SOURCE: Rose, Steven. “Love and Self-Love in Much Ado About Nothing.” Essays in Criticism 20, no. 2 (April 1970): 143-50.

In the following essay, Rose argues that in Much Ado about Nothing, Shakespeare offered some serious and often somber observations on the nature of love.

Is Much Ado really ‘about’ nothing? The throw-away title—like that of its immediate successor As You Like It, or the sub-title What You Will to the third of this central group of comedies—is surely more a challenge to the audience to think of a better one than a proclamation of the play's own triviality. Whatever Beatrice, who could see a church by daylight, may prove to symbolise by her realism, she is not a nobody. And Benedick has an equivalent stature.

The plot of Much Ado About Nothing, as has often been pointed out, revolves around ‘hearsay’:

                                                                                Of this matter Is little Cupid's crafty...