Much Ado About Nothing Synopsis
William Shakespeare is almost universally considered the English language's most famous and greatest writer. In fact, the only people who might dispute that are those who think he didn't write the surviving 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems still attributed to him. Even people who never get around to reading his works in class are instantly familiar with titles like King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo & Shakespeare.Much Ado About Nothing isn't considered one of Shakespeare's greatest plays, but it's definitely one of the most lighthearted. In this comedy, two couples are planning to get married, but their best laid plans go awry due to the work of a villain.
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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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