The Plot of Much Ado About Nothing

THE text of Much Ado about Nothing in the First Folio is not the earliest. It had already appeared in a Quarto form twenty-three years before it was there printed. Nevertheless, there is in reality but one text, inasmuch as it is from this Quarto that the Folio itself was printed. If this printed text of the Folio, over which we pore so earnestly, had been ever scanned by Shakespeare’s eyes, then we might accept it as a legacy where every comma becomes respectable ; but since we know that when the Folio was printed Shakespeare had been in his grave seven years, we discover, of a surety, that we are dealing with the skill, intelligent or otherwise, of an ordinary compositor, and that in our minute collation we are devoting our closest scrutiny to the vagaries of a printer.

When we seek to discover the source of the text of the Quarto, we are met by the mystery which seems inseparable from all things connected with Shakespeare’s outward life (I marvel that in the four thousand ways, devised by Mr. Wise, of spelling Shakespeare’s name no place is found for spelling it “ m-y-st-e-r-y”), and yet, in the present instance, I doubt that “ mystery ” is the appropriate term. It is merely our ignorance which creates the mystery. To Shakespeare’s friends and daily companions there was nothing mysterious in his life ; on the contrary, it possibly appeared to them as unusually dull and commonplace. It certainly had no incidents so far out of the common that they thought it worth while to record them. Shakespeare never killed a man, as Jonson did; his voice was never heard, like Marlow’s, in tavern brawls ; nor was he ever, like Marston and Chapman, threatened with the penalty of having his ears lopped and his nose slit; but his daily life was so gentle and so clear in the sight of man and of Heaven that no record of it has come down to us; for which failure I am most fervently grateful, and as fervently hope that no future year will ever reveal even the faintest peep through the divinity which doth hedge this king.

We are quite ignorant of the way in which any of the Shakespearean Quartos came to be published. Were it not that Heminge and Condell pronounced them all to be " stolne and surreptitious,” we might have possibly supposed that Shakespeare yielded to temptation and sold his plays to the press, — a dishonest practice indulged in by some dramatists, as we learn from Heywood’s Preface to his Rape of Lucrece, where he says, “ Some have used a double sale of their labours, first to the Stage, and after to the Presse.” But not thus dishonestly would the sturdy English soul of Shakespeare act, — a trait not sufficiently considered by those who impute to him an indifference to the offsprings of his brain. His plays once sold to the theatre passed forever from his possession, and to all allurements of subsequent money-getting from them he gave an honest kersey no.

There is one item in reference to the text which I think worthy of note. When it is asserted that the Folio is printed from the Quarto, we assume that the compositors of the Folio had before them, as “ copy,” the pages of the Quarto. There was a time when I believed that this was the custom followed by compositors in the days of Elizabeth, as it is by compositors at the present day, and I went even so far as to quote with entire approval Dr. Johnson’s remark that the printers who had the manuscript before their eyes were more likely to read it aright than we who saw it only in imagination. Nevertheless, there always remained in my mind an unexplained problem, when it happened, as it unquestionably does happen, that the pages of the Folio were set up from the printed pages of the Quarto. At the present day, when compositors set up from printed copy, they follow that copy slavishly, almost mechanically. Surely, the same must have been true of the less intelligent compositors of Shakespeare’s time, and we might expect, as of right, that the printed page of the Quarto which had served as copy would be exactly reproduced in the Folio, in spelling, in punctuation, in the use of capitals and of Italics. Yet this is far, very far, from being the case : “ don Peter of Arragon ” in the Quarto of the present play becomes “Don Peter of Arragon” in the Folio, in Italics, and with a capital D ; with “ happy ” before him in print, it is almost unaccountable that the compositor of the Folio should take the trouble of adding another type and spell the word “ happie,” or that he should change “4 of his fiue wits ” into “ foure of his flue wits,” or change “ lamb ” into “ Lambe ” with a needless capital and a needless e ; and so we might go on in almost every line throughout the play. Yet it is incontestable that the Folio was printed from the Quarto ; the very errors of the Quarto are repeated in the Folio, such as giving the names of the actors, Kempe and Cowley, instead of the names of the characters they impersonated.

