[In the following essay, Jorgensen describes how Shakespeare's use of the word nothing in the title and text of Much Ado about Nothing would have held significant, if sometimes ambiguous, religious and philosophical meanings for Elizabethan audiences.]

It is generally agreed that certain words must have given Shakespeare considerably more pleasure than they give us today. The honesty game in Othello, for example, may now impress us as a cleverness unworthy of the tragic stature of the play. I have elsewhere suggested, however, that Shakespeare was attempting in Othello a serious dramatic use of a popular literary situation in which knaves, with scarcely more disguise than the label honest endlessly repeated, pose successfully as honest men.¹ The word nothing presents an interesting parallel, for not only did its iteration stem from popular genres, but serious writers were using it for purposes other than verbal ingenuity. And there were further similarities. Like honesty, it had developed shadings just closely enough related to one another to prevent easy distinction. In its combination of one covert meaning with several respectable meanings—enough to make its use permissible, but never securely so—Shakespeare must have recognized one of his favorite opportunities. The fate of both words in modern exegesis also promises to be comparable. So enlightening, one fears, has been professorial clarification of the occasional pun on honesty, that many students have left the classroom believing that whenever Shakespeare said “honest” he meant “chaste.” Less likely to emanate from classrooms, but not for that reason the less persuasive, are the results of Thomas Pyles' scholarly study of “Ophelia's ‘Nothing,’” wherein he rescues the word (if not Ophelia) from a moderately respectable oblivion for a distinguished place in the “venereal vernacular of the day.”² Without meaning to sully what Professor Pyles rightly considers the “beautiful clarity” of his findings, I should like to restore some of the larger web of meaning which lay behind Shakespeare's remarkable insistence on the word.

“Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?” asks Lear's Fool.³ The query strikes deeper into the King's impending tragedy than we at first realize. Certainly Lear's confident reply—“Why, no, boy, nothing can be made out of nothing”—would have struck original audiences as seriously, even ironically wrong. In its pagan doctrine it opposed a vital Christian tenet; it contradicted, in several other senses, the highly potential nature of the word and idea as demonstrated elsewhere by Shakespeare and his contemporaries; it had been underlined by a previous dialogue (I.i.89-92) in which, after Lear and Cordelia exchange emphatic nothing's, the King warns her, “Nothing can come of nothing”; and it is ironically echoed by the Fool's later pronouncement upon Lear himself: “Now thou art an O without a figure. I am better than thou art now: I am a fool, thou art nothing” (I.iv.211).

The audience which thus witnessed, in one sense, much growing tragically from nothing, and, in another, kings becoming things of nothing, had been familiarized with the pattern not only by De Contemptu philosophy but by two other well-known bodies of writing. The first consisted of theological treatises affirming the original nothingness surrounding creation and the essential nothingness of all temporal things. The second was part of the literary tradition which produced mock encomia like Erasmus' Praise of Folly. Both shared the purpose of defending the importance of nothingness.

Indeed, out of context it is sometimes hard to distinguish one type from the other. The theological treatises were of course marked by solemnity of purpose, for they were attempting to refute the doctrine which the Church could not allow to stand unrefuted: creation out of matter, with its implicit dualism.⁴ But as the discussion thus far has inadvertently demonstrated, no solemnity of idea could control so treacherous a vocabulary as the subject was fated to contend with. Witness Sir Philip Sidney's attempt to translate with dignity De Mornay's proof from creation ex nihilo that God exists:

It followeth therefore that it is a power from without us which hath brought us out of Not beeing into beeing. … For otherwise, from out of that nothing which we were (If I may so tearme it,) we shoulde never have come to any thing at all. Now betweene nothing and something, (how little so ever that something can bee) there is an infinite space.⁵

And this was the fate of philosophical poets like Sir John Davies, John Davies of Hereford, and Fulke Greville who concentrated upon the second half of the paradox: that temporal life and matter are essentially nothing. Davies of Hereford, for example, in proving the insubstantiality of life, creates little more than jingle of thing's and nothing's:

What! in the World, where all things are so rife,
Is naught but Nothing to the same agreeing?
Which not appeares, nor scarse suppos'd by Seeing!
          And, beeing scarse suppos'd: then it is
          To Nothing next, or Nothing's like to this.(6)

The nonreligious writers gladly availed themselves of the theological argumentation, since it gave valuable support to their encomia; but their special contribution is usually revealed in verbal mazes just a little worse than accidental; for, despite a superficial concern with the ideas involved, their real interest was to make verbally as much as possible out of nothing.

