Like most of Shakespeare's other comedies, Much Ado About Nothing is bittersweet—alongside the levity and playfulness is a pervasive understanding, and to some degree fear, of what could go wrong. While The Merchant of Venice, Love's Labour's Lost, and Measure for Measure all lean pretty heavily into the darkness that Shakespeare likes to temper with the comic, Twelfth Night and As You Like It are most like Much Ado About Nothing with respect to the balance between wit and tragedy (Greenblatt).
As mentioned above, Much Ado weaves two plots together, that of Benedick and Beatrice and that of Claudio and Hero. Benedick and Beatrice's story resembles Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde,...
