ABSTRACT

As the only play in the canon that begins and ends with a messenger’s report, Much Ado About Nothing is remarkable for its foregrounding of the process of transmission of information and knowledge. Indeed, the play is teeming with references to messengers but also to teachers, story-tellers, gossips and forms of textual authority. Given the errors which such a proliferation of sources of knowledge may entail, many critics see the play as a pessimistic depiction of epistemological failure and as a sceptical illustration of the limits of human understanding. In Angel with Horns, A.P. Rossiter writes for example that ‘misapprehensions, misprisions, misunderstandings, misinterpretations and misapplications are the best names for what the comedy as a whole is “about”’ (Rossiter 1961, 77). More recently, the play has been read from a Marx/Althusser/Foucault-inspired perspective, as a demonstration that ‘truth’ is manufactured by the powerful. Jean Howard, in particular, has written that: ‘the love of Beatrice and Benedick can be read as encoding the process by which the powerful determine truth’ (Howard 1987, 179).