Context — Much Ado About Nothing — AQA GCSE English Literature 8702
AQA GCSE English Literature · 8702
Context
Introduction
What you need to know
The Elizabethan context of Much Ado About Nothing: comedy as a genre, courtship and marriage, honour and female chastity,
social status in Messina from the Prince of Aragon to Dogberry's watch, and Shakespeare's sources and the date of the play.
How to use this context in an answer about the play rather than as background.
Comedy as a genre: a light-hearted play that ends in marriages, and how the church scene takes Much Ado close to tragedy before its happy ending.
Courtship and marriage in Shakespeare's England: matches made by families for wealth and status, dowries and heirs, the banns, and a bride's vow to obey.
Honour and female chastity: a bride's virginity as her own and her family's honour, the jokes about cuckolds' horns, and why the men believe the slander so quickly.
Social status: a prince, a count and a lord as guests of the governor of Messina, Hero as her father's heir, Don John as a bastard who cannot inherit, and Dogberry's amateur watch.
Shakespeare's sources and date: tales by Bandello and Ariosto of a lover tricked into believing his bride unfaithful, the wooing of Beatrice and Benedick as Shakespeare's own, and a play written in 1598 or 1599 and printed in 1600, with Dogberry written for the comic actor William Kempe.
The title's pun on nothing and noting: gossip, overhearing and misreading what is seen.
