Much Ado About Pathos- #Please read the book online.

In Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, several of the play’s main characters are led to take a position contrary to the one they originally held regarding the merits of marriage and the worthiness or lack of worthiness of their romantic partners. Some of the characters actually switch back and forth, assuming one position, now another, and now back to the first regarding the worthiness of their romantic partner. All of this mind-changing comes about by way of rhetoric as the play’s characters constantly bring the pathetic appeal to bear on one another – sometimes with the best of intentions, and sometimes with the worst.

Your assignment is to write an essay on the deployment of pathetic appeals over the course of this play. You will need to analyze these various pathetic appeals closely and in depth, concentrating on the way in which the characters who deploy this appeals seem to use Aristotle’s three guidelines for constructing them. Because you will be examining these appeals in such detail and depth, you will not be able to discuss every scene of emotional manipulation in the play. You will need to choose which ones to include and which ones to skip over. And you will need to specify which ones you’ll include in your thesis statement. Narrowing the scope of your analysis this way will more or less force you go into more depth and detail in your discussion. You may find that you’ve run out of things to say before you’ve developed your essay to the assigned length. I actually hope that you do run into this problem. It will force you to think harder, to look at the scenes you’ve analyzed from more angles, and to come up with some fresh and interesting insights into those scenes of emotionally-charged rhetorical manipulation that you choose to include.