Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: How the play is built out of staged scenes, overheard talk and misread sights. "Noting" means observing, eavesdropping and taking note, and the title puns on it: much ado about what people see, and what they make of it.
- Key Characters: Don Pedro, Don John, Benedick, Beatrice, Claudio, Hero, Dogberry and his watch, Borachio, Friar Francis.
- The Core Tension: The same device, a scene staged for a hidden watcher, makes two marriages and breaks one. The play asks whether what we see is ever evidence, and whether a good lie is different from a bad one.
- Key Manifestations: Don John’s lie at the ball (A2S1); the orchard gulling of Benedick (A2S3) and of Beatrice (A3S1); the window, reported not shown (A3S2, A3S3); the watch overhearing Borachio (A3S3); the church (A4S1); the friar’s "noting" and the false death (A4S1); the masked bride (A5S4).
- Famous Quote:
"Why, these are very crotchets that he speaks;
Note, notes, forsooth, and nothing."
(Act 2, Scene 3) - The Outcome: Every deception is undone by another: Hero’s death is faked, the villains are overheard, the lovers are shown their own handwriting. Messina learns very little and marries anyway.
Didst Thou Note the Daughter?
The word is in the play’s first scene, before any plot has begun. Claudio has seen Hero and wants a second opinion; Benedick gives him a lesson in the difference between two kinds of looking.
Original
CLAUDIO: Benedick, didst thou note the daughter of Signior Leonato?
BENEDICK: I noted her not; but I looked on her.
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
CLAUDIO: Benedick, did you notice the daughter of Signior Leonato?
BENEDICK: I saw her, but saw nothing notable about her.
To note is to observe, to mark, to take in. Benedick looked and did not note, which is his way of saying he was not interested, and it is also the play’s first warning: most of the people in Messina look, and almost nobody notes. Editors have long pointed out that "nothing" and "noting" could sound the same in Shakespeare’s London, so that the title can be heard as Much Ado About Noting, a play about watching and listening and getting it wrong.
The pun is made aloud in the orchard, when Don Pedro asks Balthasar to sing and Balthasar protests that none of his notes are worth the noting: "Note, notes, forsooth, and nothing." A song about men who were deceivers ever follows, with Benedick hidden in the arbour to be deceived. The theme of wit and communication and the theme of deception are the same theme in this play, seen from different sides.
The Only Love-Gods
The play’s first full-scale deception is a kind one. Don Pedro has a week to fill before Claudio’s wedding and proposes to spend it making Beatrice and Benedick fall in love, by letting each overhear that the other is dying for them. He calls it one of Hercules’ labours. Hero, who will run the second half of it, describes the method in a couplet.
Original
Of this matter
Is little Cupid's crafty arrow made,
That only wounds by hearsay.
(Hero, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
That’s how
Cupid creates the arrows that he fires,
That start the rumourmongering.
Cupid’s arrow, in Messina, is made of gossip. Benedick hides in the arbour and hears Leonato, Claudio and the prince discuss Beatrice’s secret passion; Beatrice hides in the honeysuckle and hears Hero and Ursula agree that she is too proud ever to be told. Both believe what they hear. Both are told, in the process, something true about themselves, that they are proud, and both decide to mend. The lie produces the truth, and the conspirators congratulate themselves: "we are the only love-gods".
What makes the trick work is who is telling it. Benedick cannot believe that knavery would hide itself in Leonato’s white beard; Beatrice cannot believe that gentle Hero would slander her. Authority is the bait. The theme of love and romance in this play is helped into existence by people with the rank to be believed, and the play will shortly show the same rank believing something false.
Such Seeming Truth
The malicious deception uses exactly the same tools, and the play makes sure we notice. Borachio’s plan is to put Margaret at Hero’s window, call her Hero, and bring the prince and Claudio to watch from the orchard. He describes the effect before it happens.
Original
there shall appear such seeming truth
of Hero's disloyalty that jealousy shall be called
assurance and all the preparation overthrown.
(Borachio, Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
and it will look so convincingly true
that Hero has been disloyal, and their jealousy will
thus assure that all the wedding preparations are cancelled.
