Product Description
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: is a golden woman, a daughter of the sun, smiling-natured, but limited. Phebe, like Rosalind, is black-haired, black-eyed, black- eyebrowed, with the dead-white face that so often goes with cruelty. Shortly after this play was written he began to create types less external and less limited. Much Ado about Nothing. Written, (?) Published. 1600. Source of the Plot. The greater part of the fable seems to have been invented by Shakespeare. The Hero and Claudio story is found in the twenty-second novel of Bandello, and in at least three other books (one of them Spenser's Faerie Queene). It was also known to the Elizabethans in a play now lost. The Fable. Benedick, a lord of Padua, pledges himself to bachelorhood. Beatrice, a disdainful lady, is scornful of men. Claudio plans to marry Hero. Don John, enemy of Claudio, plans to thwart the marriage by letting it appear that Hero is unchaste. Don Pedro and Claudio make Benedick believe that Beatrice is dying of love for him. Ursula and Hero make Beatrice believe that Benedick is dying of love for her. The disdainful couple make friends. Don John thwarts the marriage of Claudio by his tale of Hero's unchastity. Claudio casts off Hero at the altar. Hero swoons, and is conveyed away as dead. Beatrice and Benedick arebrought into close alliance by their upholding of Hero's cause. Proof is obtained that Hero has been falsely accused. She is recovered from her swoon. Claudio marries her. Benedick and Beatrice plight troth. In this play Shakespeare writes of the power of report, of the thing overheard, to alter human destiny. Antonio's man, listening behind a hedge, overhears Don Pedro telling Claudio that he will woo Hero. The report of his eavesdropping conveys no notion of the truth, and leads, no doubt, to...
