Much Ado About Nothing Mood

1 In a short paragraph of 5 lines explain how the setting of the film (Italy) contributes to the light-hearted mood and tone of the film. State if and how the same mood is noticeable in the play of Shakespeare.

His 1993 film of Much Ado About Nothing is an outstanding adaptation of the play that benefits from his judicious cutting and rearrangement of text, as well as from his casting. He has filmed on location in and around an actual sunny Italian villa of appropriate age and condition, the Villa Vignamaggio in Tuscany. The setting contributes greatly to qualities of timelessness and isolation from the rest of the world, as well as to its visual impact.

The film immediately establishes a lighthearted mood in a new opening scene: First, over a black screen, a voice slowly recites the first verse of the song from Act II, Scene 3, "Sigh no more, ladies." During this recitation, the words of the first verse appear phrase by phrase on the screen. As

He is characterized as valiant, handsome. There might also be some play on the double meanings of “fair”—as beautiful, and as balanced and true. In Claudio’s eyes, Hero is not only no longer “fair,” meaning beautiful (she is “foul”), but she is also no longer “fair,” meaning truthful, but is its opposite, false or dissembling. Both the combination of “fair” and “foul” in the same line and “pure impiety and impious purity” in the following line demonstrate a rhetorical technique Shakespeare is famous for using in his plays: antithesis, or the combining of paradoxical opposites in one line for emphasis. Moments in which characters spout antitheses usually occur at the height of passion. For Claudio to use these particular opposites to describe his frustration with Hero’s seemingly fair exterior and false and foul interior reveals that he is livid with rage and driven to