel and

make him my waiting gentlewoman? He that hath a beard

is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than

a man; and he that is more than a youth is not for me, and

he that is less than a man, I am not for him. Therefore I will

even take sixpence in earnest of the bearherd, and lead his

apes into hell...

No, but to the gate, and there will the devil meet me like an

old cuckold with horns on his head, and say, “Get you to

heaven, Beatrice, get you to heaven; here’s no place for you

maids.” So deliver I up my apes and away to Saint Peter. For

the heavens, he shows me where the bachelors sit, and there

live we as merry as the day is long.