Much Ado About Nothing:
A Verse Translation
ISBN: 0-9752743-3-3
ISBN-13: 978-0-9752743-3-0
160 pages
List price $9.95
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To win her heart, you must do one thing...
This complete, line-by-line Much Ado About Nothing translation makes the language of Shakespeare's play contemporary while preserving the metrical rhythm, complexity, and poetic qualities of the original.
The aim is to capture both sound and sense of Shakespeare's comedy without the need for glosses or notes—to use contemporary language without simplifying or modernizing the play in any other way.
Readers experience this comic exploration of male suspicion and its consequences with the challenge, comprehension, and delight of audiences 400 years ago—the way Shakespeare intended.
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Much Ado About Nothing Translation Excerpt
from Act 4 Scene 1
LEONATO
Why shouldn’t she? When every earthly thing
Cries out her shame? Oh, could she now deny
The story that is printed in her cheeks?
Do not live, Hero. Don’t open up your eyes.
For if I thought you would not quickly die,
And thought your spirit stronger than your shame,
I would, hot on the heels of their rebukes,
Strike at your life. Did I grieve at just one?
Did I find fault in nature’s frugal plan?
With you one is too much! Why even one?
Why were you ever lovely in my eyes?
Why didn’t these benevolent hands take in
A beggar’s infant left outside my gates?
If it were soiled and mired in infamy
I then could say, “No part of it is mine;
This shame has drawn itself from unknown loins.”
But mine that I have loved, and mine I’ve praised,
And mine whom I was proud of; mine so much
That I myself have lost myself to mine,
To one so prized. Why she—Oh, she has fallen
Into a pit of ink, and no vast sea
Has drops enough to wash her clean again,
Nor salt enough to disinfect her foul
And tainted flesh!
BENEDICK
Sir, sir, you must be calm.
For my part, I am wrapped in such amazement,
I don’t know what to say.
"At what point does a stage of a language become so different from the modern one as to make translation necessary? Mr. Richmond is brave enough to assert that, for Shakespeare, that time has come. The French have Moliere, the Russians have Chekhov—and now, we can truly say that we have our Shakespeare.” —John McWhorter, Manhattan Institute
