Editing Margaret: Theatrical and Filmic Cuts in Much Ado About Nothing

Abstract: Margaret’s minor but pivotal role in Much Ado About Nothing has been endlessly reworked and restaged by modern theater practitioners trying to make sense of her as a character. Rather than arguing for a specific way to present the role, in this article I assert that the impulse to adapt Margaret in modern productions of Much Ado demonstrates the tension between gaps in early modern play-texts and modern realist acting techniques. This tension becomes most palpable in broadcast recordings of these productions where the camera’s cuts can both lessen and accentuate the gaps in character that the production may (or may not) have tried to fill through cuts in/additions to the text. By analyzing the rescripting of Margaret’s role at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2011 (dir. Jeremy Herrin) and the National Theatre (NT) in 2022 (dir. Simon Godwin), I argue that each production’s recording frames the labor of the actor playing her through a filmic grammar of closeups and cuts that foregrounds either her physical labor (the Globe) or her internal, emotional labor (NT). In the case of these two broadcasts of Much Ado , the cameras’ differential treatments of Margaret produce a critical reading that emphasizes the productions’ investment, or lack thereof, in staging female roles through the way they screen them.