"I beseech your grace, pardon me; I was born to speak all mirth and no matter." So says Beatrice in `Much Ado About Nothing'. To what extent do you find this a fair description of the play as a whole?

`Much Ado About Nothing' is a play filled with deceptions, secrets, disguises and misunderstandings. For that reason, the play is very humorous. However, even though the play is rather funny - it still deals with many significant issues in people's lives, such as love, appearance and reality, deception and delusion. Shakespeare, being a dramatist, understood the need for these issues to be in his plays to make them more meaningful and appealing.

Shakespeare uses a variety of techniques to create quite an amount of humour. One of the most evident techniques is the use of malapropisms. Dogberry often confuses similar sounding words antithetically. For example, Dogberry's description of...