SOURCE: Nevo, Ruth. “Better Than Reportingly.” In William Shakespeare's ‘Much Ado about Nothing,’ edited by Harold Bloom, pp. 5-19. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988.

In the following essay, originally published in 1980, Nevo suggests that by putting the Hero/Claudio and Beatrice/Benedick plots in Much Ado about Nothing on equal footing, Shakespeare focused our attention on the conflicting motifs of the play.

Much Ado about Nothing contrasts notably with the early Shrew, which is similarly structured in terms of antithetical couples, not only in its greater elegance of composition and expression, but in its placing of the comic initiative in the hands of its vivacious heroine Beatrice. In both plays, as indeed in all of the comedies, courtly love conventions and natural passion, affection and spontaneity, romance and realism, or style and substance, saying and believing, simulation and dissimulation interlock; while the dual or agonistic structure of courtship...