SOURCE: King, Walter N. “Much Ado About Something.” Shakespeare Quarterly 15 (1964): 143-55.

In the following essay, King maintains that Much Ado about Nothing is a comedy of manners, and that like other plays of this genre its central theme is the examination of a morally “flabby” aristocratic class that accepts the established social codes without question.

I

What to do with Much Ado About Nothing has bedeviled Shakespearians for longer than one likes to think. And no wonder, when critics dismiss the play, if only by implication, as a charming potboiler, archly comic for the most part, but, in Acts IV and V, oddly tragicomic and melodramatic, and unconvincing.

Reaction against this usually disguised conviction varies, of course. G. B. Harrison shrugs the whole thing off as a diverting entertainment, “but for all that, as it turns out, ‘much ado about nothing’”.¹ John Palmer is somewhat more complimentary; “this...