Study guide
Much Ado About Nothing
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Overview
- Author
- William Shakespeare (1564–1616), then a leading writer for the Lord Chamberlain's Men
- Genre
- Romantic comedy, with a near-tragic slander plot; mostly prose, with verse for the formal and lyrical scenes
- Written
- About 1598–99: absent from Francis Meres's list of 1598, and written before Will Kemp left the company early in 1599
- First printed
- Quarto of 1600; then the First Folio of 1623, set largely from the Quarto
- Setting
- Messina, Sicily, in the house and garden of the governor Leonato, just after a war
- Sources
- Matteo Bandello's novella of Timbreo and Fenicia (1554) and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, canto 5 (1516); the Beatrice–Benedick plot has no known source
- Main characters
- Beatrice, Benedick, Hero, Claudio, Don Pedro, Don John, Leonato, Dogberry
- Structure
- Five acts, seventeen scenes in this edition; two love plots linked by eavesdropping
- Key themes
- Wit and love, noting and misreading, slander and honour, appearance and truth, male friendship
- Title
- 'Nothing' was pronounced much like 'noting', so the title also means a fuss about observing, overhearing and misjudging
Context
Much Ado About Nothing was probably written in 1598 or early 1599. Francis Meres does not name it in his list of Shakespeare's comedies in 1598, and the Quarto of 1600 gives the speech prefixes of the constables in one scene as 'Kemp' and 'Cowley', the actors who first played Dogberry and Verges; Will Kemp left the company early in 1599. The play thus belongs with As You Like It and Twelfth Night to the group of mature comedies written around the opening of the Globe, and it shares with them a witty heroine and a darker undercurrent (Humphreys 1981) (McEachern 2016).
The Hero and Claudio plot comes from a story told many times in sixteenth-century Europe. In Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (canto 5), the maid Dalinda dresses in her mistress Ginevra's clothes to receive her lover Polinesso, who has arranged for Ginevra's suitor Ariodante to watch; English versions included Harington's translation of 1591, Peter Beverley's verse tale of 1566 and an episode in Spenser's Faerie Queene (2.4). Matteo Bandello's novella of Timbreo and Fenicia (1554), available in French in Belleforest's Histoires tragiques, gave Shakespeare the setting in Messina, the Aragonese prince, the father named Lionato, the feigned death and the second wedding (Bullough 1958) (Prouty 1950).
What Shakespeare added is just as important. Beatrice and Benedick, the eavesdropping scenes that bring them together, and Dogberry and his watch have no direct source. Their sparring has been traced to the courtly debates of Castiglione's Book of the Courtier and to the lovers of Shakespeare's own earlier comedies, above all Berowne and Rosaline in Love's Labour's Lost, but the result is new: a love story told in prose, between equals in wit, which steadily overshadows the plot it was meant to accompany (Prouty 1950) (Salingar 1974).
The play is unusually rich in prose, and its world is a small, gossiping household in which everyone is watching someone else. The title's pun on 'nothing' and 'noting' (pronounced alike in Elizabethan English) points to this preoccupation with observation, report and misinterpretation, and 'nothing' was also slang for the female sexual organ, a joke that bears on a plot about a woman's chastity (Jorgensen 1962) (Cook 1986).
From the start the sparring lovers have dominated the play's reception. Leonard Digges in 1640 recorded that crowds came to see Beatrice and Benedick, and King Charles I wrote their names as the play's title in his copy of the Second Folio. The parts became star roles for Garrick, Ellen Terry and Henry Irving, and in the twentieth century for John Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft, Judi Dench and Emma Thompson. Modern criticism has turned back to the Hero plot, asking what the comedy reveals about honour, gender and the community of men (Humphreys 1981) (Cook 1986) (Neely 1985).
Plot overview
Don Pedro, Prince of Arragon, returns from a successful war to the house of Leonato, governor of Messina, with his officers Claudio and Benedick and his bastard brother Don John, with whom he has lately been reconciled. Claudio falls in love with Leonato's daughter Hero, and the Prince woos her for him at a masked dance. Meanwhile Leonato's niece Beatrice and the confirmed bachelor Benedick continue their 'merry war' of insults.
To pass the week before the wedding, the Prince devises a plot to make Beatrice and Benedick fall in love. Benedick is allowed to overhear the men discussing Beatrice's secret passion for him, and Beatrice hears Hero and Ursula describe Benedick's for her; each is converted. At the same time Don John, out of envy, has his follower Borachio court Hero's maid Margaret at Hero's window while the Prince and Claudio watch from a distance.
At the altar Claudio denounces Hero as unchaste, and she faints. On the Friar's advice her family announce that she has died of shame. Beatrice and Benedick confess their love, and Beatrice demands that Benedick kill Claudio. Meanwhile the incompetent constable Dogberry and his watch, who overheard Borachio boasting, bring him before an examination where the truth emerges.
Borachio confesses; Claudio, repentant, mourns at Hero's tomb and agrees to marry a niece of Leonato's whom he has never seen. The veiled bride is Hero herself. Beatrice and Benedick, exposed by the love poems each has secretly written, agree to marry, and the play ends with a dance and news that Don John has been captured.
Scene by scene
Scene 1: Act I, Scene 1: Soldiers come home to Messina
Act I, Scene 1 (the whole scene)
Summary
A messenger tells Leonato, governor of Messina, that Don Pedro, Prince of Arragon, has won his war with few losses and is about to arrive; the young Florentine Claudio has distinguished himself. Leonato's niece Beatrice asks at once, and mockingly, after 'Signior Mountanto', the soldier Benedick. Leonato explains that the two are engaged in a running contest of wit.
The soldiers arrive with Don John, the Prince's bastard brother, newly reconciled to him after a rebellion. Beatrice and Benedick resume their sparring. When the others leave, Claudio confesses to Benedick that he loves Leonato's daughter Hero; Benedick scoffs and swears he will never marry. Don Pedro offers to woo Hero for Claudio at that night's masked revel, disguised as Claudio, and then to win her father's consent.