Although there were Italian and Latin antecedents,⁷ the first English tract of this trifling sort was The Prayse of Nothing (1585), doubtfully attributed to Sir Edward Dyer.⁸ This prose treatise not only claims for Nothing the distinction of being the origin and end of everything, but speculates upon how much better most things would be if Nothing had caused or influenced them. This exploitation of the word's ambiguity, especially when it is used as the subject of a sentence, is better illustrated in an anonymous ballad, apparently inspired by the tract and bearing the same title:

Nothing was first, and shall be last, for nothing holds for ever,
And nothing ever yet scap't death, so can't the longest liver:
Nothing's so Immortall, nothing can,
From crosses ever keepe a man,
Nothing can live, when the world is gone, for all shall come to nothing.(9)

William Lisle's poem Nothing for a New-Yeares gift (1603) likewise uses the word, as in its title, in both a positive and negative sense. And in a manner reminiscent of the Queen's premonition in Richard II, Lisle pays tribute to the creative pains that come from meditating the subject:

          Excesse of studie in a traunce denies
My ravisht soule her Angel-winged flight:
          Strugling with Nothing thus my bodie lies
Panting for breath, depriv'd of sences might.
          At length recovered by this pleasant slumber,
          The straunge effects from Nothing, thus I wonder.(10)

Obviously the only limitation upon this type of writing is the patience of the reader, for it is an easy matter to dilute sense with so large a portion of nonsense that the mind refuses to follow. Trusting indeed would be the “Courteous and gentle Reader” who, having survived Nicholas Breton's prefatory address to him, attempts a serious reading of the ensuing discourse upon the various kinds of nothing. Breton's address begins as follows:

Reade no further than you like: … If there be nothing that likes you, my luck is nought: in nothing there can be no great thing, yet something may bee founde, though nothing to any great purpose. Well, there are divers Nothings, which you shall reade further off. … Now, though I will wish you looke for no mervailous, or worthy thing, yet shall you finde something; though in effect (as it were) nothing, yet in conceit a pretie thing to passe away the time withal. Well, if you stande content with this Nothing, it may be ere long, I will send you something, more to your likeing: till when, I wish you nothing but well.¹¹

Here, indeed, is much ado about nothing. The achievement of such writing is well expressed in two concluding lines from the anonymous “A Song made of Nothing”:

Here you see something of nothing is made,
For of the word “nothing” something is said.(12)

To some extent, and especially in his early works, Shakespeare's interest in the word lay in this type of rhetorical chicanery. But just as the nondramatic encomiasts often combined a modicum of sense with the more obvious intent of bewildering iteration, so Shakespeare frequently has an idea within his earliest Nothing jingles. When, in Sonnet 136, he says:

For nothing hold me, so it please thee hold
That nothing me, a something, sweet, to thee,

he is making the challenge equivalent, in terms of love, to the other types of creativity from nothing. A similar challenge is basic to a virtuoso passage in A Midsummer Night's Dream (V.i.77-89). To Philostrate's deprecation of the artisans' play as “nothing, nothing in the world,” and Hippolyta's insistence, “He says they can do nothing in this kind,” Theseus replies, “The kinder we, to give them thanks for nothing.” Again, in Much Ado (IV.i.269), both Beatrice and Benedick, in their exchange of thing's and nothing's, resort to the screen of nonsense for a tentative advancement of a serious meaning:

BENE.
I do love nothing in the world so well as you. Is not that strange?
BEAT.
As strange as the thing I know not. It were as possible for me to say I loved nothing so well as you. But believe me not; and yet I lie not. I confess nothing, nor I deny nothing.

