Write With Me: Much Ado about Agency

Adapting a classic for modern conventions

When a CP challenged me to follow through with my teasing idea to write an adult contemporary retelling of Much Ado about Nothing, I was super excited. It’s a classic story, and Beatrice/Benedick is one of my favorite classic ships.

Then I started going through my prewriting rituals. Turns out, something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Wait. Wrong Shakespeare.

But nonetheless, there was something amiss as I set to answer modern prewriting questions (ones we’ll get into more as the month progresses). My main problem was this:

Beatrice is (to me) clearly the protagonist of Much Ado. Beatrice does not have any agency.

Even if I were wrong, and Hero were the, well, hero, her agency extends only so far as playing a trick on her sister. She has no agency in her own subplot, and that lack of agency is kind of the point Shakespeare makes about women’s roles at the time.

Updating this play was going to be trickier than I thought.

But there are levels of retellings.

Much Ado has about 22,000 words. Modern adult contemporary novels have between 75,000 and 110,000. Even taking into consideration stage directions and other narrative devices that aren’t present in the book of a staged production, I have room to, well, play.

So I figured I could take the story of Much Ado about Nothing and use it as scaffolding. Rather than being the whole of my story, in which no women have any agency whatsoever and the whole of the climax depends on a character’s virginity being wrongfully brought into question, I could take the general framework and expand on it.

My Hero can still start a rumor about Benedick loving Beatrice. There can still be issues where Hero gets in trouble because she was framed for something. But my Beatrice needs her own story, too, a character arc, a want, a need — a lesson to learn that only my Benedick can teach her.

I’m still working out the details, but I know Beatrice is going to be flailing in the aftermath of rejecting a proposal from her long-time boyfriend, and her want, at first, will be to find a new relationship. Her sister will complicate this by first moving in and then implying my Benedick is in love with her. From there, I hope to keep following with modern Western storytelling conventions. Basically, I’ll be asking myself one question over and over again:

What choices can Beatrice personally make that bring about the events in the plot?

Maybe Beatrice leaves the computer unlocked where eventually her sister is hacked and my Claudio thinks the worst of her because of it. Maybe she chooses not to speak up, when her knowledge would have cleared the air. Maybe she chooses to keep changing herself for Tinder dates instead of seeing that she’s her best self around Benedick.

At any rate, my goal isn’t to remake this story beat for beat, and seeing that is a helpful step in my planning process. Instead, I hope to provide commentary on Much Ado about Nothing via the story I do tell — and the ways I choose to tell it differently.

Have you written a retelling before? How loosely did you keep to the framework? What agency are you bringing to the characters in your story now?

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