Analysis
The opening scene sets out the play's two love stories as opposites. Claudio's love is quick, silent and conventional: he asks whether Hero is Leonato's only heir almost as soon as he admits his feeling, and he lets the Prince do his courting. Beatrice and Benedick talk incessantly, and what they say is aggression; yet each is the first thing the other mentions, and Beatrice's hint that Benedick once won her heart 'with false dice' (2.1) suggests a history beneath the jokes (Everett 1961) (Leggatt 1974).
The language of war carries over into peace. A 'merry war' of wit replaces the real one, and the men who return from it bring its codes of honour and male friendship into a household of women. Don John, all but silent here, is a reminder that the war has left unfinished business inside the prince's own family (Krieger 1979).
There is a kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and her; they never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit between them.
Leonato's description gives the relationship its famous name and frames wit as a form of combat.
What! my dear Lady Disdain, are you yet living?
Benedick's first words to Beatrice: the insult is also an admission that he has been thinking of her.
I would I could find in my heart that I had not a hard heart; for, truly, I love none.
Benedick's boast is phrased as a wish, a small crack that the gulling scene will widen.
Here you may see Benedick the married man.
Benedick mocks the proverb of the tamed bull; the phrase returns against him in the last scene.
Scene 2: Act I, Scene 2: A first mistaken report
Act I, Scene 2 (the whole scene)
Summary
Leonato's brother Antonio tells him that a servant overheard the Prince, walking in the orchard, confess that he loves Hero and means to propose to her at the dance. Leonato decides to treat the news as a dream until it proves true, but to warn his daughter so that she can prepare an answer.
Analysis
This tiny scene is the first of many in which a conversation is overheard and misreported. The servant has caught only half of the Prince's plan, and the household is set buzzing with a story that is false. The play's title turns on this activity: in Elizabethan pronunciation 'nothing' sounded close to 'noting', and the action is driven by people who note, observe and eavesdrop, often wrongly (Jorgensen 1962) (Humphreys 1981).
Antonio's report also anticipates the confusion of 2.1, when Claudio is persuaded that the Prince woos for himself. Rumour in Messina is fast, and nobody checks it.
walking in a thick-pleached alley in my orchard, were thus much overheard by a man of mine
The dense hedges of the orchard make it a natural place for eavesdropping; the garden will serve the same purpose in 2.3 and 3.1.
Scene 3: Act I, Scene 3: Don John's discontent
Act I, Scene 3 (the whole scene)
Summary
Don John tells his follower Conrade that he will not hide his melancholy or flatter anyone. Borachio enters with news that he too has overheard the Prince's plan, this time correctly: Don Pedro will woo Hero on Claudio's behalf. Don John, who resents Claudio as the young man who has gained from his own fall, resolves to make trouble.
Analysis
Don John defines himself by refusal. Where the other characters perform roles, he insists on being 'that I am', a phrase that recalls (and perverts) the divine name. His villainy has little motive beyond envy and a bastard's sense of exclusion; critics have compared him unfavourably with Iago, but his flatness may be the point, since the harm he does depends almost entirely on the credulity of others (Rossiter 1961).
The scene repeats the pattern of 1.2 with a second eavesdropper. Borachio hid behind a tapestry in a musty room, so the same conversation has now been noted twice, with opposite accuracy.
I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace;
The canker is the wild dog-rose: Don John prefers to be a weed outside his brother's favour than a cultivated flower within it.
it must not be denied but I am a plain-dealing villain.
He claims honesty for his villainy, a paradox in a play where seeming honest is the commonest deception.
Scene 4: Act II, Scene 1: The masked revel
Act II, Scene 1 (the whole scene)
Summary
Before the dance, Beatrice explains why no husband will suit her, and Leonato and Antonio coach Hero to accept the Prince. At the masked revel couples pair off: Don Pedro courts Hero, Beatrice dances with a masked Benedick and pretends not to know him while calling him 'the Prince's jester', and Don John, pretending to mistake Claudio for Benedick, tells him that the Prince is wooing for himself. Claudio believes it at once.
Benedick, smarting, complains to Don Pedro that Beatrice 'speaks poniards'. The truth comes out: the Prince has won Hero for Claudio and her father's consent. The wedding is set for a week ahead. To pass the time, Don Pedro proposes a 'Hercules' labour': to bring Benedick and Beatrice into 'a mountain of affection' with each other.
Analysis
The masked dance stages the play's central problem in miniature: a mask conceals and reveals at once. Behind his visor Benedick hears what Beatrice really thinks of him, and Claudio, given a false report by a man in a mask, abandons his trust in his friend without a word of inquiry. His soliloquy on friendship's failure in love is fluent and generalising, the speech of a man who prefers a maxim to a question (Mueschke 1967).
Beatrice's wit is at its height, but the scene also lets us glimpse its costs. She refuses a husband in jest, half-declines the Prince's half-serious proposal, and leaves with an apology that she was 'born to speak all mirth and no matter'. Her line about being born under a dancing star has been read as gaiety and as defence (Dusinberre 1975) (Everett 1961).
Speak low, if you speak love.
Don Pedro to Hero, masked: courtship in this play is conducted by proxy and in whispers.
Let every eye negotiate for itself And trust no agent; for beauty is a witch Against whose charms faith melteth into blood.
Claudio's rueful verse on the treachery of friends in love; the lesson he draws is the wrong one.
I was born to speak all mirth and no matter.
Beatrice to the Prince, at once a self-description and a reminder of the play's title.
Scene 5: Act II, Scene 2: Borachio's plot
Act II, Scene 2 (the whole scene)
Summary
Don John learns that the match is made. Borachio proposes a way to break it: Don John will tell the Prince and Claudio that Hero is unchaste and bring them to watch her bedroom window on the night before the wedding. There Borachio will court Margaret, Hero's waiting-woman, who will answer to the name of Hero. Don John promises him a thousand ducats.