"Jealousy shall be called assurance": suspicion will be mistaken for proof. That is the whole of the trick, and it depends on the watchers wanting to see what they are shown. Don John prepares them with a sentence that turns their honour into a snare, telling them that if they dare not trust what they see they must not claim to know anything. They go, and they see a woman at a window in the dark, and they hear a name.
Shakespeare never shows us the window. We get Borachio’s account of it afterwards, under a penthouse in the rain, with the watch listening. The audience is kept from being deceived so that it can watch Claudio being deceived, and judge him. The theme of honour and shame supplies the motive: the prince and the count are not fools, but their honour has been engaged, and engaged honour does not look twice.
By Noting of the Lady
Two kinds of people in Messina note rather than look, and neither has any rank. The first is Friar Francis, who watches Hero’s face through the accusation and reaches the opposite conclusion from the men shouting at her.
Original
By noting of the lady I have marked
A thousand blushing apparitions
To start into her face, a thousand innocent shames
In angel whiteness beat away those blushes...
(Friar Francis, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
So I could watch the lady, and I’ve seen
Her start to blush a thousand times or more,
But shame, arising out of innocence,
Has fought the blushes with angelic whiteness...
Claudio read the blush as guilt; the friar, noting the same blush, sees innocent shame. His plan to report Hero dead is itself a deception, "die to live", and it is the one that saves the play, because it gives the truth time to arrive. The truth is already in custody. The second noters are Dogberry’s watchmen, sitting on a church bench under orders to do nothing, who have overheard Borachio boast of the whole business.
Original
Call up the right master constable. We have here recovered the most dangerous piece of lechery that ever was known in the commonwealth.
(Second Watchman, Act 3, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Call for the master constable, Dogberry. We have recovered – I mean ‘discovered’ – the most dangerous plot of lechery – I mean ‘treachery’ – that this country has ever known.
"Lechery" for treachery: the watchman cannot even name what he has heard, and it does not matter, because he heard it. Borachio will say in Act 5 that what the wisdom of princes could not discover, these shallow fools brought to light. The theme of status and class is at its sharpest here. Messina’s gentry deceive and are deceived with great sophistication; the people who simply listen are the watch, the friar and a sexton with an inkhorn.
"the drollery, however, lies in the very symmetry of the deception."
— August Wilhelm Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, 1808
Key Quotes on Deception and Noting
Quote 1
Sure my brother is amorous on Hero and hath withdrawn her father to break with him about it.
(Don John, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
My brother has definitely fallen in love with Hero and has taken her father aside to ask if he can marry her.
Quote Analysis: Don John at the ball, watching the prince take Leonato aside. It is the first time in the play anyone states a false belief with confidence, and it is a mistake rather than a lie: Don John thinks his brother is wooing for himself. He turns the mistake into a lie a moment later, telling Claudio, under the pretence of mistaking him for Benedick, that the prince loves Hero. The villain’s method is set from the start. He does not invent; he misreads, and passes the misreading on to someone who wants to believe it.
I should think this a gull, but that the white-bearded fellow speaks it: knavery cannot, sure, hide himself in such reverence.
(Benedick, Act 2, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I would have thought this a trick, were it not that the white-bearded man is saying it: deception surely can’t be disguised within such a respectable old man.
Quote Analysis: Benedick in the arbour, reasoning his way into the trap. A gull is a hoax, and he suspects one, and dismisses the suspicion because Leonato is old and respectable. The line is the play’s clearest statement of how deception works in Messina: it is not the story that persuades but the standing of the teller. The prince and Claudio will shortly believe Don John on the same principle, that a prince’s brother would not lie about such a thing, and the play lets us hear the symmetry.
LEONATO: Are these things spoken, or do I but dream?
DON JOHN: Sir, they are spoken, and these things are true.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
LEONATO: What, am I really hearing this, or dreaming?
DON JOHN: You’re hearing this, my lord, and it’s all true.
Quote Analysis: Leonato’s bewilderment in the church, and Don John’s reply. "Spoken" is the right word: the whole accusation rests on what three men say they saw, and the play has arranged that nobody on stage saw anything clearly. Don John’s "these things are true" is the only time he lies outright in the scene, and it is enough. Leonato believes him within a line, and spends the rest of the scene wishing his daughter dead. In a play about noting, this is the moment when speaking replaces seeing entirely.