The solution of the mystery is to be found, I think, in the practice of the old printing offices, where compositors set up the types, not from copy which they themselves read, but by hearing the copy read aloud to them. We now know that in the printing offices of aforetime it was customary to have a reader whose duty it was to read aloud the copy to the compositors. This will not only explain all these trivial differences in spelling, punctuation, and the use of Italics which I have just mentioned, but will also reveal the cause of that more important class of errors which Shakespearean editors have hitherto attributed either to the hearing of the text delivered by actors, in public, on the stage, or to the mental ear of the compositor while carrying a sentence in his memory. The voice believed to be that of the actor is in reality the voice of the compositors’ reader. Be it understood that I here refer mainly to the instances where the Folio was printed from a Quarto. That plays were sometimes stolen by taking them down from the actors’ lips on the stage, we know. Heywood denounces the practice in that same address “To the Reader ” prefixed to his Rape of Lucrece.

To Shakespeare the plots of his dramas were of trifling importance, be it that they are as involved as the plot of the Comedy of Errors, or be it that the imaginary characters are as few as they are in his Sonnets ; he took plots wherever he found them made to his hand. Any situation that would evoke characteristic traits in any dramatis personæ was all that he needed. Dr. Johnson, as we all know, went so far as to say that Shakespeare “ has not only shown human nature as it acts in real exigencies, but as it would be found in trials to which it cannot be exposed.” What need, then, had Shakespeare to invent plots ? Under his hand all stories were available, but, apparently, those especially with which his audience was familiar, who, possibly, found a certain pleasure in recognizing old friends under new faces, and who could, assuredly, bestow on the characters themselves an attention which would not be distracted by the need of unraveling an unfamiliar plot. Has a comedy ever been written which gives more pleasure than As You Like It? Well may it be called flawless. And yet it contains absurdities in construction so gross that their readiest explanation is the supposition that the original commonplace thing upon which the play is founded has been allowed, by Shakespeare’s careless indifference, here and there to obtrude: there are two characters bearing the same name, — it is unthinkable that a dramatist, in devising a play, should have committed such an oversight; in one scene Celia is taller than Rosalind, and in another Rosalind is taller than Celia; the Touchstone of the first act is not the same Touchstone as in succeeding acts, and though he has been the clownish Fool about the old court all his days, neither Jaques nor the exiled Duke has ever before seen him when they meet in the Forest, where the Duke has been in exile only a few months. And can there be any device to end a story more preposterous than that a headstrong, violent tyrant at the head of “ a mighty power ” should, merely after “ some question with ” “ an old religious man,” be “ converted,” and instantly relinquish a campaign and retire from the world ? But what did Shakespeare, or what do we, care for all such things ? They are no part of the play. It is Rosalind who enthralls our hearts, and love is blind. Were there oversights ten times as gross, the play would still have power to charm. They are worth mentioning solely as indications that Shakespeare’s play is a superstructure. And thus it is, also, with this present Much Ado about Nothing. we may read every story in literature wherein parallels to this play may be traced, and yet the fons et origo will not be there. The old, insignificant play (had it been other than insignificant, it would have survived), whereof the dramatic possibilities Shakespeare detected and moulded into living forms, — this old, insubstantial play, discarded as soon as its brighter offspring appeared, has long since faded and left not a wrack behind, except where here and there its cloth of frieze may be detected beneath Shakespeare’s seams of the cloth of gold. At the very first entrance of the players on the stage, for instance, there is what I regard as an unmistakable trace of the original play : Innogen, the wife of Leonato and the mother of Hero, is set down as entering with the others, and yet she utters no single word throughout the play, not even at that supreme moment when her daughter is belied before the altar, and when every fibre of a mother’s heart would have been stirred. That her name is here no chance misprint is clear; she reappears in the stage direction at the beginning of the second act. Her recorded presence merely shows that for one of the characters with which the original play started Shakespeare found no use, and through carelessness the name was allowed to remain in the manuscript prompt-book, where nobody was likely to see it but the prompter, who knew well enough that no such character was to be summoned to the stage. Then, again, it is likely, or rather, possible, that in the old play the paternity of Beatrice was distinctly given. In the present play there is no hint of it; indeed, it is not unreasonable to ask of a dramatist that in developing his action he should give some account of his heroine; a line will be sufficient, and perhaps will save some confusion, which in this instance has really arisen. One able critic speaks of Beatrice as the worthy daughter of “the gallant old Antonio.” Undoubtedly Brother Anthony was both gallant and old, but in neither attribute so advanced as to be obliged to commit his daughter to the care of a “ guardian.” We see clearly why, dramatically, Beatrice must be a niece, not a daughter, and an orphan ; a father or a mother would have checked that saucy tongue of hers, and where would our pleasure have been then, I should like to know ? All I urge is that a dramatist, in writing a new play, and not rewriting an old one, would hardly have failed to refer to the parents of his heroine. Furthermore, many a critic has somewhat plumed himself on what he considers his singular shrewdness in detecting that Beatrice and Benedick are in love with each other at the opening of the play. But the assertion of Beatrice, in the first scene of the second act, is always overlooked, — that “ once before ” she had possessed Benedick’s heart, and he had won hers ; which is only one of the many allusions to events which occurred before the opening of the play, — when, for instance, Beatrice had promised to eat all the victims of Benedick’s sword, and when Benedick had set up his bills in Messina and challenged Cupid at the flight. In all these allusions I think we may discover traces of the original groundwork of Shakespeare’s plot. It is possible that in the old play of Benedick and Betteris we have this original, and in it the hero and heroine are acknowledged lovers, but become separated by a lovers’ quarrel, in the course of which Beatrice earns the name of “ Lady Disdain,” and the quarrel is smoothed away by the device which Shakespeare afterward adopted. This, of course, is all pure conjecture ; but does it herein differ from the majority of Shakespearean assertions ?

