The Oxford Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing (Oxford World's Classics)

by William Shakespeare (Author), William Shakespeare (Author), Sheldon P. Zitner (Editor)

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $3.24

  Sparkling with the witty dialogue between Beatrice and Benedicts, Much Ado About Nothing is one of Shakespeare's most enjoyable and theatrically successful comedies. This edition offers a newly edited text and an exceptionally helpful and critically aware introduction. Paying particular attention to analysis of the play's minor characters, Sheldon P Zitner discusses Shakespeare's transformation of his source material. He rethinks the attitudes to gender relations that underlie the comedy and determine its view of marriage. Allowing for the play's openness to reinterpretation by successive generations of readers and peformers, Zitner provides a socially analytic stage history, advancing new views for the actor as much as for the critic.

• Used

  Paperback
  1990

  $3.24

• New

  Paperback
  1995

  $6.70

  Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex. The Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare Series presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare's works. The textual editing takes account of recent scholarship while giving the material a careful reappraisal. Much Ado About Nothing has long been celebrated as one of Shakespeare's most popular comedies. The central relationship, between Benedick and Beatrice, is wittily combative until love prevails. Broader comedy is provided by Dogberry, Verges and the watchmen. The drama ranges between the destructively sinister and the lyrically romantic, giving the whole a complex and sometimes problematic character. Numerous revivals, in the theatre and on screen, have displayed the lively variety and interpretative openness of this engaging comedy.