Much Ado About Nothing

✍ Scribed by William Shakespeare

• Publisher: Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 367
• Series: The Arden Shakespeare
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Much Ado About Nothing boasts one of Shakespeare's most delightful heroines, most dancing wordplay, and the endearing spectacle of intellectual and social self-importance bested by the desire to love and be loved in return. It offers both the dancing wit of the "merry war" between the sexes, and a sobering vision of the costs of that combat for both men and women. Shakespeare dramatizes a social world in all of its vibrant particulars, in which characters are shaped by the relations between social convention and individual choice.This edition of the play offers in its introduction and commentary an extensive discussion of the materials that informed Shakespeare's compositional choices, both those conventional sources and other contexts, from cuckold jokes to conduct books, which inform the ideas and identities of this play. Particular attention is devoted to Renaissance understandings of gender identity and social rank, as well as to the social valences of Shakespeare's stylistic choices. A treatment of staging possibilities offers illustrations drawn from the earliest and recent theatrical practices, and a critical history examines the fate of the play in the changing trends of academic scholarship. "The text is superb... the critical introduction is predictably smart and engaging, exactly the sort of essay one would recommend to students."Eric Rasmussen, Shakespeare Survey

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
The Editor
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
1 An early modern watchman, with his bill and lantern, from Thomas Dekker's Gull's Hornbook (1609)
2 Title-page of Will Kemp's Nine Days Wonder (1600)
3 A man bearing the servile yoke, punishing stocks and effeminizing skirt of matrimony. From Henry Peacham's Minerva Britannia (1598)
4 The emblem illustrating Vis Amoris, from Henry Peacham's Minerva Britannia (1598)
5 Diana and Actaeon, from Henry Peacham's Minerva Britannia (1598)
6 A seventeenth-century woodcut accompanying the ballad 'A Married Man's Miserie'
7 1.1 (146–53), from a promptbook of a 1904–5 touring American production by E.H. Southern and Julia Marlowe
8 Hero swoons after Claudio's repudiation in the church scene (4.1), the frontispiece to Nicholas Rowe's edition of 1709
9 Hero swoons after Claudio's repudiation in the church scene (4.1), engraving by Jean Pierre Simon of the painting by William Hamilton (1790)
10 Hero swoons after Claudio's repudiation in the church scene (4.1), engraving by Edward Francis Burney (1791)
11 Dogberry and the Watch (4.2), in the 1976 RSC production, directed by John Barton
12 Dogberry addresses the Watch in 3.3, engraving by Henry Meadows (1845)
13 Edward Gordon Craig's preliminary sketch for the church scene (4.1) in his production of 1903–4
14 Ellen Terry as a kinder, gentler Beatrice in Henry Irving's Lyceum production, 1884–5
15 Charles Kemble as Benedick, drawing by J.H. Lynch, published by Engelmann, London (1828)
16 Title-page of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (1615)
17 2.3 in Terry Hands's 1983 RSC production
18 2.3 in John Gielgud's production at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, 1950
19 3.1 in John Barton's 1976 RSC production
20 3.1 in the engraving by James Heath of W. Peters's painting for Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery (1791)
21 Much Ado About Nothing, 1600 Quarto, sigs G3v–4r (4.1.305–4.2.54)
General Editors' Preface
The Text
Commentary and Textual Notes
Introduction
Preface
Introduction
Building a play: sources and contexts
The usual suspects: Ariosto and Bandello
Shakespeare's transformations of his sources: the creation of a social world
The maid
'How many gentlemen?'
The villain
The lover
Beyond the plot
Denouement
Dialogue and debate forms
Sexual stereotypes
Disdain
Modifications of type
Chaste, silent and obedient
Hero
Cuckolds
Structure and style
'The course of true love'
Two plots?
Style
Prose and the prosaic
Euphuism
Verbal handshakes
'The even road of a blank verse'
Image patterns
Songs
Staging Much Ado
Tonal choices
Social representations
Choice of place and time
Cultural moment
Afterlives
Origins
Criticism
Text
First impressions
Making a book
Who's in, who's out
Who gets to say what?
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
List of Roles
The Soldiers
The Household of the Governor of Messina
Townspeople of Messina
Others
Act 1
1
2
3
Act 2
1
2
3
Act 3
1
2
3
4
5
Act 4
1
2
Act 5
1
2
3
4
Appendix: Casting chart
Abbreviations and references
Abbreviations used in notes
Works by and partly by Shakespeare
Editions of Shakespeare collated or referred to
Other works cited
Modern stage, film and television productions cited
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
V
W
Z