A miracle! Here's our own hands against our hearts.
(Benedick, Act 5, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
A miracle! Our own handwriting damns our hearts.
Quote Analysis: Benedick in the last scene, when Claudio and Hero produce the two stolen sonnets. He and Beatrice have just denied, in front of everyone, that they love each other, and their own handwriting contradicts them. It is the play’s last deception undone, and the gentlest: the lovers are caught by the evidence of their own hands, which is better evidence than anyone had against Hero. "Against our hearts" is a joke, since the hands prove what the hearts feel, and Benedick, for once, does not argue.
Key Takeaways
- Noting and Nothing: The title puns on watching and listening; the play is about what people see, overhear and make of it, and almost nobody in Messina notes carefully.
- Two Gullings, One Method: The prince's benign trick on Benedick and Beatrice and Don John's malicious trick on Claudio use the same staged scene and the same hidden watcher.
- Rank Is the Bait: Each deception works because of who tells it: a white-bearded governor, a prince's brother; the standing of the speaker replaces evidence.
- The Noters Are Low: The friar who reads Hero's face and the watch who overhear Borachio are the people with no rank, and they undo what the princes believed.
Study Questions and Analysis
What does "noting" mean, and how does it connect to the title?
To note, in the play’s English, is to observe, to mark, to pay attention, and the word runs through the text: Claudio asks whether Benedick noted Hero, Balthasar jokes about notes and noting, the friar reaches his verdict "by noting of the lady". Editors have long observed that "nothing" and "noting" could be pronounced alike in Shakespeare’s day, so that the title carries a second meaning: a great fuss about watching, and about what watching gets wrong. The first scene sets up the distinction, with Benedick on one side of it.
I can see yet without spectacles and I see no such matter...
(Benedick, Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I can still see without glasses, but she doesn’t look like that to me...
He can see, and he sees nothing special in Hero; Claudio looks at the same woman and sees a jewel. Neither is noting. Both are looking with a mind already made up, and the play will go on to show that this is how everyone in Messina looks, at windows, at blushes, at masked faces.
August Wilhelm Schlegel, lecturing in 1808, saw that the play’s comedy lay in its structure: "the drollery, however, lies in the very symmetry of the deception", with two sets of watchers shown two staged scenes. Carol Cook, in her 1986 essay in PMLA, took the idea further and made it a matter of power: "To read others in this play is an act of aggression; to be read is to be emasculated." Noting, for Cook, is what the men of Messina do to women and to each other, and being noted is the danger. The two readings fit together. The play is a comedy of misreading, and the misreadings are not innocent; they fall on whoever has least power to answer them. The theme of gender and patriarchy is where that lands, since the person most read and least heard is Hero.
How do the gulling scenes mirror Don John’s plot?
Almost exactly, and on purpose. In each case a scene is staged for a hidden watcher; in each case the watcher believes what he or she is shown; in each case the belief changes a marriage. The prince announces the plan for Beatrice in words that could describe the window.
Let there be the same net spread for her; and that must your daughter and her gentlewomen carry.
(Don Pedro, Act 2, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
We need to set the same trap for her; and that is the role of your daughter Hero and her lady-in-waiting.
A net, spread by a prince and carried by Hero and her gentlewomen. Borachio’s net is spread by a prince’s brother and carried by Hero’s gentlewoman Margaret. The prince’s catches two people who were half in love already; Borachio’s catches two men who were half suspicious already. The difference is intention, and the play keeps asking whether intention is enough.
Gail Kern Paster, in her "Modern Perspective" essay for the Folger edition, puts the parallel plainly: "in the double plot of Much Ado About Nothing, the actions to make and to break nuptials employ the same kinds of theatrical means." Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1818) explained why the kind trick needs two victims of the same sort, "the vanity in each being alike": Benedick and Beatrice are caught through pride, which is what makes them believe they were being talked about. Jean E. Howard, in a 1987 essay on theatricality and rank, argued that the play is uneasy about its own method, and that the difference it finally draws between the two plots is one of status: the prince’s theatre is legitimate because he is the prince, and Borachio’s is punished, so that control of staged scenes is returned at the end to the "better sort". That is a hard reading and the text half supports it. The orchard and the window are the same scene with different lighting, and the only question the play asks of a deception is who authorised it. The theme of status and class decides which deceptions count as villainy.
