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Much Ado About Nothing is a comedy by William Shakespeare, supposedly written in 1598 and 1599. The action of the play almost seems like a game, in which dances and garden-scenes, eavesdropping, mistakes, and disguises establish a playful pattern � Shakespeare's contemporaries might have called it a comedy of errors, I call it a good episode of Gossip Girl. ;) I mean c'mon, this play has crazy sexual tension, women are accused of infidelity, people are exposed at the altar, and fancy dress parties provide the room for mindless chatter and the spreading of rumours. It is Gossip Girl.

Funnily enough the play is dominated by two of its side characters: Despite the main 'ado' concerning Don John's villainous attempt to thwart the marriage arranged between Claudio and Hero by accusing Hero of infidelity, the reader's heart and interest is with another pair, Beatrice and Benedick. Much has been said about their wit, and it is true that they are more consistently and outrageously witty than others in a play in which the dialogue crackles with repartee. But perhaps it is not so much the quality of their witty exchanges that makes them such powerful and vibrant figures, as the energy and skill with which they parry each other, and so preserve a stance of tough-minded independance. Beatrice and Benedick speak with the grace, freedom, and ease of the finest conversation among social equals, who feel free to say what they please to one another. Within this realistic dimension of the play, this natural flow of good talk, Beatrice and Benedick excel by virtue of their intelligence and vitality, and the other characters allow them this supremacy.

They are able to flout conventions too because Shakespeare has taken care not to encumber them with close relatives; Benedick has none, and Beatrice is an orphan to whom Leonato, her uncle and guardian allows a freedom he would not permit his daughter Hero to have. Beatrice talks with a man's licence, and Benedick with the liberty of an independant visitor, the more readily in that there is no one to restrain either of them.

Given the high valuation put on wit, on sharpness of intelligence, Hero is bound to appear a little stupid, and Claudio too somewhat imperceptive. The contrast between them and Beatrice and Benedick was surely designed in part to expose the limitations of both couples � thus Hero and Claudio are shown up as conventional and prim, whereas Beatrice and Benedick have their sharp tongues, which scare fools away, and preserve them as individualists from the need to conform to society's usual arrangements.

Hero and Claudio fit into the norm, in so far as their love springs from the eye, not the mind (#instalove). Some have argued that their sole concern is social position and certainly Claudio has an eye to his future wealth and status, but this is the way of the world, and also the way of prudence. Hero and Claudio play the game of love by society's normal rules; they make arrangements through intermediaries, on whom they rely for advice and protection � Hero on her father, Claudio on Don Pedro.

Beatrice and Benedick play by other rules, and like less with the eye than with the mind, relying on their own judgement, not on society's customs, ensuring that intelligence matches with intelligence. This is made clear in their preoccupation with each other from the start, and they way in which they talk about each other when the other one is not around. In the end they agree together in terms of their own, not those of society, which commonly requires the subjection of women to parents and husbands.

Claudio is a romantic lover for whom ardour is unnecessary, since he loves an image rather than a preson, and is never seen making love to Hero. Claudio takes her for granted, and his passion in anger when he learns of her apparent infidelity exceeds all the passion he has ever shown in love. After Claudio learns of her infidelity, the name 'Hero' by which he had set such store as an emblem of chaste love has become transformed, for he has discovered that Hero's appearance, her name, does not correspond to his idea of virtue in her, and he is lost in paradoxes about her as 'most foul, most fair' (IV.1.101). The emphasis in the presentation of Claudio is, then, on his sense of honour and conformity to the codes prescribed by convention: he loves Hero as a name rather than as a person.

The play was written in the middle of Shakespeare's career, which proved to be a period of change and transition in his handling of blank verse, as though the verse medium in which he had created successfully a range of characters in his earlier plays, was no longer proving suitable, or flexible enough, for a more mature dramatic art.

The greater part of Much Ado About Nothing is written in prose, and the characters whose speech is almost wholly prose (Beatrice, Benedick) have more life and depth than those who speak verse most of the time (Clautio, Hero). Benedick and Beatrice deliberately reject verse in favor of witty prose; and Claudio and Hero, with their rather artificial verse, seem intended to expose in some measure the emptiness of romantic poses in love.

Overall, I highly enjoyed this play, it gleamed with wit and an engaging set of characters. Moreover, I appreciate the play for its exploration of gender roles, and timeless themes such as infidelity and deception.