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In Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, the play's preoccupation with women's chastity is central to the plot. Many critics have dealt at length with the reactions expressed in the comedy to Hero's supposed betrayal of Claudio. Some critics have considered the implication of the remarkable number of cuckold jokes; Michael Mangan notes that the play is more obsessed with this idea than any other of its period (183). But Shakespeare also is concerned in this play with male chastity or fidelity, and while this motif is subtler than that of female fidelity, it nevertheless runs through the whole play and has its most obvious manifestation in the song, "Sigh no more ladies," sung by Balthasar at the very heart of the play before the double gulling scene (2.3.61-76).
The lyrics of the song serve to remind the audience (if at all necessary) that relationships between men and women are fraught with difficulties. They suggest that men and women are very different in their attitudes about love. The song portrays men as inconstant, with one foot in the sea and one on shore, whereas, by implication, women are naturally monogamous. (Beatrice, however, appears to be the inconstant men's equal in believing herself as incapable of fidelity in marriage as they are. God will only send no horns if he sends her no husband, she jokes [2.1.24].) In his 1993 film of the play, Kenneth Branagh makes the song central to his interpretation, privileging it even more than the play does. Virgil Thomson notes, in "Music for Much Ado About Nothing," that Shakespeare's use of music generally takes "no time at all out of the play's dramatic pacing" (qtd. in Stevens 89). Yet Branagh breaks cinematic convention by delaying the start of the action with the song's recital at the beginning and interrupting the narrative in the middle of the film for the song to be heard again. The song performed in the film is longer than it would have been in a typical theatrical production, without the lush scenery to captivate the audience. Branagh obviously thought the lyrics important enough to risk tampering with Shakespeare's magical pacing. He even uses the song's melody as a recurring motif. Branagh then concludes the film with a leisurely pan...