At the same time, they manage a deft indirectness by putting nothing into a syntax where the other person may choose either its negative or its positive meaning. And in still another sense, inaudible let us hope to the speakers if not to the audience, the passage might reward the combined insights of Professors Partridge and Pyles.¹³

Shakespeare, in fact, almost always surpasses other performers in this word game in the number—nearing proportions Empsonian—of satisfactory readings he supplies. It is seldom that one of the word's appearances in a Nothing cluster is without two or more possible interpretations. No fewer than two older meanings, for example, enrich the second nothing in Falstaff's remark about Pistol: “Nay, an 'a do nothing but speak nothing, 'a shall be nothing here” (2 Henry IV, II.iv.207). One meaning was negation in the sense of idleness or lack of import. With this denotation in mind, Alonso reproves Gonzalo who has been talking about his ideal commonwealth (Tempest, II.i.171): “Prithee no more. Thou dost talk nothing to me”—which remark, of course, gets Gonzalo really started on the subject. He had talked of nothing, he declares, to entertain the others, whose lungs are so nimble “that they always use to laugh at nothing,” in which usage nothing may connote not only empty talk but the word itself, as it appeared in the idle entertainment of the popular encomia. In its second meaning, Falstaff's nothing has the same force as naughtiness in its original sense.¹⁴ Christian monism encouraged the explanation of evil as mere negation. So Sir John Davies explains it in Nosce Teipsum:

And then the Soule, being first from nothing brought,
When Gods grace failes her, doth to nothing fall;
And this declining pronenesse unto nought,
Is even that sinne that we are borne withall.(15)

To these denotations and contexts, with their shadings too numerous to describe here, must be added the unrelated meanings made possible by an unusual vulnerability to the pun. Affording a passable rhyme with doting, as in the twentieth sonnet, nothing invited confusion with another fertile word, note. “A Song Made of Nothing” might not suggest a quibble if there were not other examples to prove that the play upon “musical noting” was far from infrequent. Shakespeare's Autolycus uses the word to describe both the vacuity and the technique of a song: “No hearing, no feeling, but my sir's song, and admiring the nothing of it!” (Winter's Tale, IV.iv.623). Stephano looks forward to having his “music for nothing” (Tempest, III.ii.154). More doubtful, and with a primary meaning closer to “absence of sense,” is Laertes' description of Ophelia's singing: “This nothing's more than matter” (Hamlet, IV.v.174)—and here one rules out only with reluctance a punning allusion to the obscenity of the mad ditties.¹⁶ More clearly in a musical context is the climactic appearance of the word in the involved passage on noting from Much Ado (II.iii.55):

PEDRO.
Or if thou wilt hold longer argument,
Do it in notes.
BALTH.
Note this before my notes:
There's not a note of mine that's worth the noting.
PEDRO.
Why, these are very crotchets that he speaks!
Note notes, forsooth, and nothing!

Shakespeare's more thoughtful concern with the traditional Nothing forms may best be approached through the special slant that these apparently gave to his expression of De Contemptu philosophy. Treatises on Nothing commonly divide the subject into such categories as life, time, beauty, and honor. Thus Breton's discourse contains a long monologue proving, by logical steps, that military honor belongs to the type of Nothing called “the nothing durable” (sig. G 2^v):

An other Honour is gotten by valiancie, and that is in the Warre, whereby the Captaine winneth the Armes, that [he and] his posteritie … do honourably beare: yet for all this, well considered, it is nothing, for that it is not certaine: for that in Warres to day is got, that to morrow is lost: to day he gets an Ensigne, that to morrow looseth his owne Armes. … Hee may be accused and attainted, that never did amisse. … Then this Honour, I see likewise is the nothing, that is the nothing durable.