In the present play, as in others of Shakespeare, there are two separate actions : there is the false personation of Hero, and the deceit practiced on Beatrice and Benedick. Unless we suppose that there existed a preceding play combining both actions, which I by no means believe to be necessary, Shakespeare must have drawn from two separate sources. For the dual deception of Beatrice and Benedick no parallel has been found ; we may therefore concede thus much to Shakespeare’s originality, but we must do it on tiptoe lest we waken the commentators, who will not listen to Shakespeare’s originality in any direction ; but for the former action, the false personation of Hero, it is said that he had but to go to Ariosto, or to Ariosto’s translator, Harington, where he might find this false personation of a heroine by one of her ladies in waiting. He would find this there, it is true, but he would find nothing more ; there is no feigned death and burial to bring repentance to her lover, but instead a grand tournament whereat the false contriver of the harm is slain by the renowned Rinaldo. When, therefore, Pope said that the plot of the present play was taken from Ariosto, he was only partially correct, — which is, after all, about as exact as Pope is generally in his notes on Shakespeare; so that really no great harm is done. And when we come to look still further into details, we find the discrepancy between Ariosto and Shakespeare becomes still greater. The scene in Ariosto is laid in Scotland; in Shakespeare the scene is in Messina. Genevra in Ariosto becomes Hero in Shakespeare ; Ariodante, Claudio ; Dalinda, Margaret; Polynesso, Don John. Polynesso is prompted to his wicked stratagem by love of Genevra; Don John, by innate depravity. Polynesso attempts to kill Dalinda, his mistress and the decoy; Don John has no acquaintance with Margaret, who is supposed to have been an unwitting and innocent accomplice. When Ariodante becomes convinced of Genevra’s falseness he attempts to drown himself, but changes his mind in the water, unromantically, though not unnaturally, and swims ashore ; how very far Claudio’s thoughts were from suicide we all know, together with his treatment of Hero. Without continuing this comparison further, it is evident, I think, that Ariosto could not have been among the direct sources whence Shakespeare drew this portion of his plot. The sole incident common to both Ariosto and Much Ado about Nothing is a woman dressed in her mistress’s garments, at a midnight window ; and for this incident Shakespeare might have been indebted to ordinary gossip concerning an actual occurrence, — an explanation which I do not remember to have seen suggested. Harington, in a note at the end of his translation of the fifth book of the Orlando, wherein is set forth the story of Ariodante and Genevra, remarks : “ Some others affirme, that this very matter, though set downe here by other names, happened in Ferrara to a kinsewoman of the Dukes, which is here figured vnder the name of Geneura, and that indeed such a practise was used against her by a great Lord, and discovered by a damsell as is here set downed. " “ Howsoever it was,” he goes on to say, “ sure the tale is a prettie comicall matter, and hath beene written in English verse some few yeares past (learnedly and with good grace) though in verse of another kind, by M. George Turberuil.”

