In the Library
Much Ado About Nothing
William Shakespeare, 1600
- Form
- Form Play
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 1.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 17
- Length
- Length 22k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
I do love nothing in the world so well as you: is not that strange?
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Misanthrope
Molière
Alceste and Célimène spar with all the wit of Beatrice and Benedick, though here the man who scorns flattery cannot win the woman who lives on it.
£1.99
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice does the same thing, but stretches the sparring-into-love arc of Beatrice and Benedick across a whole novel of drawing rooms and misread first impressions.
£1.99
The Importance of Being Earnest
Oscar Wilde
The Importance of Being Earnest does the same thing, but trades swordplay for teacups, letting quick tongues and a case of mistaken identity carry a comedy of courtship.
£1.99
About the book
Nothing, in Shakespeare's England, sounded like noting: overhearing, eavesdropping, the thing half-caught from behind an arbour. Everything in Messina turns on it. Beatrice and Benedick, who have made a career of despising each other in front of an audience, trading insults so inventive the whole household gathers to watch, are tricked into love by being allowed to overhear that they are already loved, and the tenderness that follows is real even though the evidence was a lie. The same trick in a colder hand nearly destroys a young woman at her own wedding. Then, in a church emptied of everyone but the two of them, Beatrice names her price for Benedick's love, and it is two words long: Kill Claudio. No comedy has ever swerved like that. They talk that fast because neither can bear to say the plain thing, and the play adores them for it, right up to the moment when plain speech is all that is left.