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Much Ado About NOTHING: Shakespeare and Mythical Creativity

                                                            As imagination bodies forth

                                    The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

                                    Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

                                    A local habitation and a name.

           

                                                            -A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Imagination, innovation, creation: the miracles of human ingenuity and the drivers of human progress. In the end, humanity’s most miraculous power is its ability to make something of nothing, to use his imagination, intellect and ingenuity to perform a perfect act of creation. No one was more aware of this basic human power than William Shakespeare, whose most constant characters by far are artifice and imagination. Plumbing the depths of his powerful playland, Shakespeare contemplates in his drama the inherent unreality of our human habitations and the ultimate power of our mythical creative faculty. Shakespeare encapsulates this every day miracle in his use of the word nothing, using a simple word to denote many meanings, and, in the end, describing through nothing the entire realm of possibilities that we can explore with imagination. Borges said that Shakespeare embodied everything and nothing, and indeed he did. Shakespeare embodied nothing in its mythical sense, in which humanity can utilize pure creativity to give to “airy nothing A local habitation and a name.”

            At the source of nothing’s power is Shakespeare’s ability to read into it so many different possible meanings that intimate its full mythical sense. Chief among these is the concept of “noting”. This Elizabethan pronunciation of nothing makes heady appearances in Shakespeare’s comedies, especially Much Ado About Nothing, which it can be argued has no other purpose than to comment on the misunderstandings that can arise when our imagination fills in the blanks of “noted” conversations. Much Ado also explores the moral ambivalence of the imagination. In the case of Beatrice and Benedict, noting, nothing and their own imaginations allow their love to spring from less than nothing, open dislike. For Hero, however, artifice and imagination lead to her spiritual death, rebirth only being achieved once the curtains are drawn and the artifice revealed. Nothing, then, in this sense is neither good or evil. It can help us to unveil deeper truth, encourage us to change false perceptions or engender love where it didn’t exist before, but noting and active imagination can also be used as tools to create great evil through the exploitation of jealousy.

            Nowhere is this more sinister side of noting and nothing more apparent than in Othello. The moor of Venice falls prey to specters of his own mind, his downfall arising from his receptive imagination’s cultivation of Iago’s seed of doubt. Othello’s obsession illuminates another dimension of nothing, the importance Elizabethans placed on female chastity. As Hamlet puts it, nothing is also “a fair thought to lie between maiden’s legs” (III.2.114).  The perceived worth of Hero, Desdemona and numerous other Shakespearean heroines rests on this sort of nothingness, the idea that nothing has lied twixt their legs. 

            Shakespeare, however, digs much deeper throughout his works, developing in nothing a meta-myth to guide his creative philosophy. As Shakespeare’s contemporary, Descartes, was questioning the worth of our sense perceptions, Shakespeare was exploring the boundaries of the possible. While Descartes attempted to define and fix the actual in his Meditations, Shakespeare went further, working in his plays with the relation between actuality and possibility. Instead  of smelling “this business with a sense as cold as is a dead man’s nose,” Shakespeare “see’t and feel’t” (The Winters Tale, II.1.152-153). As Prospero’s magic circle divides the island into the dream realm and reality, our world can be divided into what is and what could be or might have been but is not. As Goddard put it, “In this realm are all the deeds that were not done when the other choice was made, all the roads that were not traveled when the other fork was taken, all the life that did not come into existence when its seeds failed to germinate” (Goddard, 272).  For humanity, this nothingness defines our existence, for our existence is nothing without it. The ability to dream, to create, to imagine, defines who we are and how we act. It provides hope for the future, and informs our lives. “Out of something nothing new ever came without the aid of nothing in this high potential sense” (Goddard, 272).

            Nothing in Shakespeare actually takes on a mythical scope, mirroring the most basic miracle, creating something out of nothing. As Borges’ God answered Shakespeare, “I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.” Shakespeare is constantly confronting this creation, reflecting on it through plays within plays, imaginative gambits and deeper philosophical manifestations. Lear’s answer to Cordelia for instance, “nothing will come of nothing,” sets the stage for a demonstration of this basic miracle and meta-myth. As the story progresses, everything comes out of Cordelia’s nothing, her father’s blindness, her virtue, and the dreadful climax of the play. Similarly, Mercutio’s premonitions in Act I of Romeo and Juliet, “begot of nothing but vain fantasy,” prove prophetic by the play’s climax.

            In the end, Shakespeare is arguing for the utter reality of possibility. To Shakespeare, denying the imagination is akin to denying reality. If imagination is meaningless, “why then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing, The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing, My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings if this is nothing” (The Winter’s Tale, I.2.292-295).  The mythical Shakespeare argues that reality can and is shaped by our creative faculty through the base myth and miracle, creation. For, as God proclaimed “let there be light” and there was light, Shakespeare feels that man may be “like a god” in his ability to answer the mythical mystery of how something may come from nothing.  All myths are based on mystery, and this is the most basic mystery of all. Shakespeare’s works demonstrate how man is a mythical being through his most basic and important characteristic, his ability to imagine, to create and to explore the realm of the possible.