SOURCE: Drakakis, John. “Trust and Transgression: The Discursive Practices of Much Ado about Nothing.” In Post-Structuralist Readings of English Poetry, edited by Richard Machin and Christopher Norris, pp. 59-84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

In the following essay, Drakakis presents an interpretation of Much Ado about Nothing informed by post-structuralist theoretical principles.

I

In 1834 Coleridge announced the transformation of Shakespeare from a professional dramatist into an individual consciousness whose plays were the repositories of timeless truths. Hence his assertion that Shakespeare “is of no age—nor, may I add, of any religion, or party, or profession”.¹ With very few adjustments, the myth has proved durable, with those truths resurfacing recently as the “eterne mutabilitie” of the human condition, those “perennial, unhistorical variations of temperament” which comprise the irreducible core of “human nature”.² Coleridge had already laid the foundations for the removal of Shakespeare from history some twenty years earlier...