SOURCE: Myhill, Nova. “Spectatorship in/of Much Ado About Nothing.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 39, no. 2 (spring 1999): 291-311.

In the following essay, Myhill observes that Much Ado about Nothing is centrally concerned with the problems related to knowledge and perception, and argues that the depiction in the play of numerous deceptions highlights Shakespeare's methodology for creating different modes of interpretation.

In the past twenty years, a great deal of criticism has focused on concerns about appearances in the early modern period, particularly in terms of “self-fashioning”;¹ in this article, I want to look at the other side of this issue: the fashioning not of the self but of others through theatrical display. The debate over the stage in early modern England was also a debate over the ways in which audiences perceived and were affected by spectacles. This debate, at its most polemical, led the theater's detractors to...