Much Ado About Nothing Deception Essay

Much Ado About Nothing is one of William Shakespeare’s famous comedies. Even though it is a comedy, it plays with many ideas that would not connect to a modern day comedy like manipulation, abandonment at the altar, and deception. This play is known to be one of Shakespeare’s experiments on writing his manipulative characters such as Iago in Othello, one of his tragedies. He played with the concept of deceptive characters in many characters throughout this play. Deception and lies reveal many things about the characters in Much Ado About Nothing, they can be shown through tricking Benedick into falling in love and Don John tricking Claudio into thinking Don Pedro won Hero for himself and into thinking Hero cheated.

One aspect of deception is the playful deception used by Leonato, Claudio, and Don Pedro to trick Benedick into falling in love with Beatrice. During the masquerade after Claudio and Hero became engaged, the Prince decided to make a game out of making Benedick and Beatrice fall in love by saying “... which is to bring Signior Benedick and the Lady Beatrice into a mountain of affection, th’ one with th’ other,” (II.i.356-358). They made Benedick fall in love by having a conversation that Benedick overheard. The character that instigated this plan, Don Pedro, was using deception and lies as a fun game and as a way to

The lies that Don Pedro told show his playful nature and his joking spirit while the lies of Don John display his manipulative nature and his villain-like qualities. The play illustrates that lies can have good or bad consequences and the consequences of lies are determined by the character of the deceitful person. An ‘evil’ character, like Don John, will tell lies that can hurt people, while a ‘good’ character, like Don Pedro, will tell lies that will help people. So the lies that the character tells reflect their