Here we have the story stated as a fact, and mention of a translation of Ariosto into English; the commentators can now resume their secure nap, which we had like to have disturbed by suggesting that Shakespeare could have originated anything. Turbervil’s version, however, has not come down to us, according to Collier, who therefore casts some doubt on its existence, and suggests that Harington’s memory played him false. But this need not daunt us : in the same breath Collier tolls us of a version whereof the title is given by Warton as The tragecall and pleasaunte history of Ariodante and Jeneura daughter vnto the Kynge of Scots, by Peter Beverley. This evidently points to Ariosto, which is more than can be affirmed of the title as it appears in the Stationers’ Registers, under date of 22 July, 1565 : “ Recevyd of henry Wekes for his lycense for pryntinge of a boke intituled tragegall and pleasaunte history Ariounder Jeneuor the Dougther vnto the kynge of [?] by Peter Beverlay.”

All inquiry, however, into these English sources is needless, if Shakespeare never used Ariosto’s story at all; and I think it is clear that he did not use it. The one solitary incident of a maid’s appearance in her mistress’s robes does not form an adequate connection, when that incident might have been well known as a fact within the general knowledge of Italians, or of Italian actors, then in London.

It is to Capell, the learned, discriminating, intelligent, and infinitely uninteresting editor, that we are indebted for the discovery that a story similar in many respects to that of Hero is to be found in a version, by Belle-Forest, of one of Bandello’s novels, — the same source to which we owe a version of the story of Romeo and Juliet and of Twelfth Night. We have not, it is true, in this novel by Bandello, a maid personating her mistress, but to offset this we have several springs of action common to both novel and play; and springs of action are more potent in revealing paternity than identity of names or even repetitions of certain words or phrases : these may have occurred by haphazard, but those are of the very fibre of the plot. Bandello and Ariosto were contemporaries, and it is extremely unlikely that the Orlando Furioso was unknown to the Bishop of Agen; and as the latter was fond of imparting to his stories an air of truth by fixing dates and giving well-known scenes and names in them, he may have changed this personation of a lady by her maid, for the very purpose of taking it out of that realm of allegory in which the Orlando is written. Be this as it may, we have in Bandello the ascent of a man at night by means of a ladder to the chamber of the heroine, the despair and fury of the lover, his rejection of his mistress, her death, her secret revival, her seclusion, her pretended funeral, with an epitaph on her tomb. At this point there is a divergence in the two stories : in Bandello, the repentance and confession of the villain, whose motive had been jealousy, are brought about by remorse, and, at the tomb of his victim, he proffers his sword to the heart-broken lover, and entreats the latter to kill him ; but the lover forgives, and the two disconsolate men mingle their tears over the past, — a situation of such dramatic power and pathos that I cannot but believe that, had Shakespeare ever read it, we should have received Much Ado about Nothing, from his hands, in a shape different from that it now bears. There is one character who figures prominently in Bandello that the elder dramatist adopted, to wit, the heroine’s mother ; she appears by mistake, as I have just noted, in the stage directions of Shakespeare’s play, under the name Innogen. As far as any inference to be drawn from the similarity of names is concerned, Bandello is only very slightly better than Ariosto. The scene, however, is laid in Messina, with both Bandello and Shakespeare; we have Don Pedro and Leonato common to both, and there an end. Hero is Fenecia ; Claudio is Don Timbreo di Cardona ; Don John is Signor Girondo Olerio Valentiano: and Brother Anthony is Messer Girolamo. The conclusions of the story and the play run parallel, and the end in Bandello is reached amid the gayest of festivities, wherein, perhaps, we may see the dance at the end of Much Ado about Nothing, —a jocund ending used nowhere else by Shakespeare.

