Title of Much Ado About Nothing
The Significance of Shakespeare's Famous Comedy Title
The title of "Much Ado About Nothing" is so familiar that we take it for granted. But what does this casual title actually mean?
Much Ado About Nothing is one of Shakespeare’s most popular comedies. It’s frequently performed, continually studied, and has been made into a big-budget movie. The title, often abbreviated to Much Ado, is so familiar that most of us take it for granted, as simply a convenient label for the play.
There has been some debate over the exact meaning of the title, however. Unlike the tragedies, which were usually named after the protagonist, Shakespeare’s comedies are often titled with a short phrase: Love’s Labours Lost, As You Like It, Twelfth Night. The playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw suggested that the casual, throwaway air of these titles was Shakespeare’s way of deliberately devaluing them.
As far as Shaw was concerned, Shakespeare wrote the comedies to make a bit of money from a public with low-brow tastes, in order to fund the writing of his serious works. The histories are given imposing titles like The First Part of the Contention of The Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, (2 Henry IV) the tragedies are heralded similarly, The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, and the comedies are shrugged off with A Midsummer Night’s Dream and What You Will (Twelfth Night). According to Shaw, calling a play Much Ado About Nothing is the equivalent of Shakespeare shrugging and saying “whatever.”
Of course, the weight of opinion these days is generally against Shaw, and many critics have identified serious concerns being dealt with in Shakespeare’s comedies. The casual labelling of the plays could be part of the Renaissance tradition of literature “teaching through delight”, in which entertaining works brought home their message without being too obviously didactic. From this point of view the title Much Ado About Nothing is a graceful piece of self-deprecation by a master artist – “Sorry about all the poetry and the shouting, but I thought it might amuse you...”
The title could be a deliberate paradox to catch the attention of possible audience goers. There are a series of plays by various authors from the period with titles that were intended to sound amusingly paradoxical, such as The Roaring Girl and Wit In A Constable. If that was how Shakespeare intended it to be understood, there could even be a jokey showman’s boast in the name: “See our comedy troupe entertain and amaze you with frankly unpromising material to work with! Extraordinary wit and persiflage produced from nowhere!”
Much Ado About Nothing might also be a Shakespearean innuendo. In Elizabethan English “nothing” was slang for the female sexual organs, so calling a play Much Ado About Nothing could be a way of advertising a saucy romantic comedy. The play provides Much Ado in the way of scrapes, mistakes, plots and poetry, as the male characters chase around after Nothing. Though read from a feminist angle, the innuendo could have a far more serious significance, as an examination of the way Nothing is discussed and disposed of by a patriarchal society.
