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As with many of the author’s plays, a part of the plot and story of Much Ado about Nothing was borrowed.  But the same matter had been so often borrowed before, and run into so many variations, that we cannot affirm with certainty to what source Shakespeare was immediately indebted.  Mrs. Lenox, an uncommonly deep person, instructs us that the Poet here “borrowed just enough to show his poverty of invention, and added enough to prove his want of judgment”; a piece of criticism so choice and happy, that it ought by all means to be kept alive; though it is indeed just possible that the Poet can better afford to have such things said of him than the sayer can to have them repeated.

So much of the story as relates to Hero, Claudio, and John, bears a strong resemblance to the tale of Ariodante and Ginevra in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.  The Princess Ginevra, the heroine of the tale, rejects the love-suit of Duke Polinesso, and pledges her hand to Ariodante.  Thereupon Polinesso engages her attendant Dalinda to personate the Princess on a balcony by moonlight, while he ascends to her chamber by a ladder of ropes; Ariodante being by previous arrangement stationed near the spot, so as to witness the supposed infidelity of his betrothed.  This brings on a false charge against Ginevra, who is doomed to die unless within a month a true knight comes to do battle for her honour.  Ariodante betakes himself to flight, and is reported to have perished.  Polinesso now appears secure in his treachery.  But Dalinda, seized with remorse for her part in the affair, and flying from her guilty paramour, meets with Rinaldo, and declares to him the truth.  Then comes on the fight, in which Polinesso is slain by the champion of innocence; which done, the lover reappears, to be made happy with his Princess.

Here, of course, the wicked Duke answers to the John of the play.  But there is this important difference, that the motive of the former in vilifying the lady is to drive away her lover, that he may have her to himself; whereas the latter acts from a spontaneous malignity of temper, that takes a sort of disinterested pleasure in blasting the happiness of others.

A translation, by Peter Beverly, of that part of Ariosto’s poem which contains this tale, was licensed for the press in 1565; and Warton says it was reprinted in 1600.  And an English version of the whole poem, by Sir John Harrington, came out in 1591; but the play discovers no special marks of borrowing from this source.  And indeed the fixing of any obligations in this quarter is the more difficult, inasmuch as the matter seems to have been borrowed by Ariosto himself.  For the story of a lady betrayed to peril and disgrace by the personation of her waiting-woman was an old European tradition; it has been traced to Spain; and Ariosto interwove it with the adventures of Rinaldo, as yielding an apt occasion for his chivalrous heroism.  Neither does the play show any traces of obligation to Spenser, who wrought the same tale into the variegated structure of his great poem.  The story of Phedon, relating the treachery of his false friend Philemon, is in Book ii. canto 4 of The Faerie Queene; which Book was first published in 1590.