Here, then, we have what is unquestionably a source of a Much Ado about Nothing, — whether or not it be Shakespeare’s source and Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, who can tell ? Bandello’s novels had never been translated, I believe, into English until within recent years. For those, however, who would deny Shakespeare any knowledge of Italian, there is a version of Bandello — it cannot be called a translation — by Belle - Forest. But this version is in French, and therefore, to those who would begrudge to Shakespeare any learning whatsoever, is almost as unpalatable as the Italian of the original. But there is no help for it. Shakespeare read it either in French or not at all. I incline to the latter opinion, not by any means because I think Shakespeare could not read French, but because he needed to read nothing but the old play which he remodeled. I would eliminate Belle-Forest entirely from consideration. I do not believe Shakespeare made use of him, nor do I believe that the elder dramatist made use of him. There are dramatic elements in the French version — such as the prolonged wooing of the heroine, accompanied by languishing love songs, and high moral sentiments expressed in return — of which a dramatist with the story before him would be likely to retain some trace.

In brief, the remote source of the plot of Much Ado about Nothing is, I think, Bandello’s novel. The immediate source I believe to be some feeble play, which vanished from sight and sound on the English stage the day that Shakespeare’s play was first seen and heard.

There still remains another question which deserves consideration in any investigation of the source of the plot. We meet with it in dealing with The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and others of Shakespeare’s plays. To enter into all the details of this question, which concern the history of the German stage far more deeply than the English, would exceed the present limits. It must be sufficient here to give merely general conclusions.

In 1811, Tieck called attention to the remarkable fact that, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, there was traveling through Germany a troupe of English comedians, who performed plays, in their own language, before German audiences, mainly at court.

From that day to the present, German scholars have been busy ransacking archives and court journals, until now, thanks to Hagen, Koberstein, Cohn, Genée, Trautmann, Meissner, Tittmann, and many others, we know not only the routes traveled by these strolling English players, and the companies into which they were divided, but even their names, and occasionally the titles and subjects of their performances. It is these last two — who the actors were, and what were their plays — which chiefly concern us here.

That the visits of English actors to Germany were well known in England, and that they were actors of repute, though some of them were mere clowns and posturemasters, we learn from an unexpected English source. Hey wood, Shakespeare’s fellow actor and dramatist, informs us that, “ at the enter taineinent of the Cardinall Alphonsus and the infant of Spaine in the Low-Countreyes, they were presented at Antwerpe with sundry pageants and playes : the King of Denmarke, father to him that now reigneth, entertained into his service a company of English comedians, commended unto him by the honourable the Earle of Leicester : the Duke of Brunswicke and the Landgrave of Hessen retaine in their courts certaine of ours of the same quality.” Elsewhere, Heywood refers incidentally to these his strolling countrymen, and to their fanreputation : “ A company of our English comedians (well knowne) travelling those countryes [Holland], as they were before the burghers and other chiefe inhabitants, acting the last part of the Four Sons of Aymon,” etc., etc. This company commended to the King of Denmark by the Earl of Leicester touches us more nearly than would be at first supposed. It is not unlikely (this unfortunate refrain, which is fated to accompany, as a ground tone, every assertion connected with Shakespeare), — it is not unlikely that at one time Will Kempe was a member of this same troupe, which Leicester took with him on his ill-fated expedition to the Netherlands. Sir Philip Sidney accompanied Leicester, and a few months before his own honorable and pathetic death wrote, under date of 24 March, 1586, to his father-in-law, Mr. Secretary Walsingham : “ I wrote yow a letter by Will, my lord of Lester’s jesting plaier, enclosed in a letter to my wife,” etc. Mr. Bruce shows, by a process of exclusion, that this “ Will ” can be none other than William Kempe, named in the First Folio as the actor of Dogberry.

The list of names which the records in Germany reveal is scanty; naturally, the names, not of every individual in a troupe, but only of the leaders, are recorded. Among these we find George Bryan and Thomas Pope, all-sufficient to bring us close to Shakespeare: these two are familiar to us in the list of twenty-six actors given in the First Folio. Thus we learn that actors from Shakespeare’s own troupe traveled in Germany, and went even further south into Italy (we know that Kempe, for instance, went to Venice), just as Italian companies came to London, where in 157778 there was an Italian commediante named Drousiano, with his players, — a fact, by the way, disclosing an intimate relationship at that early day between the English and the Italian stage of which far too little account is made by those who wish to explain Shakespeare’s knowledge of Italian manners and names. That these foreign trips of English actors to Germany were profitable may be inferred from the comfortable fortune of which Thomas Pope died possessed, as shown by his will.

