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Portrait of Much Ado About Nothing

Shakespeare · Comedies

Much Ado About Nothing

c. 1598–99

Comedy — from Bandello's novella of Timbreo and Fenicia, with Ariosto's Ariodante and Ginevra

Soldiers return from a war to the Sicilian household of Leonato, where a young count courts the governor's daughter and two sworn enemies of love are tricked by their friends into falling for one another. A villain's staged deception wrecks the wedding by slandering the bride, and only a bungling night watch, who overhear the plot without understanding it, put matters right. The sparring of Beatrice and Benedick has made it the best loved of the middle comedies.

How to spot them

  • ▸Messina, after a victorious campaign; Don Pedro and his officers are billeted with the governor
  • ▸Two wits who claim to despise love are gulled into it by friends talking loudly in a garden
  • ▸A bride is denounced at the altar and feigns death on a friar's advice
  • ▸A constable whose every word is the wrong one leads the night watch
  • ▸A title that puns on 'noting' — overhearing, eavesdropping, observing

Scenes, characters & lines

'Kill Claudio'

Beatrice's two-word demand of Benedick in the church, after Hero is slandered

'Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, / Men were deceivers ever'

Balthasar's song

'I do love nothing in the world so well as you — is not that strange?'

Benedick's declaration to Beatrice

A constable who says 'comparisons are odorous' and insists on being written down an ass

Dogberry, whose malapropisms nevertheless expose the villainy

Friends talk loudly in an arbour so that the eavesdropper will hear

Don Pedro, Claudio and Leonato gull Benedick; Hero and Ursula gull Beatrice

A bride is slandered when a man woos her maid at a window in her name

Borachio and Margaret, staged by Don John to deceive Claudio

'O, what men dare do! What men may do! What men daily do, not knowing what they do!'

Claudio at the ruined wedding

Key ideas

  • The plot is driven almost entirely by overhearing: the same device that destroys Hero also makes Beatrice and Benedick happy
  • Beatrice's fury at the wedding — that she cannot fight Claudio herself — gives the comedy a real edge of anger about whose word is believed

Quick-fire facts

  • •First printed in quarto in 1600; placed among the comedies in the First Folio
  • •Will Kemp, the company's great clown, is named in the quarto's speech prefixes as the original Dogberry
  • •Berlioz turned the Beatrice and Benedick plot into the opera Béatrice et Bénédict (1862)
  • •Kenneth Branagh's 1993 film, shot in Tuscany, starred Branagh and Emma Thompson
  • •In Elizabethan pronunciation 'nothing' and 'noting' sounded alike, and 'nothing' also carried a bawdy sense
  • •Don John, the play's villain, is the bastard brother of Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon
  • •Charles I wrote 'Benedik and Betrice' beside the title in his copy of the Second Folio
  • •The wronged Hero is restored by the device of a supposed cousin whom Claudio must marry sight unseen

Drill it — 9 cards

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Sources