Analysis
The plot is built entirely on staged appearances. Borachio does not need to forge evidence; he only needs to arrange a scene that the watchers will interpret as their suspicions predispose them to. Some editors note that Borachio's plan, as he outlines it, has Margaret call him 'Claudio', a detail that makes little sense and has been explained as a slip or a textual problem (Humphreys 1981) (McEachern 2016).
The scene's central irony is that the remedy of 2.1, the Prince's honest wooing by proxy, and the poison of 2.2 depend on the same thing: a performance by one person in the name of another.
hear me call Margaret Hero, hear Margaret term me Claudio;
The instruction that gives editors trouble: why would the lover at the window be called Claudio?
there shall appear such seeming truth of Hero’s disloyalty
'Seeming truth' names the play's main concern, the gap between what appears and what is.
Scene 6: Act II, Scene 3: Benedick is gulled
Act II, Scene 3 (the whole scene)
Summary
Alone in Leonato's orchard, Benedick reflects on how love has turned the plain soldier Claudio into a fop and lists the graces a woman must have before he will marry her. Seeing the Prince, Claudio and Leonato approach, he hides in an arbour. They listen to Balthasar's song 'Sigh no more, ladies', and then, knowing he is listening, discuss how Beatrice is desperately in love with Benedick but will die rather than tell him for fear of his scorn.
Left alone, Benedick concludes that 'this can be no trick'. He resolves to be 'horribly in love' with her and justifies the change: 'the world must be peopled'. Beatrice arrives to call him to dinner, as rudely as ever, and he finds a double meaning of love in every word.
Analysis
The first gulling scene is a piece of theatre within the theatre, with the plotters acting for an audience of one who thinks he is spying on them. Its comedy lies in the speed of Benedick's conversion and in the shamelessness with which he reasons his way to the conclusion he wanted. Barber and Leggatt see the trick as releasing a feeling the 'merry war' had kept down rather than creating one (Barber 1959) (Leggatt 1974).
The scene also plays on the title. Before the song Don Pedro and Balthasar pun on 'notes' and 'nothing', and the song itself, warning that men were 'deceivers ever', comments ironically on the deception under way and on the deception still to come (Jorgensen 1962).
There’s not a note of mine that’s worth the noting.
Balthasar's modesty, which prompts the Prince's pun on notes and 'nothing'.
Men were deceivers ever; One foot in sea, and one on shore, To one thing constant never.
Balthasar's song, a melancholy refrain for a comedy of male credulity and inconstancy.
the world must be peopled.
Benedick's reason for abandoning his vow, delivered with comic solemnity.
This can be no trick
The first words of his soliloquy: the man who prides himself on seeing through everything is perfectly deceived.
Scene 7: Act III, Scene 1: Beatrice is gulled
Act III, Scene 1 (the whole scene)
Summary
Hero sends Margaret to tell Beatrice that she and Ursula are gossiping about her in the orchard. Beatrice creeps into the arbour, and Hero and Ursula, walking within earshot, discuss Benedick's hidden love for Beatrice and Beatrice's pride, which would make her mock him to death. When they leave, Beatrice resolves in a rhymed speech to put away contempt and return Benedick's love.
Analysis
The scene mirrors 2.3 but changes its form. The men's gulling is in prose and full of jokes; the women's is in verse, more lyrical and more severe, and its chief charge is not that Beatrice is loved but that she is proud and incapable of love. Beatrice's reply is a short poem, partly a sonnet in shape, the first verse she speaks in the play (Lewalski 1968) (Humphreys 1981).
Hero, quiet in public, is fluent here, a hint that she has more voice than her role as the obedient daughter allows her. The scene's account of Beatrice also prepares for her fury in 4.1, when scorn turns against the men who scorned Hero (Neely 1985).
Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes,
Hero's portrait of Beatrice, meant to be overheard.
Contempt, farewell! and maiden pride, adieu! No glory lives behind the back of such.
Beatrice's turn: she cares less for being loved than for what people say behind her back.
Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand:
The image is from falconry, picking up Hero's comparison of her to a wild hawk, a 'haggard of the rock'.
Scene 8: Act III, Scene 2: Don John's accusation
Act III, Scene 2 (the whole scene)
Summary
The Prince and Claudio tease Benedick, who has shaved, perfumed himself and complains of toothache, all signs of a man in love. He takes Leonato aside to speak privately. Don John then enters and tells Don Pedro and Claudio that Hero is disloyal; he offers to show them her window that night. Claudio says that if he sees anything, he will shame her at the wedding in the church.
Analysis
The scene swings abruptly from the play's lightest comedy to its darkest turn. The men who mock Benedick for being transformed by love are themselves transformed by a rumour in a few lines, and the speed of their belief is as striking as Benedick's in 2.3. Claudio's response, to plan a public humiliation, shows how much his love depends on Hero's value as a sign of honour (Cook 1986) (Berger 1982).
Don John's reasoning reverses the normal order of evidence: belief comes first and the 'proof' is arranged to confirm it. The epistemology of the play, its interest in how people know what they think they know, is laid bare here (Dawson 1982).
Even she: Leonato’s Hero, your Hero, every man’s Hero.
Don John's slander turns on possession; the repetition empties the name of individual meaning.
If you dare not trust that you see, confess not that you know.
A rule of evidence from the man who is staging what they will see.
Well, everyone can master a grief but he that has it.
Benedick's retort to the jokes about his toothache, a proverb that applies with sharper force later.
Scene 9: Act III, Scene 3: Dogberry and the watch
Act III, Scene 3 (the whole scene)
Summary
Dogberry, the master constable, and his partner Verges give the night watch their orders: arrest vagrants, but if a man will not stand, let him go; avoid thieves, since touching pitch defiles. Left on duty, the watchmen overhear Borachio boasting to Conrade about the night's work and about the folly of fashion. He reveals that Don Pedro and Claudio, watching from the orchard, took Margaret for Hero and that Claudio swore to shame her. The watch arrest both men.
