About the Play:

Much Ado About Nothing, often considered the first rom-com, is an adored comedy by William Shakespeare about misunderstandings, love, and deception. The anti-romantic wits Beatrice and Benedick, who profess to hate each other, are forced by their friends' trickery to admit their true feelings as they help to save the wedding of his fellow soldier Claudio and her cousin Hero. One of the Bard's best romantic comedies, it was written at a point when he had honed his craft so characters are not just caricatures but are multi-dimensional.

Read William Shakespeare's great comedy Much Ado About Nothing in all its brilliance and actually understand what it means. No Fear Shakespeare gives you Shakespeare's complete original text of Much Ado About Nothing on the left-hand page, side-by-side with an easy-to-understand modern English on the right, with marginal notes and explanations and full descriptions of each character.

Shakespeare side-by-side in plain English. Each No Fear Shakespeare contains:
• The complete text of the original play
• A line-by-line translation that puts Shakespeare into the kind of English people actually speak today
• A complete list of characters with descriptions
• Plenty of helpful commentary

Much Ado About Nothing was written between 1598 and 1599 is Shakespeare's most frequently performed comedy.

About the Playwright:

Arguably the greatest English-language playwright, William Shakespeare was a seventeenth-century writer and dramatist, and is known as the Bard of Avon. Under the patronage of Queen Elizabeth I, he penned more than 30 plays, 154 sonnets, and numerous narrative poems and short verses. Equally accomplished in histories, tragedies, comedy, and romance, Shakespeare's most famous works include Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, The Taming of the Shrew, and As You Like It. Like many of his contemporaries, including Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare began his career on the stage, eventually rising to become part-owner of Lord Chamberlain's Men, a popular dramatic company of his day, and of the storied Globe Theatre in London. Extremely popular in his lifetime, Shakespeare's works continue to resonate more than three hundred years after his death. His plays are performed more often than any other playwright's, have been translated into every major language in the world, and are studied widely by scholars and students.