With his fellow actors thus combining pleasure and profit on the Continent, can it be that Shakespeare remained at home ? Of course, there are not wanting those who maintain that Shakespeare actually did travel professionally. Mr. Fleay, for instance, says that inasmuch as Shakespeare’s company, Lord Strange’s, “ visited Denmark and Saxony, he [Shakespeare] in all probability accompanied them ; we are not told which way they came home, but if Kempe took the same route as he did in 1601, he came through Italy. This would account for such local knowledge of Italy as Shakespeare shows.”

This “ probable ” transportation of Shakespeare into Germany and Italy incites me to say that, profound as are my veneration for Shakespeare and gratitude to him as a poet, they are deeper in regard to him as a man. With that prophetic glance vouchsafed only to the heaven-descended, he foresaw the inexhaustible flood of imaginings which would be set abroach to account for any prolonged obscurity enveloping his life. Clearly, with this end in view, he evaded all public notice for seven long years. From 1585, when his twin children were baptized (common decency must assume that he was present at this ceremony), until 1592, we know absolutely nothing of him. For one momentary flash, in 1587. when the terms of a mortgage given by his father had to be adjusted, we may possibly catch a glimpse of him ; but for all the rest a Cimmerian midnight wraps him. And what a priceless boon ! It was during these seven silent years, while holding horses at the doors of theatres for a livelihood, that he became, if we are to believe all the critics and commentators, a thorough master of law and practice down to the minutest quillet; a thorough master of medicine, with the most searching knowledge of the virtue of every herb, mineral, or medicament, including treatment of the insane and an anticipation of Harvey’s circulation of the blood ; he became an adept in veterinary medicine, and was familiar with every disease that can afflict a horse ; he learned the art of war, and served a campaign in the field ; he went to sea, and acquired an absolute mastery of a ship in a furious tempest, and made only one slight mistake, long years afterward, in the number of a ship’s glasses; he studied botany, and knew every flower by name ; horticulture, and knew every fruit; arboriculture, and knew the quality and value of all timber; that he practiced archery daily, who can doubt ? and when not hawking or fishing, he was fencing ; he became familiar with astronomy and at home in astrology ; he learned ornithology through and through, from young scamels on the rock to the wren of little quill; he was a pigeon fancier, and from long observation discovered that doves would defend their nest, and that pigeons lacked gall ; he was a printer, and not only set up books, but bound them afterward; as we have just seen, he was a strolling actor in Germany and traveled in Italy, noting the tide at Venice and the evening mass at Verona; he got his Bible by heart, including the Apocrypha ; he read every translation of every classic author then published, and, possibly, every original in Greek, Latin, Italian, and French (of course he learned German while strolling); and, finally, he read through the whole of English literature, from Chaucer down to every play or poem written by his contemporaries, and as he read he took voluminous notes (sly dog!) of every unusual word, phrase, or idea, to palm it off afterward as his own !

My own private conviction is that he mastered cuneiform ; visited America, and spent ten days in Boston,—greatly to his intellectual advantage.

Having discovered who these English comedians are, it behooves us next to learn something of the plays they acted. Here a curious fact is revealed. Although nowhere are the plays of these English comedians professedly printed, there yet exist certain German plays, written during the years that thesd English players were strolling in Germany, whereof the titles and the plots impressively remind us not only of plays then on the English stage, but even of certain plays by Shakespeare himself. Among the earliest of these German plays are those written by a certain Duke Heinrich Julius of Wolfenbuttel, who in 1590 went to Denmark, to marry the sister of that king to whom, four years before, Leicester had handed over his company of actors. It is highly probable (pardon the stereotyped phrase !) that the duke brought away with him some of these former players of Leicester. Be this as it may, certain it is that from this date Duke Heinrich Julius, during eleven years, wrote about as many comedies, tragedies, and tragi-comedies, which remained for a long time unrivaled in the German drama, such as it was ; they bear unmistakable signs of English influence. The only one which concerns us here is the Comcedia von Vincentio Ladislao, wherein Hermann Grimm, whose opinions are always worthy of all respect, finds the prototype of Benedick.

