SOURCE: “Faith and Fashion in Much Ado about Nothing,” Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 25, 1972, pp. 93-105.

In the following essay, Ormerod examines how the word “fashion” functions as an alias for the word “nothing” in certain instances in the play, and contends that fashion “is the real villain of the play, and that its destructive function is recognised to a greater or lesser extent by many of the play's characters.”

Most critics who have written on the subject of Much Ado about Nothing seem agreed that the play must take its place in Shakespeare's incessant debate about the conflict between appearance and reality, and the difficulties which beset an individual when he attempts to make a right choice, particularly in love, between superficial seeming and inner truth. Few readers, I imagine, would quarrel with the following verdict:

Shakespeare's ideas about love's truth—the imaginative acting of a lover and the...