Analysis
Dogberry's malapropisms ('comprehend' for apprehend, 'vagrom' for vagrant) make him the comic opposite of the witty aristocrats, yet his watch, who understand almost nothing, are the only people who hear the truth. The irony is pointed: the play's gentlemen see and misinterpret, while its fools overhear correctly without understanding what they hear (Allen 1973) (Krieger 1979).
Borachio's digression on fashion as a 'deformed thief', which the watch take to be a real criminal called Deformed, is not idle. Fashion is the force that makes people change shape to please others, and Ormerod reads it as the play's figure for the conformity that leads Claudio to discard Hero (Ormerod 1972).
you shall comprehend all vagrom men
Dogberry's order: two malapropisms in five words.
Seest thou not, I say, what a deformed thief this fashion is?
Borachio's satire on fashion, overheard and misconstrued.
partly by the dark night, which did deceive them
Borachio explains why the Prince and Claudio were taken in.
Scene 10: Act III, Scene 4: Dressing the bride
Act III, Scene 4 (the whole scene)
Summary
On the morning of the wedding Hero is being dressed. Margaret chats about gowns and the Duchess of Milan's dress and teases Hero with bawdy jokes. Hero says her heart is heavy. Beatrice arrives with a cold; Margaret prescribes 'Carduus Benedictus', the holy thistle, with a pun on Benedick, and Beatrice, for once, is lost for a reply.
Analysis
The scene places Margaret, who unwittingly played Hero at the window, at the bride's side, a dramatic irony the audience feels while she does not. Hero's heavy heart and Margaret's talk of the 'weight of a man' sharpen the sense that the wedding is going wrong offstage.
Beatrice's uncharacteristic silence shows the effect of 3.1: she is now vulnerable to the jokes she used to make. The bawdy and the fashion-talk also keep in view the material world of dresses, bodies and marriage-beds that Claudio's language about Hero will shortly degrade (McEachern 2016).
God give me joy to wear it! for my heart is exceeding heavy.
Hero's foreboding as she prepares for the church.
Scene 11: Act III, Scene 5: The constable is too tedious
Act III, Scene 5 (the whole scene)
Summary
Dogberry and Verges try to tell Leonato that they have arrested two villains, but they talk at such length and so confusedly that Leonato, hurrying to the wedding, tells them to examine the prisoners themselves and bring him the results.
Analysis
The scene is a hinge. A single clear sentence from Dogberry would prevent the disaster of 4.1, but Leonato, who has no patience with his social inferiors, does not listen. The comedy of verbal incompetence turns into dramatic suspense, since the audience knows what the constable is failing to say (Allen 1973).
Dogberry's pride in his office and his touchiness about dignity also make him a parody of the gentlemen's concern with reputation, honour and 'name' (Krieger 1979).
Comparisons are odorous: palabras, neighbour Verges.
'Odious' becomes 'odorous', and the Spanish 'palabras' (pocas palabras, few words) is said by the most long-winded man in Messina.
Neighbours, you are tedious.
Leonato's impatience; Dogberry takes it as a compliment.
Scene 12: Act IV, Scene 1: The broken wedding
Act IV, Scene 1 (the whole scene)
Summary
At the altar Claudio refuses Hero, hands her back to her father as a 'rotten orange' and, with the Prince and Don John, accuses her of having talked with a man at her window. Hero faints. Leonato, believing the accusers, wishes her dead. The Friar, who has watched her face, is convinced of her innocence and proposes that the family announce her death and wait for the truth to come out; Benedick, suspecting Don John, supports the plan.
Left alone, Benedick and Beatrice declare their love. When he asks what he can do for her, she answers 'Kill Claudio'. He refuses, she rages that she cannot be a man to avenge her cousin, and at last he agrees to challenge his friend.
Analysis
This is the play's tragic centre, and its language changes accordingly. Claudio's speeches are formal, self-righteous and full of the vocabulary of appearances: Hero is a 'sign and semblance', her blush is evidence of guilt. Leonato's readiness to believe the princes over his own daughter shows how completely a woman's honour belongs to the men around her. Feminist readings have made this scene central to the play (Cook 1986) (Neely 1985) (Berger 1982).
The Friar answers Claudio's reading of Hero's face with his own 'noting' of it, which reaches the opposite conclusion. The second half of the scene then transforms the merry war into an alliance. 'Kill Claudio' is often laughed at in the theatre, but it asks Benedick to choose a woman's word over a man's friendship, the choice Claudio failed to make (Everett 1961) (Dusinberre 1975).
Give not this rotten orange to your friend; She’s but the sign and semblance of her honour.
Claudio's public repudiation; the phrase 'sign and semblance' gave Cook's influential essay its title.
Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty.
Claudio reads Hero's body as evidence and gets it wrong.
By noting of the lady: I have mark’d A thousand blushing apparitions
The Friar's counter-reading, explicitly a kind of 'noting'.
O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place.
Beatrice's fury at the limits placed on her sex.
Scene 13: Act IV, Scene 2: The examination
Act IV, Scene 2 (the whole scene)
Summary
Dogberry, Verges and a Sexton examine Borachio and Conrade. The Sexton, the only literate and sensible official present, draws out the watch's evidence, notes that Don John has fled and that Hero is reported dead, and takes the prisoners to Leonato. Conrade calls Dogberry an ass, and Dogberry is outraged that the insult has not been written down.
Analysis
The trial is a farce, and yet it reaches the truth that the princes' hearing in 4.1 missed. Dogberry's legalism and the Sexton's patience together make an image of justice that is absurd but finally effective, set against the noble characters' rush to judgment (Allen 1973).
