Tragedy And Irony In Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing

Shakespeare’s play ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ is considered a comedy with tragic elements. In Shakespeare’s time, comedy was considered a lesser form of a performance than a tragedy. Greek comedies portray a battle between a young hero and an older authority, a confrontation of some kind. In the conclusion, the lovers are changed, and usually get married. Therefore, if we know that comedies have tragic elements and tragedies comic elements, a simplified contrast of tragedy and comedy will say that comedy begins with disorder and ends in order, while with tragedy is the other way round (Thompson, 2011). With this in mind, marriage was a good way to reinstate order during times of direst in Elizabethan England as well as in the past eras. Shakespeare’s

The play starts with romance coming over the leading man, Claudio, who plots to woo Leonato’s daughter Hero at a banquet that his troupe and his captain, Don Pedro, have been invited to. As in all good Shakespearean plays, there is also a side plot that eventually involves romance and marriage, between Beatrice and a man who says he will never marry called Benedick. The villain in the play Don John, the illegitimate brother of Don Pedro, has an evil plan to ruin the love and marriages of Claudio and Hero. Comedies and love stories tend to depict marriage as a desired end, while the tragedies and bleaker histories over dramatize marriage as the grounds of suffering; this play combines both factors to make the story of the lovers (Newey,

‘Much Ado About Nothing’ character Benedick’s perception of marriage is that it is a threat to masculine friendships and freedom, this is the action or the ‘cost’. The reaction or ‘reward’ is that now there is a challenge that has to be cover came, Don Pedro and Leonato’s plan is to get Benedick married to Beatrice (Karpinska, 2010). An instance of a negative reward and cost is how Claudio, after being fooled by Don John into believing his love Hero was involved with some other man, ousted Hero publicly humiliating her at their own nuptials. The cost was that he now thought Hero was dead, however, after showing true grief for her father was he ‘rewarded’ with his lover