SOURCE: Osborne, Laurie E. “Dramatic Play in Much Ado about Nothing: Wedding in the Italian Novella and English Comedy.” Philological Quarterly 69, no. 2 (spring 1990): 167-88.

In the following essay, Osborne analyzes Much Ado about Nothing as an integration of the Italian novella and the English comedy. Osborne asserts that through his linking of these two genres, Shakespeare explored the contradictions within comic conventions and the problems inherent in combining non-comic and non-dramatic materials with comedy.

In Much Ado about Nothing, Shakespeare creates two plots from a single principal source—the slandered maiden tale which Ariosto and Bandello both treat.¹ One plot, the story of Hero, up to the end of the comedy, imitates the action of the original Italian novellas and their interesting villain, while the other, the story of the courtship of Beatrice and Benedick, which is Shakespeare's creation, refashions the main plot and its dramatist manipulator according...