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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
The date of the Q text of Much Ado About Nothing is fixed by external evidence within fairly narrow limits. The only quarto edition of the play was registered for publication on August 23, 1600, after having been noted as “to be staied” on a fly-leaf of a volume of the Stationers' Register under date of August 4, with no year attached but closely following another entry dated May 27, 1600, and therefore presumably of the same year. The title does not appear in Meres's list of 1598, although of course there is the ever-present question of the mysterious Love's Labour's Won mentioned by Meres, with which, however, no attempts have been made to identify Much Ado in recent years. These facts apparently fix the date of writing of the play as between shortly before September 7, 1598, when Meres's work was registered, and August 4, 1600. That it was not immediately before the last-mentioned date is evident from the inclusion of As You Like It in the same list with Much Ado as “to be staied.” Touchstone is a rôle of the type intended for Robert Armin, who superseded Will Kemp as clown of the Chamberlain's Men, while Kemp is known to have played Dogberry. The writing, staging, and popularizing of As You Like It therefore intervened between that of Much Ado and August 4, 1600. Kemp seems to have left the company early in 1599. These facts tend to date Much Ado in the fall or winter of 1598–99, and this is today the generally accepted date.
1 Cf. E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare, pp. 79 and 79 n. 4.
2 The claims of this play as a matter of collateral interest are presented by Cohn, Shakespeare in Germany in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, pp. lxiv–lxvii, and are dealt with pro and con in the Furness variorum Much Ado, pp. 339–344, quoting Herman Grimm and J. Tittmann. The hero is a miles gloriosus, a type well known to the English predecessors of Shakespeare and in 1598–99 already employed by the poet in Don Armado and Falstaff.
3 MS. Rawl. A 239 (Bodleian), leaf 47. I follow the text as given by Chambers, William Shakespeare, ii, 343. Nine plays by other companies were also performed at court during the same period (Chambers, Eliz. Stage, iv, 180–181).
4 Variorum ed., p. xxii.
5 J. O. Halliwell Phillipps, Memoranda on All's Well that Ends Well, … Much Ado About Nothing, … p. 59. Furness, op. cit., p. xxii, refers to Halliwell Phillipps, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, ed. 1885, p. 262; but the entry does not appear in either of the two eds. of the Outlines to which I have access.
6 Noted by H. C. Bartlett, Mr. William Shakespeare: Original and Early Editions of His Quartos and Folios, etc., p. 92.
7 Through the courtesy of the authorities of the Folger Memorial Library in Washington, and especially of their Reference Librarian, Mr. Giles E. Dawson, I have been able to trace the first publication of Belleforest's version back to the third volume of the Histoires Tragiques (Paris, 1572), in which it appears as the eighteenth and last in the volume, with a running title numbering it fifty-fourth in the series. This is ten years earlier than the date given by Furness, who quotes from the ed. of 1582 and is followed by all later editors. The story does not appear in the two-volume eds. of 1559–60 or 1568.
8 Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, iv, 148, citing the Revels Accounts, ed. Feuillerat, p. 238.
9 Chambers, op. cit., iv, 99, 159, citing the Declared Accounts of the Record Office, 542. mm. 44–45, also the Revels Accounts, ed. Feuillerat, p. 350.
10 I have not been able to examine the German edition. A partial translation appears in A. Cohn, Shakespeare in Germany, pp. 82–111 (German and English in parallel columns) and another in Furness, Much Ado, pp. 329–337.
11 Much Ado, pp. xxx and 329 ff.
12 Such a comedy subplot with a love complication involving inferiors attached to the principal characters occurs in the earliest known English secular drama, Medwell's Fulgens and Lucres. Before Much Ado the device had appeared in the Comedy of Errors, and Shakespeare again utilizes it in Love's Labour's Lost, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night, with variations of rank and relationship. Shakespeare needed no such suggestion. Further, some elements in Ayrer's subplot derive indirectly from Belleforest, whom neither Cohn nor apparently Shakespeare knew. In an “enrichment” of Bandello, Belleforest says that Timbreo passed and repassed Fenicia's home because “so unbounded is the passion of love that the eye once struck by the arrow of Cupid, transmits the wound and conceit to the heart.” With Ayrer this commonplace crystallizes into a dramatized assault on Timbreo by Venus and Cupid, which immediately finds a comic duplication in the entrance of the Clown, who with an arrow “dishonorably lodged” in his rear and “holding his hands over the spot, alternately bewails his pain and proclaims his love for Anna Maria.” (I quote Furness.) The yokel comedically must be fooled, and the use of water for the climax both here and in Vincenlius Ladiszlaus points to a current German comic stage trick, but establishes no relationship with Shakespeare. Cupid's arrow also naturally suggests to Ayrer the trite reference to Vulcan as the forger of the arrows, an idea that, despite Cohn, has no real parallelism of thought to Much Ado, i, i, 185–186.
