Much Ado about Nothing Synopsis
While staying at his friend Leonato's home, Claudio falls in love with Hero, Leonato's beautiful daughter, and they agree to marry. In the meantime, they decide to trick their friends Benedick and Beatrice-who have nothing but insults for each other-into falling in love as well. However, Don John, the illegitimate brother of Leonato's close friend Don Pedro, won't stand for such happiness. He tricks Claudio into thinking Hero has been unfaithful. Claudio's hasty overreaction and Leonato's redemption of Hero wield all the tools of a romantic comedy, making a story that is, indeed, much ado about nothing. This unabridged version of William Shakespeare's delightful play was first published in England in 1600.
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About William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was born at Stratford upon Avon in April, 1564. He was the third child, and eldest son, of John Shakespeare and Mary Arden. Little is known of Shakespeare’s early life; but it is unlikely that a writer who dramatized such an incomparable range and variety of human kinds and experiences should have spent his early manhood entirely in placid pursuits in a country town. There is one tradition, not universally accepted, that he fled from Stratford because he was in trouble for deer stealing, and had fallen foul of Sir Thomas Lucy, the local magnate; another that he was for some time a schoolmaster.
When Shakespeare died fourteen of his plays had been separately published in Quarto booklets. In 1623 his surviving fellow actors, John Heming and Henry Condell, with the co-operation of a number of printers, published a collected edition of thirty-six plays in one Folio volume, with an engraved portrait, memorial verses by Ben Jonson and others, and an Epistle to the Reader in which Heming and Condell make the interesting note that Shakespeare’s ‘hand and mind went together, and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.’
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