Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare

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Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare

Shakespeare derived much of his plot, in the play Much Ado About Nothing, from alternate sources, but his individual language and use of wording is what draws people to his works. His plot in Much Ado About Nothing is fairly simple but elegant. Two sets of lovers fall in love. They are Claudio and Hero and Benedict and Beatrice. The miscreant, Don John, schemes to break up the marriage of Claudio and Hero, but he eventually fails. Shakespeare adopted, or stole these plots from a set of three books. They are Novelle by Matteo Bandello, Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto, and The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser. Shakespeare did not try to disguise his stolen plots, meagerly altering names of characters and places. He extracted small pieces of plot from each of these books, but they are still readily noticeable. The setting of this play is in Italy, which Shakespeare also adopted as his own. It does not matter what the plots are in any of Shakespeare's plays because the aspect that made him so renowned was his use of the English language, molding into iambic pentameter. This style of writing, also known as blank verse is characterized by five unstressed syllables followed by five stressed syllables. "O, what men dare do! What men may do! What men daily do, not knowing what they do"(Shakespeare 59). This is an example of iambic pentameter. There are

eighteen singular syllables, but daily and knowing are two syllables each, so that is twenty whole syllables. This is two sets of blank verse. Shakespeare deserves all credentials possible in his works because his language is incredible.

In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare used some of the characters and plot from a play written by Matteo Bandello called Novelle. This play was accessible to Shakespeare because it had been translated into French from Italian. In this play, there was a King of Aragon who came with his army to aid the people. One of his knights fell in love with a young, chaste lady, the daughter of Master Lionato. This knight was very much in love with this lady, and wished to marry her. Lionato was also from Messina corresponding in Much Ado About Nothing with Leonato, the governor of Messina.

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