Written, if not printed, well before the penning of Falstaff's disquisition, this monologue may have come to Shakespeare's attention, especially if the “W. S.” who wrote the commendatory verses can be, as Grosart thinks possible, the dramatist.¹⁷ Again, Macbeth's “signifying nothing,” with which he closes his discourse on time and life, may have had a specific ring, now lost, to audiences accustomed to the many formal disquisitions whose equations ended with nothing.

Although in these instances Shakespeare does not, any more than several other writers in the genre, depend upon the emphasis of iteration, there are many serious passages in which he does. Thus, Leontes' protest against believing his jealousy insubstantial is clamorous with the word:

                                                                                                    Is this nothing?
Why, then the world and all that's in't is nothing;
The covering sky is nothing; Bohemia nothing;
My wife is nothing; nor nothing have these nothings,
If this be nothing.

(Winter's Tale, I.ii.292)

But here, since Leontes is distraught, Shakespeare uses for valid purposes of characterization the pointless cleverness of the non-dramatic writers. Furthermore, Leontes' distraction is not only expressed but aggravated by his meditating the idea of nothingness. In like manner the “inward soul” of the rhetorically frantic Queen Isabella trembles with “nothing”:

As, though in thinking on no thought I think,
Makes me with heavy nothing faint and shrink.

(Richard II, II.ii.31)

The Queen's fearful thought of non-being contrasts effectively with her husband's eager acceptance of it. Richard finds a pleasure, typically verbal, in dramatizing the ritual of a king becoming a thing of nothing. He prefaces this aspect of his deposition with “for I must nothing be,” and concludes it: “Make me, that nothing have, with nothing griev'd” (IV.i.201-216). And he privately re-enacts the scene—with the same verbal play—in the episode before his death, where after being “unking'd,” he straightway becomes “nothing.” “But whate'er I be,” he concludes,

Nor I, nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleas'd till he be eas'd
With being nothing.

(V.v.38)

The solacing power of Nothing, as Richard ingeniously interprets it, was a staple of the mock encomia, which likewise rely upon ambiguity by comparing Nothing's harmlessness with the misery occasioned by things. The prose Prayse of Nothing is written so that “we may more apparently perceive the good effects which come of nothing, as of the least, or no enimie of life, by whose societie many evils depart.”¹⁸ It is appropriate that the dying Timon should find no more positive words for the hereafter than the formula of the mock encomia:

                                                                                                                        My long sickness
Of health and living now begins to mend,
And nothing brings me all things.

(Timon of Athens, V.i.189)

Timon's statement, of course, had its obverse side. Nothing, in a positive sense, did produce all things; and its formidableness in the genesis of man's affairs and dreams became for Shakespeare, as for his contemporaries, a fertile obsession. Shakespeare's meditation on this orthodox theme runs through such variations as Romeo's oxymoronic “O anything, of nothing first create” (I.i.184); Mercutio's rhapsody on the origin of dreams; and even, perhaps, whole plays in which the dramatist's virtuosity was demonstrated by the extent to which he could make something of nothing. But possibly the aspect of the subject that most fascinated Shakespeare, judging from his references to it, was its metaphorical application to the poet's craft. According to the psychological authority Laurentius, “the understanding part of the minde receiveth from the imaginative the formes of things naked and voide of substance.”¹⁹ This, the creative shaping of what was trifling, insubstantial, or unknown, seems to have impressed Shakespeare as the real challenge facing the imagination. In his most famous lines on the subject (Midsummer Night's Dream, V.i.14-17), he speaks of imagination bodying forth the forms of things unknown, while the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

Nor is the task of shaping “airy nothing” peculiar to the poet. It is shared by all who imagine. Ophelia's “speech is nothing,”

Yet the unshaped use of it doth move
The hearers to collection.

