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Much Ado About Nothing: Context & Background
Context Profile – At a Glance
- Date Written: Probably 1598 or 1599. It is missing from Francis Meres’s list of Shakespeare’s plays in 1598, was entered in the Stationers' Register in August 1600, and was printed that year in a quarto whose title page says it had been "sundrie times publikely acted" by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.
- Genre: Comedy – one of the mature comedies written at the turn of the century, with As You Like It and Twelfth Night, and the most prose-heavy of them. Printed among the comedies in the First Folio of 1623.
- Primary Source: The Hero and Claudio story is an old one. Shakespeare’s nearest source is the twenty-second novella of Matteo Bandello (1554), set in Messina, which he may have read in Belleforest’s French; behind it lies the tale of Ariodante and Ginevra in the fifth canto of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, in Sir John Harington’s English of 1591, where a maid impersonates her mistress at a window. Beatrice, Benedick and Dogberry have no source at all.
- The Clown Who Left: The 1600 quarto prints the names of the company’s clowns, Will Kemp and Richard Cowley, in place of Dogberry and Verges in the examination scene. Kemp left the Lord Chamberlain’s Men during 1599, which helps to date the play and tells us who the constable was written for.
- Honour and the Marriage Market: An Elizabethan gentleman’s daughter was married by arrangement, carried a dowry, and was valued by her reputation for chastity; a slander against it could end a match and a life. The play’s cuckold jokes and its church scene are two faces of the same anxiety.
- Messina under Aragon: Sicily was ruled by the crown of Aragon from the thirteenth century; Bandello’s prince is a king of Aragon in Messina, and Shakespeare keeps the Spanish prince, the Italian governor and the soldiers home from an unnamed war.
Date, Text and the Clown Who Left
Nobody can date Much Ado About Nothing to a month, but the window is narrow. Francis Meres, surveying English writers in his Palladis Tamia of 1598, listed six Shakespeare comedies and this is not among them, so it was probably not yet on the stage; a note on a flyleaf of the Stationers' Register, dated 4 August 1600, lists "The commedie of muche A doo about nothing" with As You Like It, Henry V and Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour as books "to be staied", that is, held back from the press; and on 23 August 1600 Andrew Wise and William Aspley entered it for printing, "Wrytten by Mr Shakespere", the first time his name appears in the Register. The quarto came out that year and is the only edition before the 1623 Folio. It is a good text, printed from something close to Shakespeare’s own papers, and it has one famous slip: in the examination scene, the speech prefixes for Dogberry and Verges give way to "Kemp" and "Cowley", the names of the actors who played them.
That slip is the play’s best dating evidence and its best casting note. Will Kemp was the company’s star clown, the Dogberry of the first production, and he left the Lord Chamberlain’s Men during 1599; so the play was most likely written in 1598 or early 1599, with the part built around a particular comedian’s way of being wrong. The Folio adds a second ghost, substituting the name of the singer Jack Wilson for Balthasar in a stage direction. A play this close to its first cast is unusual, and it fits the writing: Dogberry's malapropisms and his "O that I had been writ down an ass" read like material shaped to a performer, and the play’s prose, seven lines in ten, is actor’s prose, built for timing rather than for the page.
Exam tip: Use the textual facts to make a point about the play, not to decorate an introduction. The Kemp prefixes are evidence that Shakespeare was writing Dogberry for a known clown, which supports an argument that the watch scenes are built around performance rather than plot; the 1599 date puts the play beside Henry V and Julius Caesar, which is worth a sentence if your essay is about the soldiers coming home from a war.
