In this study, students will work closely with William Shakespeare’s comedy
Much Ado About Nothing. There are two primary goals in this unit: First, to provide students with a close encounter, marked by complete cycles of comprehension and interpretive work, with one of Shakespeare’s most beloved comedies. At the end of the unit, students will know the play, and they will have thought carefully about some of its major issues and themes. Second, they will have an opportunity to think about what happens when a “source text” like Shakespeare’s play is interpreted by, in this case, two filmmakers. To this end, the class’s encounter with the play will begin with the viewing of Joss Whedon’s 2013 sleek and modern adaptation, a film he shot in his own home after he was done shooting his blockbuster superhero movie The Avengers. Whedon’s film will scaffold students’ initial orientation to the play
and prepare the way for the work in the later portions of the study where Whedon’s interpretation is compared with Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 film version of the play.

By the end of the study, students will have had an encounter with one of Shakespeare’s most famous comedies, and they will have engaged in a careful side-by-side consideration of two film adaptations of the original script. They will also have evolved and applied a sophisticated and thorough vocabulary for understanding the choices a director makes when he or she stages or films a retelling of an “open text.”