13 See his volume, Collier, Coleridge, and Shakespeare, pp. 131 ff., or the somewhat cut form given by Furness, Much Ado, pp. 367 ff. Apparently the last serious support given this view was that of Fleay (Life and Work of Shakespeare, pp. 135, 204), who argued for 1590 as the original date of the play on the insubstantial ground that at i, i, 276 a date July 6 is mentioned, that at ii, i, 351–352 the same day is referred to as Monday, and that July 6 fell on Monday in no year between 1590 and 1601. A parallel argument of Fleay's breaks down for Every Man in His Humour, as J. C. Smith pointed out, Arden ed. of Much Ado, p. x, n. 2. And W. O. Wright had already identified July 6 with “Old Midsummer Day, an appropriate date for such Midsummer madness.” The significance of the date is not chronological but dramatic, as if Benedick had said, “the first of April.”
14 New Shakespeare ed., pp. 93–102.
15 He is mute throughout the sixty-seven lines of the passage and is not to be identified for the audience until ii, iii, 45, and therefore, whatever may be his apparent significance for a literary editor, in i, i, he as yet has none for the audience, who will not remember his brief presence here when he again appears, or be at all concerned about it if they do. Shakespeare is working in accordance with the principles of audience psychology, not the psychology of an undesired reader.
16 Pp. 102–107 and Notes passim.
17 I am by no means unmindful of the fact that Professor Wilson's co-editor is the justly admired author of a large body of fiction as well as a volume on Shakespeare's Workmanship; but I am not aware that he has had experience as a playwright, in which profession, I reiterate, the conditions and psychological operations of the author are quite different.
18 Cf. Portia's words to Antonio, Merchant of Venice, v, i, 278–279, “You shall not know by what strange accident / I chanced on this letter.”
19 Cf. conveniently, Furness ed., p. 319.
20 iii, iv, 153–155.
21 See scenes ii, iii; iii, i; and iv, i; and Professor Wilson's notes upon them.
22 Mr. Granville Barker, Companion to Shakespeare Studies, p. 49, refers to “fourteeners” in the Comedy of Errors and Love's Labour's Lost. In the former there are none; the irregular lines are four-stress tumbling verse throughout. In the latter, fourteeners are twice used briefly for special effects—at iv, ii, 58–63, to distinguish an extemporized epigram in stanza form ababcc, and at v, ii, 555–558, to color quaintly Costard's impersonation of Pompey the Great in the antiquated “show” of the Nine Worthies. These are very special functions and by no means parallel with the ordinary dialogue use of the single couplet in Much Ado.
23 In his note to i, i, 37.
24 PMLA, xl (Sept., 1925), 543–550.—But whereas I formerly believed, with Wilson, that this represented a revision from before 1598 to the Q version, I now believe it was an immediate amplification of the 1598–99 Q text arising from the popular hit made by Dogberry and possibly from other reasons involved in the make-up of the company.
25 Praetorius facsimile of Much Ado quarto, p. viii.
26 Variorum ed., pp. 208–209.
27 New Shakespeare ed., p. 104.
28 Columns (1), (2), and (3) are from Chambers, Shakespeare, ii, 398 (2), (4), and (3), who corrects Fleay's figures as given in C. M. Ingleby, Shakespeare, The Man and His Work, ii, 99. They are quoted here merely as an aid in interpreting columns (4)-(9). Column (4) is from König, Der Vers in Shakespeares Dramen, p. 132. Column (5) is from Chambers, ii, 400 (2), following Fleay in Ingleby, ii, 71; I convert to percentages. Column (6) is from Chambers, ii, 400 (7), who quotes from Fleay in Ingleby, ii, 99; I convert to percentages. Column (7) is from König, 134. Column (8) is from Chambers, ii, 402 (4–5). Columns (9)–(10) are from König, pp. 133, 131. Column (11) is from Chambers, ii, 400 (1) quoted from Fleay in Ingleby, ii, 99; I convert to percentages. In all percentages Chambers turns decimal figures into the nearest integer, treating 0.5 as 1; I follow the same rule in the second decimal place.
29 New Shakespeare ed., Twelfth Night, pp. viii, ix, 100–101.
30 Namely, i, iii, 20–27; v, i, 110 ff.; and v, i, 255, though the last is part of a blank verse passage and may be supposed to have a metrical rhythm.
31 Cf. Chambers, Shakespeare, i, 233, for their frequency in Shakespeare's prose.
32 All such details are considered in my forthcoming edition of the play.