Sources: Bandello, Ariosto and the Couple Shakespeare Invented
The slandered bride is one of the most travelled stories in Renaissance Europe. Shakespeare’s closest source is Matteo Bandello’s twenty-second novella, published in 1554 and available in French in Belleforest’s Histoires tragiques: in Messina, after a war, a knight called Timbreo falls in love with Fenicia, daughter of Lionato, and is tricked by a rival into watching a servant climb to her window at night; he rejects her, she is given out as dead, the truth comes out, and he marries her in the person of a supposed cousin. Shakespeare kept the city, the war, the father’s name, the window, the false death and the veiled second wedding. Behind Bandello stands the fifth canto of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, where the villain persuades a maid to appear at her mistress’s window dressed as her, which is the detail Shakespeare needed for Margaret; Harington’s translation of 1591 had made it available in English, and Spenser had retold the same episode in Book II of The Faerie Queene in 1590. The story of a woman slandered by a staged sight was, in other words, a familiar one, and an audience would have known from the first mention of Don John's "I had rather be a canker in a hedge" roughly where it was going.
What they could not have known was the other half of the play. Beatrice and Benedick have no source; nor does Dogberry; nor does the prince’s plot to make two enemies of marriage fall in love by letting them overhear. Shakespeare took an Italian tale about honour and a window and built, beside it, an English comedy of talk, and the invented half has outlived the borrowed one. King Charles I, annotating his copy of the Second Folio, wrote "Bennedik & Betrice" beside the play’s title in the contents list, and a court payment of 1613 records the play performed under the name "Benedicte and Betteris". The source plot gave Shakespeare his crisis; his own invention gave him the people the audience came back for, and the way the two halves meet, in the church, when the invented couple have to deal with the borrowed catastrophe, is the play’s real design.
Exam tip: Treat the sources as choices. Shakespeare had a tragic tale in front of him and kept its mechanism while adding a constable to catch the villains and a second couple to carry the comedy; an essay that asks why he made those additions, and what they do to the Hero plot, is arguing about the play, while one that merely lists Bandello and Ariosto is reciting a footnote.
Messina, Aragon and the Soldiers' Return
The play opens with a letter: "Don Pedro of Aragon" is coming to Messina from a war, and Leonato asks how many gentlemen were lost, to be told "But few of any sort, and none of name". The setting is precise and the war is not. Sicily had been ruled by the crown of Aragon since the thirteenth century, and Bandello’s story is set in the aftermath of a real campaign; Shakespeare keeps the Spanish prince, the Italian governor and the mixed company of officers, Claudio from Florence and Benedick from Padua, and lets the war itself vanish. What matters is that soldiers are coming home to a town with daughters in it. The messenger’s first speech sets the terms: "A victory is twice itself when the achiever brings home" full numbers, and the achievers are about to be billeted on a house with two marriageable women.
An English audience in 1599 had its own soldiers' returns to think about, from Ireland and from the Spanish wars, and its own sense of what a company of officers did with a month of leave. The play’s comedy is the comedy of idle men: Don Pedro fills the week before the wedding by making a match, Don John fills it by breaking one, and Benedick’s conversion to love happens in an orchard because nobody has anything else to do. Messina is a holiday setting in the way Illyria and the Forest of Arden are, a place where rank is on show and work is suspended, and the governor’s house becomes a stage on which the visiting prince arranges everyone’s life. The Spanish names carry a flavour of grandeur and punctilio that the honour plot needs: a prince’s word, once given, cannot be withdrawn, and when Don Pedro says he saw Hero at the window the matter is closed.
Exam tip: Read the setting as a social arrangement rather than a map. An essay on status and class or honour and shame gains from noticing that every man in the play is either a guest or a host, and that the guests outrank the hosts: Leonato gives up his house, his table and his daughter to a prince he cannot refuse, and the catastrophe happens because the prince is believed over the daughter.
Honour, Chastity and the Cuckold's Horns
The play’s two plots are built on one Elizabethan fact: a woman’s worth was her chastity, and it was held for her by men. A gentleman’s daughter was married by arrangement, with her father’s consent and her dowry, and her reputation was the asset being transferred; Claudio's first question about Hero is whether she is her father’s heir, and his wooing is done by the prince, with her father, while she stands by. The accusation in the church is framed in those terms. Claudio gives her back, "Give not this rotten orange to your friend", as a buyer returning spoiled goods, and swears he will not "knit my soul to an approved wanton"; Leonato’s grief is for a possession, "mine and mine I loved", and his first wish is for her death. None of this is exaggerated for the stage. Slander of a woman’s chastity was actionable in the church courts, and a broken betrothal on such grounds was a public ruin.