In the 1600 Quarto the speech prefixes of this scene name the actors Will Kemp and Richard Cowley in place of Dogberry and Verges, evidence that the text was printed from a manuscript close to the company's working copy and a clue to the play's date (Humphreys 1981) (McEachern 2016).
O that he were here to write me down an ass!
Dogberry wants his humiliation officially recorded, the most famous of his self-defeating complaints.
and one that knows the law, go to;
From his indignant list of his own merits.
Scene 14: Act V, Scene 1: Challenges and confession
Act V, Scene 1 (the whole scene)
Summary
Leonato, now persuaded of Hero's innocence, rejects his brother's counsel of patience and, with Antonio, challenges Claudio and the Prince. Benedick then enters and, in earnest, challenges Claudio, who at first thinks he is joking. Dogberry brings in Borachio, who confesses the whole plot. Claudio and Don Pedro are stricken. Leonato demands that Claudio hang an epitaph on Hero's tomb and marry, sight unseen, Antonio's daughter, who he claims is almost a copy of Hero.
Analysis
Leonato's speech on grief rejects the stoic consolations of 'proverbs' that the play's men have used to manage feeling. The scene then tests male friendship: Claudio and the Prince try to banter with Benedick as before, and fail to see that the merry war has changed sides. Benedick's quiet seriousness is the measure of how far he has come since 1.1 (Leggatt 1974).
Borachio's confession states the play's moral irony outright: the 'shallow fools' have discovered what the wise could not. Claudio's acceptance of a substitute bride has troubled many readers, who see it as proof that he still regards a wife as a token in a bargain between men (Cook 1986) (Neely 1985).
Patch grief with proverbs; make misfortune drunk With candle-wasters
Leonato's contempt for consolation; 'candle-wasters' are bookish men who study through the night.
what your wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light
Borachio's confession turns the play's hierarchy of wisdom upside down.
Scene 15: Act V, Scene 2: A lover who cannot rhyme
Act V, Scene 2 (the whole scene)
Summary
Benedick asks Margaret to fetch Beatrice and tries, without success, to write a love song, finding only absurd rhymes for 'lady'. Beatrice comes, and the two talk with mocking tenderness about which of each other's bad parts made them fall in love. Ursula brings news that Hero has been cleared and Don John has fled.
Analysis
The scene shows the merry war continuing inside love rather than ending with it. Benedick's failure as a sonneteer is a joke at the expense of Petrarchan convention, which the play associates with Claudio's kind of love, and his prose wooing is more convincing than any verse (Salingar 1974) (Barber 1959).
The lovers' exchange, which turns on whether either can 'suffer love', keeps their old roles while giving them a new meaning: insult has become a private language of affection.
I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will.
Benedick picks up Beatrice's word and turns it into a confession.
Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably.
A self-description that fits the whole of their courtship.
Scene 16: Act V, Scene 3: At Hero's tomb
Act V, Scene 3 (the whole scene)
Summary
At night Claudio and the Prince visit the monument of Leonato's family. Claudio reads an epitaph declaring that Hero was 'done to death by slanderous tongues', a song is sung to Diana, goddess of chastity, and the mourners vow to repeat the rite each year. Dawn breaks, and they go to the wedding.
Analysis
This brief, formal, ritual scene stands in for the repentance that Claudio never expresses in his own words. Productions differ over whether it should feel moving or perfunctory, and critics divide in the same way over how far it redeems him (Mueschke 1967) (McEachern 2016).
The epitaph also turns slander into fame: the false story that killed Hero's name is replaced by a public monument to her innocence, though the audience knows that the death it commemorates is itself a fiction.
Done to death by slanderous tongues Was the Hero that here lies:
The epitaph's opening lines name the cause of 'death' plainly.
Scene 17: Act V, Scene 4: The masked brides
Act V, Scene 4 (the whole scene)
Summary
The women enter masked. Claudio swears to marry Leonato's niece before he sees her face; she unmasks, and she is Hero. Benedick asks for Beatrice, and each denies loving the other until Claudio and Hero produce love sonnets that each has written in secret. Benedick stops Beatrice's mouth with a kiss, declares that 'man is a giddy thing', and calls for a dance before the weddings. A messenger reports that Don John has been captured; Benedick postpones his punishment until tomorrow.
Analysis
The ending repeats the masked dance of 2.1 with its errors corrected: masks again hide the women, but this time the men must accept what they cannot see. Hero's return reads as a resurrection, a motif Shakespeare develops in the late romances, but her few lines and her quick acceptance of Claudio have left many readers uneasy (Neely 1985) (Friedman 1990).
The kiss that silences Beatrice has been read as romantic triumph and as the play's final reassertion of male control; the line is given to Benedick in most modern editions, including this one, though early texts assign it to Leonato (Friedman 1990) (McEachern 2016). Benedick's last words of advice, that the Prince should marry, and the deferral of Don John's punishment, keep the comic ending deliberately unfinished.
One Hero died defil’d, but I do live, And surely as I live, I am a maid.
Hero distinguishes the slandered Hero from herself.
She died, my lord, but whiles her slander liv’d.
Leonato's riddle explains the fiction of her death.
Peace! I will stop your mouth.
The kiss that ends the merry war, and much modern debate.
for man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion.
Benedick's cheerful defence of having changed his mind.
Characters
Leonato's household
- Beatrice
- Leonato's niece, an orphan with no fortune of her own, the quickest wit in Messina and a declared enemy of marriage. Her mockery of Benedick hides a past attachment and a fear of being made a fool; once persuaded that he loves her, she gives up her pride. Her anger at Hero's treatment and her cry that she wishes she were a man make her one of Shakespeare's most forceful heroines.
- Hero
- Leonato's only daughter, gentle, obedient and mostly silent in company, though lively among women in 3.1 and 3.4. Slandered at her wedding, she is declared dead and returned to life. Her quietness has been read as modesty, as a sign of how little voice she has, and as a challenge for performers.
