Much Ado About Nothing

Shakespeare scholars believe that Much Ado About Nothing was most likely written and first performed around 1598 or 1599. This was a period when Shakespeare’s career was beginning to bloom. He was a well-known playwright in London, and his comedies were evolving, becoming more subtle, more sophisticated, and more bittersweet than his early plays. The note of tragedy in this play, for instance, shares some dramatic patterns with Romeo and Juliet, another of Shakespeare’s Italian tales.

Shakespeare probably wrote Much Ado within a few years of writing Romeo and Juliet, and he may have intentionally recycled several ideas in both plays. Such recycling was common in Shakespeare’s time. Because his work is now famous, today’s readers and audiences might imagine Shakespeare as a man of lofty, isolated literary genius. In reality, Shakespeare was a working playwright in a highly collaborative theatrical environment. It was very common for him to co-write plays, to repeat his own successful themes, and to poach ideas from other writers’ work.

Much Ado and Romeo and Juliet, for instance, both appear to draw material from Italian writers. Some of the romance between Beatrice and Benedick is very similar to a story in Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier, a book of stories about Italian Renaissance nobility. What makes Shakespeare’s plays notable lies not in the stories he told, but in the details and themes he developed within those stories, and the language he used to tell them.