(Hamlet, IV.v.7-9)

Here it is the hearers who turn the nothing, the nonsense, into shapes. And Shakespeare demanded that his audience generally do the like. The audience's obligation to give the actors thanks for nothing, as proposed by Theseus, is best explained by the playful demands of the mock encomia. But in Henry V Shakespeare challenges the audience more seriously. Let us actors, he asks,

                                                  ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.(20)

Nothing is the material of human dreams. Mercutio, like Gonzalo accused of talking of “nothing,” likewise shapes the word to his own ends:

                                                                      True, I talk of dreams;
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy;
Which is as thin of substance as the air.(21)

Imogen describes her supposed dream as “but a bolt of nothing, shot at nothing, Which the brain makes of fumes” (Cymbeline, IV.ii.300-301). Distempered fantasies are similarly begot. Queen Isabella, fainting from “heavy nothing” (or could it be heavy noting?), is told by Bushy, “'Tis nothing but conceit, my gracious lady.” Her reply, though hysterical and equivocal, is in one of its senses consistent with Shakespeare's other statments:

'Tis nothing less. Conceit is still deriv'd
From some forefather grief. Mine is not so,
For nothing hath begot my something grief,
Or something hath the nothing that I grieve.(22)

One must not, of course try to build Shakespeare's concept of imaginative creation upon the fanciful, and at best figurative, references to Nothing in these passages. At the same time, analogy with the doctrine of divine creation, which was neither fanciful nor figurative, helps explain the remarkable persistence with which the concept of nothingness, and usually the word itself, appears in his statements on poetry and dreams. And it is interesting that Puttenham should use, “reverently” he is careful to add, analogy with the Christian God to justify the Greek notion of the poet as maker (rather than simply imitator). Did not God, “without any travell to his divine imagination,” make “all the world of nought?”²³

But perhaps enough has now been said about Nothing to give point to the title of this paper. Did Shakespeare intend the Nothing in Much Ado to have what was for him a characteristic richness and emphasis? Almost a century ago, Richard Grant White employed his knowledge of Elizabethan English in a bold proposal that the original audience both pronounced and interpreted the title as “Much Ado about Noting”; for noting, or observing and eavesdropping, is found in almost every scene and is indispensable to all the plots.²⁴ Though no successful refutation of White's argument has appeared, its rejection is implicit in an almost perfect editorial silence. Not only do most editors fail even to mention the theory (Hardin Craig is apparently unique in giving it a footnote), but there has been only the most casual of commentary on the title at all.²⁵

Possibly some of the additional evidence needed by White is now before us. He proved that noting yielded a good reading of the play; he could not prove that Shakespeare intended so slight a title to carry weight. With our awareness of the various Nothing discourses, of their challenge to make as much as possible of nothing, of Shakespeare's concept of nothing as the material of imaginings, and of his tendency to underline the word, we can add support to White's theory—though only by correcting his exclusive emphasis on the meaning of “noting.” Writers who ingeniously shaped Nothing into many significances did employ the pun, but their medium demanded the use of other kinds of manipulation. In attempting a dramatic, rather than expository, elaboration, Shakespeare would give the playwright's equivalent of the poet's imaginative shaping. Out of a trifle, a misunderstanding, a fantasy, a mistaken over-hearing, a “naughtiness,” might come the materials for a drama—as happened, less deliberately perhaps, in King Lear.

Besides paying deserved respect to an important word, this theory has the merit of removing from the most troublesome of Shakespeare's happy comedies many of the supposed imperfections in character and motivation. At worst, perhaps, it will move the hearers to collection.

Notes

1. “Honesty in Othello,” SP [Studies in Philology], XLVII (1950), 557-567.

2. MLN [Modern Language Notes], XLIV (1949), 322-323.

3. King Lear I.iv.143. Throughout I have used The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Kittredge (Boston, 1936).

4. For the theological significance of creation ex nihilo, see C. M. Walsh, The Doctrine of Creation (London, 1910).

5. A Worke Concerning the Trewnesse of Christian Religion (1592), p. 4. See Henry Cuffe's ingenious attempt to explain “A making something of nothing” in The Differences of the Ages of Mans Life (1607), pp. 26-29. Christian works on creation typically devote an early section to this vexing matter, as does Sylvester's Bartas. His Devine Weekes (1605) in “The First Day of the First Weeke.”

