SOURCE: Deleyto, Celestino. “Men in Leather: Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado about Nothing and Romantic Comedy.” Cinema Journal 36, no. 3 (spring 1997): 91-105.

In the following review, Deleyto studies Branagh's treatment of genre and gender issues in his 1993 film adaptation of Much Ado about Nothing.

Recent writing on romantic comedy has taken the view that the genre has died, been reborn, and reached a peak of popularity in the course of the last fifteen to twenty years. Reacting to Brian Henderson's well-known article on the “agony” of contemporary romantic comedy, Bruce Babington and Peter Evans, for example, affirm the ongoing validity of the genre's basic discourse of celebration of heterosexual love, even while they acknowledge that it has undergone important transformations because it “involves specifics that are in a state of flux in advanced Western cultures.”¹ Referring to comedy in general, Andrew Horton likewise notes the consistent popularity of Hollywood comedies...