MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

Summary

The only edition of this comedy known before the folio 1623, is a quarto printed in 1600, entitled :— “Much adoe about Nothing, as it hath been sundrie times publikely acted by the right honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. Written by William Shakespeare. London Printed by V. S. for Andrew Wise and William Aspley, 1600.” It is supposed originally to have been acted under the title of “Benedick and Beatrix,” and, from being unnoticed by Meres, to have been written not earlier than 1598.

The serious incidents of his plot, some writers conjecture, Shakespeare derived from the story of Ariodante and Geneura, in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, which, in 1582-3, was made the subject of dramatic representation, and played before Queen Elizabeth by “Mulcaster's children,” that is, the children of St. Paul's school, and of which an English translation by Sir John Harrington, Elizabeth's “merry poet,” and godson, was published in 1591. Others, with more probability, believe the source from whence he took them was some now extinct version of Bandello's twenty-second novel, “Como il S. Timbreo di Cardona, essendo col Re Piero d'Aragona in Messina, s'innamora, di Fenicia Leonata: e i varii fortunevoli accidenti, che avvennero prima che per moglie la prendesse.” In Bandello's story the scene, like that of the comedy, is laid at Messina; the name of the slandered lady's father is the same, Lionato, or Leonato; and the friend of her lover is Don Piero, or Pedro.