SOURCE: Slights, Camille Wells. “The Unauthorized Language of Much Ado About Nothing.” In Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealth, pp. 171-89. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Slights asserts that one of the main concerns of Much Ado about Nothing is the social nature of language and its relationship to hierarchical social and political power.

‘and two men ride of a horse, one must ride behind’ 

(III.v.36-7)

In the first scene of Much Ado About Nothing, when Claudio and Don Pedro make fun of Benedick's use of a conventional verbal formula, Benedick retorts: ‘Nay, mock not, mock not. The body of your discourse is sometime guarded with fragments, and the guards are but slightly basted on neither. Ere you flout old ends any further, examine your conscience’ (I.i.285-9). When Benedick accuses his friends of guarding their discourse with fragments that are ‘but slightly basted...