Why are Claudio and Don Pedro so easily deceived?
Because they are offered a sight, not an argument, and because their honour is engaged before they look. Don John does not tell them what happened. He tells them to come and see.
Wonder not till further warrant: go but with me to-night, you shall see her chamber-window entered...
(Don John, Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But don’t be amazed until you have further proof: come with me tonight, and you will see someone enter her bedroom window...
The prince’s first response is that he will not think it. Then Don John tells them that if they dare not trust what they see they cannot confess what they know, and the challenge is to their manhood rather than their judgement. Claudio decides before he has seen anything that if the charge is true he will shame Hero in the congregation; the prince promises to help. By the time they reach the orchard the verdict is written and the window only has to confirm it.
Bertrand Evans, in Shakespeare’s Comedies (1960), gave the play’s method a name, "discrepant awareness": the audience knows more than the characters for most of the play, holding the advantage "during fourteen of the play’s seventeen scenes", and so we watch the prince and Claudio walk into the trap knowing it is a trap. The Folger editors Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine list what the trap catches hold of, "Claudio’s own weak jealousy, Don Pedro’s touchy sense of his own honor, and Leonato’s too credulous paternal fury". Don John supplies almost nothing. Paster adds the cultural reason the lie is so easy to believe: "anxiety about sexual betrayal in marriage seems endemic in Messina", and every cuckold joke in the first two acts has prepared the men to expect a faithless woman. They do not need to be deceived. They need only to be shown something that fits. The theme of honour and shame is what makes a man see guilt in a blush.
Why does Shakespeare keep the window scene offstage?
So that the audience cannot be fooled with Claudio, and must judge him instead. We hear about the window twice, both times from Borachio, and the first account is a boast made in the street to Conrade, with the watch listening.
I tell this tale vilely: – I should first tell thee how the prince, Claudio and my master, planted and placed and possessed by my master Don John, saw afar off in the orchard this amiable encounter.
(Borachio, Act 3, Scene 3)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But I’m telling you this tale badly. I should first tell you how the prince, Claudio, and my master, – the former two manipulated and convinced by master Don John – saw this romantic encounter from across the orchard.
He is telling it badly, he admits, and starts again: the prince, Claudio and Don John "saw afar off in the orchard this amiable encounter". Afar off, in the dark, with Margaret in Hero’s clothes and Don John vouching for what they were looking at. Borachio lists the causes of their belief in order, the oaths, the dark, and chiefly his own villainy, and the list is the play’s diagnosis of how a sight becomes a certainty.
Bertrand Evans (1960) treated the omission as the key to the play’s management of knowledge. We have known about the plan since Borachio proposed it, so a staged window would add nothing to our information and would risk making the deception look either convincing, which would excuse Claudio, or absurd, which would make him a fool. Reported, it leaves the fault where the play wants it, in the watchers. Jean E. Howard (1987) read the offstage window as the play’s one unauthorised performance, staged by a bastard and his hireling with a servant for an actress, and noted that it is the only piece of theatre in the play the audience is not allowed to attend. There is a third effect. Because we never see Margaret at the window, we never learn what she thought she was doing, and the play can clear her at the end without having to show us she was innocent. The theme of gender and patriarchy is served by the same silence: two women are judged on a scene nobody saw.
What is the difference between the friar’s noting and the men’s looking?
Attention, and the willingness to be wrong. Friar Francis stands through the whole accusation without speaking, and when he does speak he offers his observation as evidence and stakes his reputation on it.
Call me a fool;
Trust not my reading nor my observations,
Which with experimental seal doth warrant
The tenor of my book; trust not my age,
My reverence, calling, nor divinity,
If this sweet lady lie not guiltless here
Under some biting error.
(Friar Francis, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Call me foolish;
Don’t trust my observations or conclusions,
Which through my vast experience assures
My authenticity; don’t trust my age,
My standing, my vocation, nor my faith,
If this sweet lady is indeed found guilty
Of doing something wrong.
