Shakespearean Intelligencing in Much Ado About Nothing

Abstract

This essay aims at uncovering the limited scope of epistemological observation of the early-modern era and alternatively examining the aesthetic dimension of ontological relationality of Shakespearean intelligencing via analyzing the comedy, Much Ado About Nothing. The idea of human perspective as advanced in the Renaissance is not only related to the cognitive experience of the subject but also to the relationality and aesthetic connectivity between the subject and its cognitive object. In the play, Shakespeare deliberately creates cognitive and ontological tensions between his literary creation and the audience in order to provoke interactive communications and thereby comic humor in the theatrical space. While intelligencing exposes characters’ epistemological impulses or their desires to know the truth, their often limited intellectual recognition constantly collides with that of the audience. A character’s desire to know is not simply a part of mimesis or inductive reasoning through sensory or empirical observation, but rather a literary device that Shakespeare uses to construct the intelligencing experience as a part of an ontological system structured within theatrical space. In so doing, Shakespeare illustrates how the theatrical space cognitively mediates aesthetic experience for the audience.