Much Ado About Nothing notes (1st edition)

In this extract from Act 4 Scene 1, Claudio’s public humiliation of Hero is the climax of Much Ado About Nothing and through this Shakespeare addresses several of the themes present throughout the play such as female virtue, honour, gender politics and the patriarchal hegemony of Elizabethan society. Above all, Hero’s denouncement dramatically undermines the theatrical nature of love in the play and takes the play on darker turn that combines the qualities of both tragedy and comedy in Shake...