- Leonato
- Governor of Messina, Hero's father and Beatrice's uncle, a courteous and talkative host. He believes the slander against his daughter at once and wishes her dead, then rages with grief once convinced of her innocence.
- Antonio
- Leonato's elderly brother. He brings the first mistaken report of the Prince's love, urges patience in grief and then challenges Claudio more fiercely than anyone. His supposed daughter is the disguise under which Hero returns.
- Margaret
- Hero's waiting-gentlewoman, witty and bawdy. She is Borachio's lover and unwittingly plays Hero at the window; the play exonerates her as acting 'against her will' without explaining how.
- Ursula
- Another of Hero's gentlewomen, who helps her stage the gulling of Beatrice in the garden.
Don Pedro's company
- Benedick
- A young lord of Padua and a soldier in the Prince's service, famous for his jokes against women and marriage. Gulled into love, he changes with comic speed, but his real transformation comes in 4.1, when he believes Beatrice over his friends and challenges Claudio.
- Claudio
- A young Florentine count who has won honour in the war. He falls for Hero at sight, relies on the Prince to woo her, and believes every report he hears, including Don John's slander. His public humiliation of Hero and his quick recovery make him the play's most troubling lover.
- Don Pedro
- Prince of Arragon, generous, playful and fond of contriving matches. He woos Hero for Claudio and devises the gulling of Beatrice and Benedick, but he is as easily deceived as Claudio. He ends the play the only principal still single.
- Balthasar
- A singer in the Prince's service who sings 'Sigh no more, ladies' during the gulling of Benedick.
Don John's faction
- Don John
- The Prince's bastard brother, a sullen malcontent recently defeated in a rebellion. He plots against Claudio out of envy and spite rather than for any gain, flees when the plot is discovered and is captured at the end.
- Borachio
- Don John's follower, whose name suggests the Spanish for a drunkard. He devises the window plot, boasts of it to Conrade and, once caught, confesses it fully, clearing Margaret.
- Conrade
- Another of Don John's men, who listens to Borachio's account of the plot and is arrested with him. He calls Dogberry an ass.
The watch
- Dogberry
- Master constable of Messina, pompous, kindly and a master of the malapropism. His watch arrests the villains, but his inability to come to the point nearly lets the wedding disaster happen. Written for the clown Will Kemp.
- Verges
- Dogberry's aged partner, the headborough, who echoes and admires his chief.
- The Watch
- Ordinary citizens on night duty, led by George Seacoal. They overhear Borachio's boast, misunderstand much of it, and arrest the right men.
- The Sexton
- The clerk who conducts the examination of Borachio and Conrade and takes the evidence to Leonato.
Others
- Friar Francis
- The priest at the wedding, who reads Hero's innocence in her face and devises the stratagem of her feigned death.
Themes
Noting and nothing
The title's pun points to the play's method. Almost every turn of plot depends on someone noting (watching, overhearing, interpreting) another person: the servant in the orchard, Borachio behind the tapestry, Benedick in the arbour, Beatrice in the bower, Claudio at the window, the watch in the street. Some notings are deliberately staged and produce truth; others are staged and produce lies; the most important true one is made by men who cannot understand it (Jorgensen 1962) (Dawson 1982).
The play thus asks what counts as knowledge. Claudio trusts his eyes and is wrong; the Friar trusts his reading of Hero's face and is right; Benedick trusts Beatrice's word and is right. Faith in a person, not evidence, proves the better guide (Lewalski 1968).
Wit, love and self-protection
Beatrice and Benedick use wit as armour. Their jokes keep others, and each other, at a distance, and the gulling succeeds because it offers each a flattering reason to lower their guard. The comedy of their conversion is that the very pride the plotters attack is what makes them believe the story (Barber 1959) (Leggatt 1974).
Their love does not end the wit but changes its use. In 5.2 and 5.4 they mock each other in a way that has become intimate, and the play suggests that a marriage of equals depends on keeping the conversation going.
Slander, honour and the value of women
Hero's honour is a public possession, valued by her father, her bridegroom and the Prince as a sign of their own reputations. The slander works because the men care more for their honour than for her, and Claudio's language turns her into a commodity, a 'rotten orange' to be returned (Cook 1986) (Berger 1982).
Beatrice's response exposes the limits placed on women: she can see the injustice but cannot act on it except through a man. The play's solution, Benedick's challenge, keeps male violence as the means of justice even as it shows a man choosing a woman's word over his friends' (Neely 1985) (Dusinberre 1975).
Appearance and reality
Masks, disguises, staged conversations and the window scene all make what is seen differ from what is. The play's villains and its benevolent plotters use the same techniques, and Shakespeare invites the audience to notice that deception can bring lovers together as easily as it can tear them apart (Mueschke 1967).
Fashion, the subject of Borachio's strange digression, belongs to the same theme: it changes the outward shape of things to please the crowd, as Claudio's love bends to public opinion (Ormerod 1972).
Male friendship and its limits
The soldiers' bond is the strongest relationship in the first half of the play: Don Pedro woos for Claudio, and the three friends mock Benedick together. Don John's plot works through that solidarity, since the Prince confirms Claudio's suspicion and both act together at the wedding (Krieger 1979).
Benedick's challenge breaks the circle. In choosing Beatrice's side he enters a different kind of loyalty, and the scene in which Claudio and the Prince fail to recognise his seriousness (5.1) marks the end of the men's easy fellowship.
Fools and wisdom
Dogberry and the watch, who constantly misuse words, discover the plot that the clever noblemen fall for. The play's hierarchy of wit is upended, as Borachio himself says, and the comedy suggests that good will and plain persistence matter more than eloquence (Allen 1973).
Yet the fools' folly also nearly costs Hero everything, since Dogberry cannot make Leonato listen in 3.5. Wisdom in the play is less a matter of intelligence than of attention.
