Much Ado About Joss Whedon

Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing makes me feel like giving up. I still believe, believe it or not, that reading or listening to or watching Shakespeare should be an opportunity for us imaginatively to put ourselves back into the 17th century and to see the world, if only for a moment, the way people 400 years ago saw it, in all its savage energy and delight. Of course I know that I have long been fighting a hopeless rearguard action with the progressive-minded, who take just the opposite view of the matter — namely that Shakespeare needs to be purged of anything too redolent of a now-discredited past. That is to say, not only his obscurities but also his Elizabethan political incorrectness must go. So sure are we that he is really just like ourselves under his accidental carapace of old-fashionedness — doubtless adopted in the first place as a disguise to hide his own progressive views — that we feel the need triumphantly to reaffirm it by updating him, both morally and materially. To quarrel with this impulse is as much a critical faux pas as to anathematize (as I also do) cartoon movies. Both can only be the act of a hopeless stick-in-the-mud.