The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare

• The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare
• About

Much Ado About Nothing

Much Ado About Nothing
Shakespeare's popular comedy of reputation and repartee is not listed among his works by Meres in mid-1598, but must have been written by early 1599, when the comedian Will Kempe, accidentally mentioned in the quarto edition of 1600 as the original Dogberry, left Shakespeare's company. It was probably composed in 1598 and first performed that autumn, a dating confirmed by internal evidence: in rare vocabulary it is closely related to 2 Henry IV and Henry V (1597–8, 1598–9) and the incidence of colloquialisms in its verse places it before As You Like It (1599).

Text

The 1600 quarto was clearly set from Shakespeare's own foul papers. This authorial draft was apparently fairly untidy: as well as sometimes preserving the names of actors Shakespeare had in mind as he wrote (Kempe for Dogberry and Richard Cowley for Verges), the speech prefixes are often inconsistent, while entrances and exits are often omitted,...

[The entire page is 2758 words long]

Oxford University Press Titles

• The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology
• The Oxford Dictionary of Economics
• The Oxford Companion to American Literature
• The Oxford Companion to American Military History
• The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization
• The Oxford Companion to English Literature
• The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales
• The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare
• The Oxford Dictionary of Plays
• The Oxford Dictionary of Art
• Oxford Dictionary of Sociology
• Oxford Dictionary of World History
• Oxford Dictionary of World Mythology