The other face of the same anxiety is the cuckold’s horns, the play’s running joke from the first scene to the last. Benedick offers to wear them in advance, "pluck off the bull’s horns and set them in my forehead", Don Pedro quotes the proverb of the savage bull bearing the yoke, Beatrice would rather lead apes in hell than marry, and the last joke in the play, before the pipers, is that "there is no staff more reverend than one tipped with horn". A husband could not verify his wife, and the only comic response available was to laugh at the fear in advance. Carol Cook’s 1986 reading of the play turns on this: the men’s privilege depends on being able to read women, and a woman whose seeming cannot be read is a threat to the whole arrangement. The church scene is what the horn jokes have been nervous about all along.
Exam tip: Pair a horn joke with the church scene. The strongest essays on gender and patriarchy or courtship and marriage show that the comedy and the catastrophe come from the same source, male fear of female unchastity, and that the play knows it: Benedick’s bull’s horns in Act 1 and Claudio’s rotten orange in Act 4 are the same anxiety in two registers.
The Stage History: From Garrick's Benedick to the Raj
The play has rarely been off the stage, and it has usually been the lovers' play rather than Hero’s. It was performed at court in 1613 for the wedding celebrations of Princess Elizabeth, apparently twice, once under its own title and once as "Benedicte and Betteris", and Leonard Digges, writing commendatory verses for the 1640 Poems, remembered that audiences only had to see Beatrice and Benedick for the galleries and boxes to fill. In the eighteenth century it was seldom seen until David Garrick brought it back in 1748 and made Benedick one of his signature parts, which he played more than a hundred times and liked to open each season with. The Victorian theatre belonged to Henry Irving and Ellen Terry at the Lyceum, whose production of 1882 ran for 250 nights; Terry’s Beatrice became the standard against which later ones were measured, and George Bernard Shaw, reviewing a rival production in 1898, denied that the lovers were witty at all and said the play survived on its music.
The twentieth century rediscovered the rest of the play. John Gielgud’s Benedick, with Diana Wynyard and then Peggy Ashcroft as Beatrice, held the stage at Stratford and in London in the early 1950s; Franco Zeffirelli gave the National Theatre a Sicilian Messina of fountains and living statues in 1965; and John Barton’s RSC production of 1976 moved the play to India under the British Raj, with Judi Dench and Donald Sinden, a setting Michael Billington called ideal for "a play about the practical jokes of a bored officer class". Kenneth Branagh’s film of 1993, shot in Tuscany with Emma Thompson as Beatrice, Denzel Washington as the prince and Michael Keaton as Dogberry, is how most students now meet the play; Josie Rourke’s 2011 production with David Tennant and Catherine Tate set it on a Mediterranean island in the 1980s, and Joss Whedon shot a black-and-white film in his own house in 2013. Each setting answers the same question: what kind of society makes a prince’s word enough to destroy a bride, and a constable’s truth impossible to hear.
Exam tip: Use the stage history to make an argument about tone. A production that sets the play among bored officers in a colonial station is reading the gulling and the slander as the pastimes of men with nothing to do, which is a critical position; if you cite Barton’s Raj or Branagh’s Tuscany, say what the setting argues, not just that it existed.
Key Takeaways
- A 1599 comedy with its first clown’s name in the text: The quarto’s "Kemp" prefixes date the play and show Dogberry built around a particular performer.
- Half borrowed, half invented: The slandered bride comes from Bandello and Ariosto; Beatrice, Benedick, Dogberry and the gulling are Shakespeare’s own, and the play’s design is the meeting of the two.