6. Wittes Pilgrimage, in The Complete Works of John Davies of Hereford, ed. Grosart (Edinburgh, 1878), II, 44. For an attempt to refute the idea that since “god created all things of nothing, therefore shall all things returne againe unto nothing,” see Godfrey Goodman, The Fall of Man (1616), p. 19; also the discussion of this subject in Victor Harris, All Coherence Gone (Chicago, 1949).

7. See Jean Passerat's Nihil (1567), and Francisco Copetta's Capitolo nel quale si lodano le Noncovelle (c. 1548). The genre, still not extinct, persevered only meagerly during the Augustan period. Fielding, in An Essay on Nothing (Complete Works, ed. Henley, London, 1903, XIV, 309), could cite as one who “dared to write on this subject” only “a hardy wit in the reign of Charles II” (doubtless referring to Rochester's “Upon Nothing”).

8. In “The Authorship of The Prayse of Nothing,” The Library, 4th Ser., XII (1932), 322-331, R. M. Sargent proposes Edward Daunce instead of Dyer.

9. The Praise of Nothing (n. d.), STC 20185, second stanza. I have used a microfilm of the British Museum copy.

10. Second stanza, reprinted Fugitive Tracts, Second Series (1875), no pagination.

11. “The Scholler and the Souldiour,” in The Wil of Wit (1597), sig. F4. I have used the unique copy of this edition in the Huntington Library.

12. Roxburghe Collection, 372, 373. Printed in The Roxburghe Ballads (Hertford, 1874), II, 484.

13. Editors have apparently overlooked the parallel between this dialogue and the broadside ballad beginning: “Fain would I have a prettie thing, / to give unto my Ladie: / I name no thing, nor I meane no thing, / but as pretie a thing as may bee” (in Clement Robinson's A Handefull of Pleasant Delites, 1584, ed. Kershaw, London, 1926, pp. 95-97).

14. For other examples of this privative usage of nothing, see Othello, III.iii.432 and IV.i.9.

15. The Poems of Sir John Davies, Reproduced in Facsimile (N.Y., 1941), p. 148. More elaborately De Mornay cites as the cause of evil “the verie nothing it self; that is to wit, that God almightie, to shew us that he hath made all of nothing, hath left a certeine inclination in his Creatures, whereby they tend naturally to nothing, that is to saye, to change and corruption” (p. 23).

16. Nevertheless, a good case for suspecting puns even in situations of tension is made by M. H. Mahood, “The Fatal Cleopatra: Shakespeare and the Pun,” Essays in Criticism, I (1951), 198. And compare Laertes' verbal cleverness on a still more trying occasion (IV.vii.187):

    Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
    And therefore I forbid my tears.

17. See Grosart's edition of Breton's Works (Edinburgh, 1879), I, liv.

18. The Prayse of Nothing (1585; reprinted 1862), p. 17.

19. M. Andreas Laurentius A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight (1599); Shakespeare Assoc. Fac. No. 15, p. 16. For the relationship between the understanding and the imagination, see Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde (1601), pp. 91-96.

20. Henry V Prologue, 17. See Alwin Thaler, “Shakespeare on Style, Imagination, and Poetry,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America], LIII (1938), 1031.

21. Romeo and Juliet, I.iv.96. “Affection,” states Leontes in a wild speech, communicates with dreams and fellows nothing, but may “co-join with something” (Winter's Tale, I.ii.138-143).

22. Richard II, II.ii.32-37.

23. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Smith (Oxford, 1950), II, 3. This analogy, potentially more serious in poetics than can be shown here, is absent from even so sound a study as M. W. Bundy's “‘Invention’ and ‘Imagination’ in the Renaissance,” JEGP [Journal of English and Germanic Philology], XXIX (1930), 535-545.

24. The Works of William Shakespeare (Boston, 1857), III, 226-227.

25. Of the twelve pages devoted by T. M. Parrott to the play in Shakespearean Comedy (N.Y., 1949), none is given to the title. Most editors who do allude to it (Neilson and Hill, O. J. Campbell, and G. B. Harrison) refer to it either as a symptom of genial carelessness or as a clue that all will turn out happily.