Motifs
Eavesdropping
Overhearing structures the whole plot, from the half-heard orchard conversation of 1.2 to the watch's capture of Borachio. Each scene of listening sets up a contrast between accurate hearing and wrong interpretation.
Masks and veils
The masked revel of 2.1 and the veiled brides of 5.4 frame the action. Masks let characters speak frankly, misidentify each other, and in the end ask the men to commit themselves before they see.
Horns and cuckoldry
Jokes about the cuckold's horns run from Benedick's 'savage bull' in 1.1 to the last scene. They express the male fear of female infidelity on which Don John's slander feeds.
Proverbs and maxims
Characters often reach for proverbial wisdom, from Claudio's lines on friendship to Antonio's counsel of patience. Leonato's rejection of those who 'patch grief with proverbs' shows the gap between maxim and experience.
Death and resurrection
Hero's feigned death and return, devised by the Friar, give the comedy a pattern of loss and restoration that Shakespeare would develop in his late romances.
Symbols
The window
Hero's chamber window, where Borachio courts Margaret, stands for the deceptive evidence of the eyes. It returns in Beatrice's scornful 'Talk with a man out at a window!'
The garden and the arbour
Leonato's orchard, with its thick hedges and bowers, is the place of concealment where both lovers are tricked and where the play's benign deceptions are staged.
The rotten orange
Claudio's image for Hero at the altar: fair outside and corrupt within. It sums up the suspicion of appearances that drives him, and perhaps a pun on Seville oranges and jealousy.
The epitaph
The verses hung on Hero's tomb in 5.3 turn slander into public praise and stand for Claudio's ritual penance.
The sonnets
The halting love poems that Beatrice and Benedick write in secret are produced in 5.4 as evidence against their denials: written words finally prove what spoken wit concealed.
Critical debates
The problem of Claudio
Claudio's credulity, his public cruelty to Hero and his ready acceptance of a substitute bride have led many readers to find him unworthy of the happy ending. Some critics defend him as a conventional young lover whose behaviour follows the codes of honour of the play's sources and of its world, and whose rite at the tomb is a sufficient penance (Mueschke 1967) (Prouty 1950).
Others argue that the play deliberately exposes those codes. For Everett and Cook, Claudio's failure is a failure of the masculine, military world that shapes him, and the comedy's resolution is uneasy precisely because nothing in him has visibly changed (Everett 1961) (Cook 1986).
Which is the main plot?
The Hero and Claudio story provides the play's structure and its sources, yet audiences since the 1600s have treated Beatrice and Benedick as its centre. Critics have argued that the subplot was designed to answer the main plot: the witty lovers' slow, mutual knowledge corrects the romantic lovers' quick, conventional attraction (Leggatt 1974) (Salingar 1974).
Barber reads the play in festive terms, with the merry war as a release of feeling through holiday play; Everett calls it an 'unsociable comedy' because its social world is so close to cruelty (Barber 1959) (Everett 1961).
Gender, patriarchy and Beatrice
Feminist criticism has made Hero's treatment central. Cook shows how the play's language of signs makes women's bodies texts for men to read, and Neely sees the broken wedding as part of a pattern of 'broken nuptials' through which Shakespeare explores male anxiety about women (Cook 1986) (Neely 1985).
Beatrice has been claimed as a proto-feminist heroine whose wit challenges masculine authority, and Dusinberre placed her within a Protestant discourse that valued companionate marriage. Others note that her rebellion ends in marriage and a kiss that silences her, so that the play contains the energy it releases (Dusinberre 1975) (Friedman 1990).
Signs, interpretation and knowledge
The pun on noting and nothing has led critics to read the play as a study of how meaning is made and misread. Dawson argues that its comedy turns on signs, words and appearances whose meaning depends on interpretation, and Jorgensen traces the many senses of 'nothing' in the text (Dawson 1982) (Jorgensen 1962).
Lewalski sees a more religious pattern beneath this: the play contrasts reliance on appearances with a faith in persons that is finally vindicated, giving the comedy a Neoplatonic and Christian structure of error and grace (Lewalski 1968).
Dogberry and the social order
Is Dogberry merely a clown's part for Kemp, or does he matter to the play's meaning? Allen argues that he embodies a comic model of authority and of providence, bumbling yet effective, while Krieger reads the play's class structure as one in which the aristocrats' leisure and the constables' labour are sharply divided (Allen 1973) (Krieger 1979).
His malapropisms also parody the nobles' obsession with words and reputation: he too is fierce about being called an ass, and he too wants his honour written down (Ormerod 1972).
Sources and Shakespeare's changes
Comparison with Bandello and Ariosto shows what Shakespeare chose to alter. In Bandello the deceived lover is a rival's dupe, the father's grief is long, and there is no comic subplot; in Ariosto the maid knowingly dresses as her mistress. Prouty argued that Shakespeare made the story more realistic and more social, and Bullough prints the sources for comparison (Prouty 1950) (Bullough 1958).
Critics disagree over whether the borrowed plot sits comfortably with the invented one. Some find the romance conventions of the source stiff beside the new comedy; others argue that the clash between them is the play's point (Salingar 1974) (Humphreys 1981).
Fashion, conformity and the group
Ormerod reads Borachio's speech on fashion as a key to the play: characters adapt their behaviour to what is expected of them, and Claudio's love is a fashion that changes when the group's opinion changes. Berger sees the comedy as a satire of a male community whose sexual and family politics require women to serve as tokens of honour (Ormerod 1972) (Berger 1982).
On these readings Benedick's break with his friends is the play's real moral act, a choice of individual judgment over the pressure of the group (Krieger 1979).
Silence and the ending
Hero says almost nothing in the final scene, and Beatrice is stopped by a kiss. Friedman examines how productions have handled these silences, which can be played as consent, reconciliation or quiet resistance, and argues that the text leaves the choice open (Friedman 1990).
