Much Ado About Nothing

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

By WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Preface and Annotations by

HENRY N. HUDSON

Introduction by

CHARLES H. HERFORD

Much Ado About Nothing

By William Shakespeare

Preface and Annotations by Henry N. Hudson

Introduction by Charles H. Herford

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7588-8

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7755-4

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Cover Image: Beatrice overhears Hero and Ursula, a watercolor by John Sutcliffe, c. 1904.

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

ACT I.

SCENE I.

SCENE II.

SCENE III.

ACT II.

SCENE I.

SCENE II.

SCENE III.

ACT III.

SCENE I.

SCENE II.

SCENE III.

SCENE IV.

SCENE V.

ACT IV.

SCENE I.

SCENE II.

ACT V.

SCENE I.

SCENE II.

SCENE III.

SCENE IV.

BIOGRAPHICAL AFTERWORD

Preface

Entered at the Stationers’ in August, 1600, and published in quarto the same year, with the words, As it hath been sundry times publicly acted, in the title-page; which would naturally infer the piece to have been written in 1599. All the internal marks of style bear in favour of the same date; the play being in this respect hardly distinguishable from As You Like It. After the one quarto of 1600. the play is not met with again till it reappeared in the folio of 1623. As the text of the folio differs but in a very few slight particulars from that of the quarto, the probability is that the later was reprinted from the earlier copy. And perhaps none of the Poet’s plays has reached us in a more satisfactory state; the printing being such as to leave little room for doubt as to the true text.

As with many of the author’s plays, the plot and story of Much Ado About Nothing were partly borrowed. But the same matter had been so often borrowed before, and run into so many variations, that we cannot affirm with certainty from what source the Poet directly drew. So much of the story as relates to Hero, Claudio, and Don John, bears a strong resemblance to the tale of Ariodante and Ginevra in the fifth and sixth books of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Still there is little if any likelihood that the Poet took his borrowed matter from that source. A connection between the play and one of Bandello’s novels is much more distinctly traceable from the similarity of names and incidents. In the novel, Fenicia, the daughter of Lionato, a gentleman of Messina, is betrothed to Timbreo de Cardona, a friend of Piero d’Arragona. Girondo, a disappointed lover of the lady, goes to work to prevent the marriage. He insinuates to Timbreo that she is disloyal, and then to make good the charge arranges to have his own hired servant in the dress of a gentleman ascend by a ladder of ropes and enter the house of Lionato at night, Timbreo being placed so as to witness the proceeding. The next morning Timbreo accuses the lady to her father, and rejects the alliance. Fenicia sinks down in a swoon; a dangerous illness follows; and, to prevent the shame of her alleged trespass, Lionato has it given out that she is dead, and a public funeral is held in confirmation of that report. Thereupon Girondo becomes so harrowed with remorse, that he confesses his villany to Timbreo, and they both throw themselves on the mercy of the lady’s family. Timbreo is easily forgiven, and the reconciliation is soon followed by the discovery that the lady is still alive, and by the marriage of the parties.

This brief statement marks the nature and extent of Shakespeare’s obligation to Bandello. The parts of Benedick and Beatrice, of Dogberry and Verges, and of several other persons, are altogether original with him; at least no traces of them have been found in any other book or writing: so that he stands responsible for all the wit and humour, and for nearly all the character, of the play. As no translation of Bandello has been discovered of so early a date as the play, it does not well appear how the Poet could have become acquainted with the novel except in the original. But the Italian was then the most generally studied language in Europe; educated Englishmen were probably quite as apt to be familiar with it as they are with the French in our day; Shakespeare, at the time of writing this play, was thirty-five years old; and we have other indications of his having known enough of Italian to be able to read such a story as Bandello’s in that language. Dyce, however, whose judgment is apt to be right in such cases, remarks on the subject as follows: "There is a French version of Bandello’s tale in the third volume of Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques, &c.: but some English translation of it, which is no longer to be found, was in all probability what Shakespeare used."

HENRY N. HUDSON.

1886.

Introduction

Much Ado About Nothing was entered in the Stationers’ Register, 4th August 1600, and the only Quarto edition appeared in the same year. It is very accurate, and probably authentic; the Folio being reprinted from it with a few omissions and some slight, apparently accidental, variations of no value. Its title runs:

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.

