SOURCE: Jorgensen, Paul A. “Much Ado About Nothing.” Shakespeare Quarterly 5, no. 3 (summer 1954): 287-95.

In the following essay, Jorgensen describes how Shakespeare's use of the word nothing in the title and text of Much Ado about Nothing would have held significant, if sometimes ambiguous, religious and philosophical meanings for Elizabethan audiences.

It is generally agreed that certain words must have given Shakespeare considerably more pleasure than they give us today. The honesty game in Othello, for example, may now impress us as a cleverness unworthy of the tragic stature of the play. I have elsewhere suggested, however, that Shakespeare was attempting in Othello a serious dramatic use of a popular literary situation in which knaves, with scarcely more disguise than the label honest endlessly repeated, pose successfully as honest men.¹ The word nothing presents an interesting parallel, for not only did its iteration stem from popular genres, but serious...