Much Ado about Nothing (Vol. 31) | Ralph Berry (essay date 1971)
Ralph Berry (essay date 1971)
SOURCE: "Much Ado about Nothing: Structure & Texture," in English Studies, Vol. 52, No. 3, June, 1971, pp. 211-23.
[In the essay below, Berry separates the situations in Much Ado about Nothing into three categories—"those arising from practice, from chance, and from the necessities of life "—and assesses how these situations relate to the "exploration of the limits and methods of humanly-acquired knowledge."]
Much Ado About Nothing serves as well as any play tomark the useful limits of analyses confined to imagery. On Much Ado, Clemen has nothing to say; and [Caroline] Spurgeon, whose abstractions of iterative imagery so often initiate fruitful trains of thought, points to the images of swift movement, of sport, and of nature [in her Shakespeare's Imagery, 1935]. Now these observations add up to a perfectly fair critical comment, that the play's atmosphere...
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