Beyond a list of the players,{1} among whom the famous comedian Kemp figured as Dogberry,{2} nothing is known of these performances; but the play, which is not mentioned by Meres (1598) and is bound by close affinities of temper and style to As You Like It and Twelfth Night, was undoubtedly, in its finished form, a fruit, like these, of the rich years 1599-1600. Like these, too, it contains no definite traces of earlier work. An interesting oversight in i. 1., where Leonato is said to enter accompanied, not only by Hero his daughter and Beatrice his niece, but by ‘Imogen his wife,’ tantalises the imagination with visions of a second Hermione championing a slandered Perdita,{3}—another glimpse of that relationship of mother and daughter, so rarely touched by Shakespeare. But the theory of a ‘revision’ (the cheap panacea in some hands for the slightest discrepancy) is wholly unsupported by criteria of style. The dramatic manner of Much Ado is flexible in the highest degree, but it is not at all composite. The subsequent fortunes of the play were not, for one of the masterpieces of English comedy, eventful. It was one of the six plays of Shakespeare chosen for performance at the wedding festivities of the Princess Elizabeth in 1613, and, except the unmatched ‘Sir John Falstaff’ (as Henry IV. was called) and the new, or recent, Tempest and Winter’s Tale, the only comedy. Up to the closing of the theatres it continued to fascinate high and low.

Let but Beatrice

And Benedicke be seene, loe in a trice

The cockpit, galleries, boxes all are full.

So wrote Leonard Digges in 1640. But after the Restoration its brilliance was already a little out of date, and the play might have gone off the board had it not occurred to Sir W. Davenant to eke out its deficiencies by fusing it with Measure for Measure, the two being ‘believ’d’ (as Langbaine puts it) ‘to have Wit enough in them to make" one good play.’ The result was his The Law against Lovers, witnessed by Pepys in 1661 and published in 1673.

The serious plot of Much Ado is founded on the story of Timbreo and Fenicia, the twenty-second of Bandello’s novels, which Shakespeare perhaps read as paraphrased by Belleforest in his Histoires Tragiques. Timbreo is the victim of a plot similar to that laid against Claudio. But its author is a jealous rival, Girondo, and its agent not a counterfeit presenter of the lady but a servant ‘perfumed’ like a lover, whom he causes to ascend by night to Fenicia’s chamber window before Timbreo’s eyes. Timbreo sends a message to her parents, breaking off the match. Fenicia, overcome with the humiliation, pines away, but, when apparently at the point of death, suddenly revives. Her parents thereupon send her secretly to a distant retreat, giving out that she is in fact dead, and burying an empty coffin with solemn ceremony. Girondo repents, confesses, and begs Timbreo to take his life. Fenicia is restored, and Timbreo recovers his old fiancée under the semblance of a new.

A much superior form of the plot-incident in this fantastic tale was to be found in Ariosto’s story of Ariodante and Genevra (Orl. Fur. c. v.). Here the Duke of Albany, Polynesso, a rejected lover of Genevra, similarly beguiles Ariodante, his successful rival. But instead of the perfumed serving-man, he resorts to an abandoned mistress of his own, Genevra’s maid, inducing her innocently to appear at her lady’s window in her lady’s dress. The sequel diners; Genevra’s imagined guilt is less lightly pardoned, and she is only rescued from death by the timely intervention of the champion Rinaldo.

The story in both forms had long been familiar in England. Even before the appearance of Harington’s translation of the Orlando in 1591, it had been translated in verse by Turbervile and Beverley; and a nameless playwright had produced a (lost) ‘Historie of Ariodante and Genevora,’ which was ‘showed before her Majestie on Shrove Tuesdaie at night, in 1583.’ Spenser also introduced it into the tale of Sir Guyon (F. Q. ii. 4), qualifying it for its place in the allegory of Temperance by a new conclusion in which the deceived lover, an example of headstrong fury, actually slays the innocent Claribella and vainly endeavours to slay her handmaid.

Such a story involved a nearer approach to a tragic action and to tragic pathos than anything in As You Like It or Twelfth Night, Rosalind’s banishment on pain of death is but a shadowy threshold across which she steps blithely into the magic woodlands of Arden. Even the ‘concealment’ which preys on the damask cheek of Viola cannot compare in poignancy with the slanderous outrage which crushes Hero. Yet we are never