He has watched her blush and seen the blush answered by "angel whiteness"; he has seen a fire in her eye that burns the error. He does not claim to know what happened at the window. He claims to have noted a face, and to be experienced in faces, and he puts his age, his calling and his divinity behind the reading. Nobody else in the church has looked at Hero at all. They have looked at each other, at their honour, and at a memory of the dark.
Carol Cook (1986) read the whole play as a contest over the reading of women, and the friar is the one man in it who reads carefully; his method is the opposite of Claudio’s "I will write against it", which decides what the sign means before examining it. William Hazlitt (1817) noticed that Hero’s own appeals in the scene "are made with the most affecting simplicity", and simplicity is exactly what the friar notes and the men cannot see. It is worth adding that the friar’s remedy is itself a deception, the report of Hero’s death, and that he justifies it in a speech about how we value what we have lost. The play does not oppose truth to deception; it opposes careful noting to careless looking, and allows a good deception to be the work of a careful noter. Paster observes that the actions "to make and to break nuptials employ the same kinds of theatrical means", and the friar’s false funeral is the last and kindest of them. The theme of love and romance is restored by a priest’s lie.
How is the deception finally exposed?
By people nobody was listening to. The watch arrest Borachio and Conrade on the night of the window; Dogberry tries to tell Leonato the next morning and is sent away as tedious; the examination in the prison is a shambles until the sexton takes it in hand.
Master constable, you go not the way to examine: you must call forth the watch that are their accusers.
(Sexton, Act 4, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Master constable, this is not the right way to interrogate them: you have to call the watchmen who accuse them to the court.
The sexton calls the watchmen, hears their evidence, puts together Don John’s flight and Hero’s reported death, and carries the written examination to Leonato. Borachio confesses in full to the prince in the street, before the examination even arrives, because the watch have already caught him and he has given up. Dogberry contributes the charges, numbered secondarily, sixth and lastly, and a request that it be remembered he is an ass.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1818) objected that any "less ingeniously absurd watchmen and night-constables would have answered the mere necessities of the action", and A. C. Swinburne (1880) answered that "if Dogberry had been other than Dogberry, or if Verges had been other than Verges, the action and catastrophe of the whole play could never have taken place at all": a competent constable would have stopped the wedding, and the play needs the wedding to fail. Both are right about different things. The plot requires the watch to be slow; the theme requires them to be right. Borachio says it to the prince’s face, that what your wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light, and the play lets the line stand as its verdict on Messina’s noting. The theme of status and class has no plainer statement: the truth was available all along to anyone who would listen to a constable.
Is the ending itself another deception?
Yes, and the play is open about it. Hero returns to Claudio masked, as her own cousin, given away by her uncle under a false name, and Claudio swears to marry her before he has seen her face. The friar promises to explain afterwards.
All this amazement can I qualify:
When after that the holy rites are ended,
I'll tell you largely of fair Hero's death:
Meantime let wonder seem familiar...
(Friar Francis, Act 5, Scene 4)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I can explain away all these surprises:
When we’ve concluded with the marriage service,
I’ll tell you how we faked fair Hero’s death.
But, meanwhile, let these wonders all seem normal...
"Let wonder seem familiar": accept the trick for now and ask later. It is the comedy’s instruction to its audience as well as its characters, and it comes from the man who devised the false death. Then Benedick and Beatrice are caught by their stolen sonnets, and the dancing begins.
Gail Kern Paster reads the masks as a warning: "the final entrance of the bridal party, with not just the reborn Hero but all the women wearing masks, suggests that the old cultural categories that produce suspicion and slander remain largely untouched". Nobody in Messina has learned to note; they have only been shown a happier sight. Carol Cook (1986) said the same of the ending as a whole, that the comic conclusion "leaves unresolved crucial conflicts that the play has generated", and that Hero "remains dead in her resurrection, as she is reappropriated to the mode of perception that killed her". The gentler reading is Schlegel’s, that the symmetry of the deceptions is the play’s joke and its design, and that a comedy which began with a lie about love may fairly end with a trick that restores it. What the text supports is that the last deception is run by the friar and Leonato, not by Don John, and that this, in Messina, is the difference between villainy and a wedding. The theme of courtship and marriage is completed by one more staged scene, and the audience is asked to let wonder seem familiar.
