Much Ado about Nothing Study Guide

Scholars agree that Much Ado about Nothing was written and first performed sometime between late 1598 and 1599, the year the comic actor Will Kemp, who first played the role of Dogberry, left the acting company that first performed the play. An entry in the Stationer's Register, dated August 4, 1600, includes a reference to the play, ordering that it not be published. Critics have offered several explanations for this entry in the Register, with some maintaining that it reflects official censorship or Puritan pressure, and others stating that it was merely an attempt on the part of the Lord Chamberlain's Men (an acting company with which Shakespeare was associated) to prevent a pirated edition of Much Ado from being published.

Evidence indicates that Much Ado enjoyed considerable popularity during Shakespeare's day and throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The earliest available commentary on a performance of the play appeared in 1613, in the accounts of the Treasurer to King James, Lord Stanhope. In a poetic tribute that appeared in a 1640 edition of Shakespeare's plays, Leonard Digges wrote, ". . .

but let Beatrice / and Benedicke be seene, loe in a trice / The Cockpit, Galleries, Boxes, all are full," attesting to the play's popularity. But it was not until late in the seventeenth century and early in the next that true critical assessments first appeared. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, critics identified Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso as one of Much Ado's principal sources and introduced several thematic and technical points-questions regarding how true to life the characters' words and actions are, and examinations of Shakespeare's use of language-that were to become very important in later studies of the comedy. As for Shakespeare's sources for Much Ado, the dramatist borrowed from a story in Matteo Bandello's collection of tales, La prima parte de le novelle (1554), which Shakespeare knew both in Italian and in French. In Much Ado, he tightened the action for dramatic effect, drawing in elements from Ariosto's version of the tale along with some hints from Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590), a major influence upon Elizabethan writers.

Much Ado has been described as a comedy which, despite its surface gaiety and occasional slapstick, is also serious and even profound in its implications. It has also been considered an enjoyable but problematic play. Attempts to assess it have varied, but most commentators have agreed that Much Ado is a comedy of manners, a play which gently pokes fun at the manners and conventions of an aristocratic, highly sophisticated society. True to this form, Much Ado features instances of eavesdropping, the war of the sexes, mistaken identities, misunderstood communications, and a tangle of subplots all ending in the pairing off of marriageable couples, the downfall of a scheming villain, and the happiness of a wedding dance.