Much Ado About Nothing

William Shakespeare wrote Much Ado About Nothing in 1598-9, during the remarkably productive period in which he also created Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Twelfth Night. The play had been ‘sundry times publicly acted’ by 1600, since when it has been perennially popular.

The drama follows two pairs of lovers as they travel very different but challenging paths to the altar. The story of the younger pair is based – as Shakespeare’s plots so often are – on literary sources. At the time he was writing there were at least seventeen versions of the Hero and Claudio story extant, stretching from fifth century Greek romance to Ariosto’s sixteenth century Italian epic poem Orlando Furioso. Beatrice and Benedick – the older, more combative and today far more famous couple – seem to have been an original creation and the ‘merry war’ between them captured the public imagination.

Although Charles II (1660-1685) praised the play under the title Beatrice and Benedick, the idea of ‘noting’ – thought to have been a homonym for ‘nothing’ in Shakespeare’s time – is key to the plot, indicating gossip, rumour and general eavesdropping, all of which provide the engine for the action. Much Ado, set in Sicily and full of delightful heroines, dancing, feasting and wordplay, is generally regarded as amongst the sunniest of Shakespeare’s canon. Nevertheless, the play is threaded through with male rivalry and insecurity and, as Claire McEachern observes in her introduction to the Arden edition: “The battle of the sexes it portrays, for all its lighthearted wit, risks real consequences and casualties.”

STUDY DETAILS:

• Six meeting virtual study (on Zoom) led by Jane Wymark
• Monday evenings, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK), 22 May – 26 June 2023
• Recommended edition: Much Ado About Nothing, The Arden Shakespeare, edited by Claire McEachern, ISBN 9781472520296
• £180.00 for six meetings