SOURCE: Dawson, Anthony B. “Much Ado About Signifying.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 22, no. 2 (spring 1982): 211-21.

In the following essay, Dawson discusses how messages and their interpretation (or, more often, misinterpretation) not only propel the plot in Much Ado about Nothing, but also act as signs, or clues, to the play's major themes.

Thinking about Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing led me to thinking about messages and the process of interpretation imposed by the delivery of messages. The play takes up this perfectly ordinary, everyday activity and subjects it to comic scrutiny. In doing so, the play highlights the act of message-sending itself, as well as the subsequent act of interpretation or, more often, misinterpretation. The characters certainly make much ado about such acts, which are indeed a kind of “nothing,” if we regard nothing in a paradoxically active sense, as a free form, an act liberated from...