- Soldiers on leave in a governor’s house: Messina is a holiday setting in which guests outrank hosts, a prince arranges lives to pass the time, and his word is enough to end a marriage.
- Chastity was property: The church scene and the cuckold jokes are the same Elizabethan anxiety, male dependence on a virtue men could not verify, in tragic and comic registers.
- The lovers' play on stage: From Garrick’s Benedick to Branagh’s Tuscany, productions have been drawn to Beatrice and Benedick, and each setting is a reading of what kind of society Messina is.
Much Ado About Nothing Context – Frequently Asked Questions
When was Much Ado About Nothing written, and when was it first performed?
Between late 1598 and 1599, almost certainly. Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia, entered in September 1598, lists six Shakespeare comedies and omits this one; the Stationers' Register records it on 4 August 1600 among four plays "to be staied" and again on 23 August 1600, when Andrew Wise and William Aspley entered it for printing as "Wrytten by Mr Shakespere"; and the quarto printed that year by Valentine Simmes says it had been acted "sundrie times publikely" by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The inner limit comes from the clown: Will Kemp, whose name stands in for Dogberry’s in the quarto’s examination scene, left the company during 1599.
Some scholars have wondered whether the play is the lost Love’s Labour’s Won that Meres does list, which would push it earlier; but a bookseller’s list of 1603 names Love’s Labour’s Won alongside other plays and not Much Ado, and most editors treat the identification as a minority view. The first recorded performances after the quarto are at court in May 1613, for the celebrations of Princess Elizabeth’s marriage to the Elector Palatine, when the King’s Men were paid for "Much adoe abowte nothinge" and, in a second list the same day, for a play called "Benedicte and Betteris", generally taken to be the same play under the name its audience gave it.
What were Shakespeare’s sources for Much Ado About Nothing?
For the Hero and Claudio plot, Matteo Bandello’s twenty-second novella (1554), probably read in Belleforest’s French translation: it is set in Messina after a war, its heroine Fenicia is the daughter of Lionato, and her suitor Timbreo is tricked by a rival into seeing a man climb to her window, rejects her, mourns her supposed death and marries her unknowingly as a cousin. Behind Bandello is Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, canto 5, the story of Ariodante and Ginevra, in which the villain has a maid impersonate her mistress at the window; this is the detail that gives Shakespeare Margaret, and it reached England in Harington’s translation of 1591 and in Spenser’s retelling in The Faerie Queene (1590).
For Beatrice and Benedick, nothing. The sparring couple, the prince’s scheme to match them, and Dogberry and the watch are Shakespeare’s inventions, and they take up more of the play than the plot he borrowed. The nearest thing to a model is Shakespeare’s own earlier pair, Berowne and Rosaline in Love’s Labour’s Lost; Samuel Taylor Coleridge thought Berowne and Rosaline "evidently the pre-existent state of Benedick and Beatrice". The design of the play is the collision of the two halves: the invented lovers inherit the borrowed catastrophe in the church, and the invented constable resolves it.
Why is the play called Much Ado About Nothing?
Because the catastrophe is about nothing: Hero has done nothing, the window showed nothing, and the whole play is a great fuss over a sight that never happened. That is the plain sense, and the title’s self-deprecation is part of the joke. Editors also note that "nothing" and "noting" were pronounced alike in Shakespeare’s English, and that noting, meaning observing, overhearing and taking note, is what every scene in the play is made of; the prince’s trick and Don John’s both depend on someone hidden noting a scene staged for them. Balthasar makes the pun in the orchard, "Note, notes, forsooth, and nothing", and Claudio’s first question to Benedick is whether he noted the daughter of Signior Leonato.
A third sense, which Elizabethan audiences would have heard, is bawdy: nothing was slang for what a woman has between her legs, so that the title is also much ado about a woman’s chastity, which is exactly what the church scene is. The three senses are not alternatives. The play is a comedy about observation, built on a crisis about a woman’s body, in which the crisis turns out to rest on nothing at all, and the title holds all of that in three words. See the theme guide on deception and noting for how the noting works scene by scene.