As certain critics, mostly German, found the plot of The Tempest in Jacob Ayrer’s Die schoene Sidea, so here in the same old ponderous folio of Ayrer (printed at “ Nürmberg Anno M DC XVIII.” with thirty-six farces added, printed at “ Nürnberg. Im Jahr M D C X.”), it is alleged, the plot of Much Ado about Nothing is to be found ; that is, as much of the plot as relates to Hero and Claudio. If Hermann Grimm be correct, what is lacking in Ayrer is supplied by Duke Heinrich Julius, and Shakespeare’s entire plot stands revealed. It is hardly worth while to enter here into a discussion of the date when the excellent Ayrer wrote his comedies. He died in 1605, and Cohn thinks that it is “ beyond a shadow of doubt that he wrote nearly all his pieces after 1593.” How immaterial Ayrer’s date is, in regard to the present play, we shall at once see when we learn the title of the play which is supposed to be the one from which Shakespeare drew his inspiration. The full title of it is : " A Mirror of Womanly Virtue and Honour. The Comedy of the Fair Phœnicia and Count Tymbri of Golison from Arragon, How it fared with them in their honourable love until they were united in marriage. With 17. Characters, and in 6. Acts.” There is almost sufficient evidence in this title alone of the direct source of Ayrer’s plot. It is not Bandello. In Bandello, Don Timbreo is never once styled a " Count,” and far less “ Count of Colisano; ” that he had received the " county of Colisano ” is mentioned only once at the beginning of Bandello’s story. It is Belle-Forest, who speaks habitually of the “ Comte de Colisan.” Moreover, Belle-Forest, within the first few lines of his story, speaks of the conspiracy of Giovanni di Procida, which led to the Sicilian Vespers, and styles the conspirator Jean Prochite. Bandello refers to the Sicilian Vespers, but never mentions Procida. In Ayrer, at the very beginning, when Venus enters and complains of the coldness in fove affairs of “ Tymborus Graf von Golison,” she acknowledges that he fought most bravely " when, in Sicily, that great slaughter was made by Prochyte.” The presence of this name, and in its French form, is quite sufficient, I think, to show that Ayrer’s source was not Italian, and that it was Belle-Forest. Other parallelisms between Ayrer and Belle-Forest, such as love letters and love songs, are manifest. My present purpose is attained if it be clear that while Ayrer’s source was Belle-Forest. Shakespeare’s was Bandello ; we are hereby made sure that Shakespeare was not indebted to Ayrer. Somewhat a barren conclusion, it must be acknowledged; but not without its gain, if it set at rest the supposition, held by not a few, that in Ayrer we have the original plays which Shakespeare afterward remodeled. I think it was conclusively proved in the New Variorum Tempest that there is no connection whatever between that play and Ayrer’s Schoene Sidea. Nevertheless, Mr. Fleay, in speaking of these plays of Ayrer, together with those contained in another collection, first printed in 1620, four years after Shakespeare’s death, says: “ A close examination of these German versions convinces me that they were rough draughts by juvenile hands, in which great license was left to the actors to fill up or alter extemporaneously at their option. Successive changes made in this way have greatly defaced them ; but enough of the originals remain to show that they were certainly in some cases, probably in others, the earliest forms of our great dramatist’s plays. I have no doubt he drew up the plots for them while in Germany.”

If this last assurance be correct, it is pleasing to reflect how thoroughly our great dramatist emancipated himself in after years from these juvenile draughts. That these first feeble bantlings of the German drama were the offspring of the plays acted by the English comedians I have no doubt ; at times we feel the very whiff and wind of the early London stage ; than this there is, I think, nothing more substantial. Nay, does not the very Preface of Ayrer’s folio acknowledge that his plays were written after the new English fashion, “ auff di neue Englische manier vnnd art,” and are not four of his operettas — so to call his Singets Spil — sung to the tune of the English Roland ” ? These early German dramas will always remain a curious and interesting study to English and German students. But I doubt that we shall ever find among them anything which might be called a translation of an English play, however primitive or rudimentary ; there may be here and there scenes, or names, or allusions, like Corambis in Hamlet or like Prochyte in The Fair Phœnicia, but there an end. The original will be recalled, not reproduced. It would be pleasant to think that we might turn to Germany to find the plays, lost to England, which Shakespeare remodeled, but, I fear, it is not to be. Possibly, the connection between Much Ado about Nothing and The Fair Phœnicia is as close as any we shall ever find between the English and the German plays. I have said that Belle-Forest is the direct or indirect source of The Fair Phœnicia. If it be the indirect source, there may have been a play acted by the English comedians, some of whom were Shakespeare’s fellow actors, which served as the original both to Ayrer and to Shakespeare. Nearer than this, I think, we shall never get.

