Much Ado about Nothing (Vol. 78) | Steven Rose (essay date April 1970)
Steven Rose (essay date April 1970)
SOURCE: Rose, Steven. “Love and Self-Love in Much Ado About Nothing.” Essays in Criticism 20, no. 2 (April 1970): 143-50.
[In the following essay, Rose argues that in Much Ado about Nothing, Shakespeare offered some serious and often somber observations on the nature of love.]
Is Much Ado really ‘about’ nothing? The throw-away title—like that of its immediate successor As You Like It, or the sub-title What You Will to the third of this central group of comedies—is surely more a challenge to the audience to think of a better one than a proclamation of the play's own triviality. Whatever Beatrice, who could see a church by daylight, may prove to symbolise by her realism, she is not a nobody. And Benedick has an equivalent stature.
The plot of Much Ado About Nothing, as has often been pointed out, revolves around ‘hearsay’:
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