Looking for something to lighten your spirits as the chill winds of autumn start dancing through the streets? Much Ado About Nothing is tonight!

A couple centuries worth of editorial work have worked marvels in cleaning up the text of Shakespeare’s plays. Elizabethan foibles, errors, and hack jobs have been turned into polished, perfected texts — the result of perhaps the most thorough and extensive analysis of any text in the history of civilization. (Only the King James’ Bible [...]

The original text for Much Ado About Nothing is the quarto of 1600. The play was also included in the First Folio of 1623, but the text there appears to have been typeset from the quarto itself. (It replicates virtually all of the quarto’s errors. For example, half of Balthasar’s lines in 2.1 are nonsensically [...]

Benedick and Beatrice. Romeo and Juliet may be Shakespeare’s tribute to eternal passion, but Benedick and Beatrice are perhaps the perfect Shakespearean lovers: Witty, acerbic, charming, independent… Ruthless. Much Ado About Nothing has burbled with vivacious energy from its first performance in 1598. Often imitated, never duplicated, it’s a rollickin’ ride of pure entertainment from [...]