How does the play reflect Elizabethan attitudes to marriage and women?
Closely, and without flinching. Marriage among the gentry was an arrangement between men: a father gave his daughter with a dowry, a suitor’s rank and prospects were weighed, and the bride’s part was consent. Hero’s betrothal follows the pattern exactly, the prince wooing for Claudio, Leonato giving her away, Hero saying nothing until told to; Beatrice’s refusal to marry is possible only because she is an orphan niece with no estate to settle. A wife’s chastity was her husband’s honour, and a slander against it could be fought in the church courts and could end a match; Claudio’s public rejection of Hero is the behaviour of a man protecting his own name, and Leonato’s wish for her death is the reaction of a father whose asset has been spoiled.
The play shows all this and also lets a woman answer it. Beatrice’s "Would it not grieve a woman to be" ruled by a piece of valiant dust, and her rage in the church that she cannot be a man and will therefore die a woman with grieving, are the clearest statements in Shakespeare’s comedies of what the arrangement costs. Anna Jameson, in 1832, read Beatrice as a faithful portrait of the fine lady of Shakespeare’s own time; Carol Cook, in 1986, read the whole play as a struggle by its men to keep control of how women are seen, which the ending restores rather than resolves. Both readings are defensible from the text, and an essay can hold them together. See the theme guide on gender and patriarchy.
Who was Will Kemp, and why does his name appear in the play?
Will Kemp was the leading clown of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in the 1590s, famous for jigs and for a dance from London to Norwich he undertook in 1600 and wrote up as Kemps Nine Daies Wonder. In the 1600 quarto of Much Ado, the speech prefixes in the examination scene (Act 4, Scene 2) read "Kemp" and "Cowley" instead of Dogberry and Verges, which can only mean that the printer’s copy was marked with the actors' names, and that Kemp played Dogberry. Samuel Johnson noticed the substitution in 1765, and modern editors agree that the manuscript behind the quarto stood very close to the playhouse.
It matters for two reasons. Kemp left the company during 1599, so the play was written while he was still in it, which fixes the date; and the part was written for him, which tells us how to read it. Dogberry’s long self-inventory in the prison, "I am a wise fellow, and, which is more, an officer", is a clown’s set piece, shaped to a known performer’s way of being ponderous, and the Royal Shakespeare Company states plainly that Kemp is known to have played the part. Whether he was also Shakespeare’s model for the garrulous fool who will not keep to the script, as some have guessed from Hamlet’s advice to the players, is speculation; the quarto prefixes are the evidence, and they are enough.
What is the significance of Messina and the Italian setting?
Messina came with the story: Bandello set his novella there, in the wake of a real war, with a king of Aragon as its prince, and Shakespeare kept the Sicilian port, the Spanish prince and the Italian governor. Sicily had been ruled from Aragon since the thirteenth century, so the arrangement was historical as well as literary. What Shakespeare adds is vagueness about the war and precision about the household: we never learn who was fought, but we know exactly who is host and who is guest, who outranks whom, and that the prince will stay "at the least a month".
For an English audience, Italy was the country of courtly manners, of honour codes, of elaborate intrigue and of sexual suspicion, and Shakespeare used it for all four. The prince’s word closes an argument in a way an English magistrate’s could not; a bastard brother’s grievance is a matter of blood; and the slander of a bride is conducted with full ceremony, in a church, before witnesses. At the same time the watch are entirely English, a parish constable and his neighbours with lanterns, and the play’s comedy comes from the collision of a Mediterranean honour plot with a Warwickshire night watch. Modern productions have made the setting do work of their own, from Barton’s British Raj to Branagh’s Tuscan villa, and each is a reading of what kind of society lets a prince be believed over a daughter. See the theme guide on status and class.