SOURCE: Richmond, Hugh M. “Much Ado About Notables.” Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979): 49-63.

In the following essay, Richmond traces the historical precedent for the villainous Don John in Much Ado about Nothing and proposes literary analogues for the play's comic lovers, Beatrice and Benedick.

From Robert Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, with its bitter warnings to his colleagues against upstart plagiarists, down to Geoffrey Bullough's recent encyclopedic account of Shakespeare's sources and analogues,¹ Shakespeare's capacity to build on other men's work has been recognized as intrinsic to his mode of composition as an Elizabethan dramatist. As we shall see, even such a play as Love's Labor's Lost, which lacks literary sources, reflects detailed and systematic exploitation of the lives and personalities of the contemporary French aristocrats whose names recur in the majority of the play's principal characters. Shakespeare's procedure in composition shows Elizabethan “invention” to have been more syncretic than wholly...