Coleridge is recorded to have said that “ Dogberry and his comrades are forced into the service, when any other less ingeniously absurd watchmen and night constables would have answered the mere necessities of the action.” Aliquando bonus Homerus, etc. This remark by him who is, perhaps, our greatest critic on Shakespeare has been, it is to be feared, the cause of much misunderstanding not only of Shakespeare’s plays in general, but of this present play in particular. An idea is thereby conveyed that Shakespeare worked, to a certain extent, at haphazard, or at least that at times he lost sight of the requirements of his story, and was willing to vary the characters of his creation at the suggestion of caprice, — to introduce a blundering constable here or a drunken porter there, just to lighten his play or to raise a horselaugh in the groundlings. It would be difficult to imagine a falser Imputation on Shakespeare’s consummate art. Never for one instant did Shakespeare lose sight of the trending of his story: not a scene, I had almost said not a phrase, did he write that does not reveal the true hard-working artist laboring, with undeviating gaze, to secure a certain effect. The opinion is abroad that Shakespeare produced his Dogberry and Verges out of the sheer exuberance of his love of fun, and that in this “ star y-pointed ” comedy they are the star of comicality merely to give the audience a scene to laugh at. This inference is utterly wrong. They do, indeed, supply endless mirth, but Shakespeare had to have them just as they are. He was forced to have characters like these, and none other. The play hinges on them. Had they been sufficiently quick-witted to recognize the villainy of the plot betrayed by Borachio to Conrade, the play would have ended at once. Therefore, they had to be stupid, most ingeniously stupid, and show “ matter and impertinency ” so mixed that we can understand how they came to be invested with even such small authority as their office implies. Men less stupid would never have had their suspicions aroused by what they supposed to be an allusion to “ Deformed, a vile thief.” Even this allusion is not haphazard : stupid by nature as these watchmen are, no chance must be given them to discern the importance of their prisoners ; their attention must be diverted from the right direction to something utterly irrelevant, which shall loom up as significant in their muddled brains. Hence, this “ Deformed ” is not a mere joke, but a stroke of art, and does not of necessity involve a contemporary allusion, as is maintained. At no previous point in the play could Dogberry and Verges have been introduced; where they first appear is the exact point at which they are needed. Through the villainy of Don John and the weakness of Claudio the sunshine of this sparkling comedy is threatened with eclipse, and the atmosphere becomes charged with tragedy. Just at this point appear these infinitely stupid watchmen, all whose talk, preliminary to the arrest of Borachio and Conrade, is by no means merely to make us laugh, but to give us assurance that the play is still a comedy, and that, however ludicrous may be the entanglement in which these blundering fools will involve the story, the solution, the denouement, will be brought about by their means, and that the plot against Hero which we see is hatching will by them be brought to naught. Had Dogberry been one whit less conceited, one whit less pompous, one whit less tedious, he could not have failed to drop at least one syllable that would have arrested Leonato’s attention just before the tragic treatment of Hero in the marriage scene, which would not then have taken place, and the whole story would have ended then and there. Dogberry had to be introduced just then to give us assurance that Don John’s villainy would come eventually to light, and thereby enable us to bear Hero’s sad fate with such equanimity that we can listen, immediately after, with delighted hearts to the wooing of Benedick and Beatrice.

I do by no means say that Shakespeare could have dramatized this story in no other way, — his resources were infinite ; but I do say that, having started as he did start, he was forced, by the necessities of the action, to have stupidity rule supreme, and no whit less than supreme, at those points where he has given us the immortal Dogberry.

Horace Howard Furness.