Editors note that the kiss line is given to Leonato in the Quarto and Folio and to Benedick by many modern editors, a textual decision that changes the meaning of the ending (McEachern 2016) (Humphreys 1981).
Key passages
There is a kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and her; they never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit between them.
The phrase that names Beatrice and Benedick's relationship and frames their wit as combat carried over from the real war.
I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in his grace;
The villain's self-portrait: he prefers the wild rose of the hedgerow to the cultivated flower of his brother's favour, choosing exclusion over dependence.
Let every eye negotiate for itself And trust no agent; for beauty is a witch Against whose charms faith melteth into blood.
Believing a false report that the Prince has betrayed him, Claudio draws a general moral. The speech shows his readiness to accept the worst without inquiry.
Men were deceivers ever; One foot in sea, and one on shore, To one thing constant never.
Sung during the gulling of Benedick, the song comments on male inconstancy and foreshadows Claudio's betrayal of Hero.
the world must be peopled.
Benedick's grand justification for abandoning his vow of bachelorhood, a comic rationalisation of a change of heart.
Contempt, farewell! and maiden pride, adieu! No glory lives behind the back of such.
Beatrice's conversion, spoken in rhyming verse after she overhears Hero's account of her pride.
Give not this rotten orange to your friend; She’s but the sign and semblance of her honour.
The public repudiation of Hero, in which she becomes a sign whose outside belies its inside: the language of appearances turned into an instrument of cruelty.
I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.
Her confession of love, moments before she asks Benedick to kill Claudio, marks the turn from merry war to alliance.
O that he were here to write me down an ass!
Dogberry's wounded dignity makes him demand that the insult be recorded, a comic parody of the nobles' concern with reputation.
for man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion.
His last word on his change of mind: inconstancy, the fault of the song in 2.3, becomes a cheerful acceptance of human changeableness.
Questions for study
How does the pun on 'nothing' and 'noting' help to explain the play's structure?
List each scene of overhearing, from 1.2 to 3.3, and ask which produce truth and which produce error.
Compare the gulling of Benedick (2.3) with the gulling of Beatrice (3.1). Why does Shakespeare use prose for one and verse for the other?
Consider what each lover is told about the other, and what each is told about themselves.
Is Claudio a fit husband for Hero by the end of the play?
Weigh his speeches in 4.1 against the rite at the tomb (5.3) and his acceptance of a bride he has not seen (5.4).
What does Beatrice's cry 'O God, that I were a man!' reveal about the position of women in Messina?
Think about who can act on Hero's behalf in 4.1 and 5.1, and how.
Why does Shakespeare allow the foolish watch, rather than any of the noble characters, to uncover Don John's plot?
Compare Borachio's words in 5.1 with Leonato's impatience in 3.5.
How convincing is Don John as a villain? Does the play need him to have a motive?
Look at his self-description in 1.3 and at how much of the damage is done by others' credulity.
How does Shakespeare transform the sources in Bandello and Ariosto?
Consider what is added (Beatrice and Benedick, Dogberry) and what is changed in the window scene and the feigned death.
What is the significance of masks and disguises in 2.1 and 5.4?
Ask what the men must do differently when the women are masked the second time.
Does the final scene silence Beatrice and Hero, or does it give them a voice?
Count their lines, and consider the textual question of who speaks 'Peace! I will stop your mouth.'
How does the play treat male friendship, and what happens to it after 4.1?
Compare the banter of 1.1 and 3.2 with Benedick's challenge to Claudio in 5.1.
Further reading
- Allen, John A. "Dogberry." Shakespeare Quarterly 24 (1973): 35–53.
- Barber, C. L. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959.
- Berger, Harry, Jr. "Against the Sink-a-Pace: Sexual and Family Politics in Much Ado About Nothing." Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982): 302–313.
- Bullough, Geoffrey, ed. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Vol. 2: The Comedies, 1597–1603. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia University Press, 1958.
- Cook, Carol. "'The Sign and Semblance of Her Honor': Reading Gender Difference in Much Ado About Nothing." PMLA 101 (1986): 186–202.
- Dawson, Anthony B. "Much Ado About Signifying." Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 22 (1982): 211–221.
- Dusinberre, Juliet. Shakespeare and the Nature of Women. London: Macmillan, 1975.
- Everett, Barbara. "Much Ado About Nothing." Critical Quarterly 3 (1961): 319–335.
- Friedman, Michael D. "'Hush'd on Purpose to Grace Harmony': Wives and Silence in Much Ado About Nothing." Theatre Journal 42 (1990): 350–363.
- Humphreys, A. R., ed. Much Ado About Nothing. The Arden Shakespeare, Second Series. London: Methuen, 1981.
- Jorgensen, Paul A. Redeeming Shakespeare's Words. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962.
- Krieger, Elliot. "Social Relations and the Social Order in Much Ado About Nothing." Shakespeare Survey 32 (1979): 49–62.
- Leggatt, Alexander. Shakespeare's Comedy of Love. London: Methuen, 1974.
- Lewalski, Barbara K. "Love, Appearance and Reality: Much Ado About Something." Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 8 (1968): 235–251.
- McEachern, Claire, ed. Much Ado About Nothing. The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series. Rev. ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.
- Mueschke, Paul, and Miriam Mueschke. "Illusion and Metamorphosis in Much Ado About Nothing." Shakespeare Quarterly 18 (1967): 53–65.
- Neely, Carol Thomas. Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
- Ormerod, David. "Faith and Fashion in Much Ado About Nothing." Shakespeare Survey 25 (1972): 93–106.
- Prouty, Charles Tyler. The Sources of Much Ado About Nothing: A Critical Study, Together with the Text of Peter Beverley's Ariodanto and Ieneura. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950.
- Rossiter, A. P. Angel with Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures. Ed. Graham Storey. London: Longmans, 1961.
- Salingar, Leo. Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-21.