Faith and Fashion in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’

Summary

Most critics who have written on the subject of Much Ado about Nothing seem agreed that the play must take its pace in Shakespeare’s incessant debate about the conflict between appearance and reality, and the difficulties which beset an individual when he attempts to make a right choice, particularly in love, between superficial seeming and inner truth. Few readers, I imagine, would quarrel with the following verdict:

Shakespeare’s ideas about love’s truth – the imaginative acting of a lover and the need for our imaginative response to it, the compulsion, individuality, and complexity of a lover’s realization of beauty, and the distinctions between inward and outward beauty, appearance and reality, and fancy and true affection – all are represented in Much Ado about Nothing; they inform its structure, its contrasts, relationships, and final resolution; they control many of the details of its action, characterization, humour, and dialogue. Indeed, in fashioning these elements into a lively, dramatic whole, Shakespeare achieved his most concerted and considered judgment upon love’s truth.

I agree with this reading, and would like to attempt to amplify it by using a methodology pioneered by Miss Dorothy Hockey. Taking her stand upon Helge Kökeritz's treatment of Richard Grant White's suggestion that the play's title may contain a pun upon 'Nothing' and 'noting', Miss Hockey reads the play as an extended treatment of the implications of this pun, and examines in detail all the occasions during the play when attention to the act of 'noting', of eavesdropping and observing, enhances our understanding of the play's structure and morality.