Review of Indira Ghose’s Much Ado About Nothing: Language & Writing.

Much Ado About Nothing: Language & Writing.  Indira Ghose.  Bloomsbury: London and New York, 2018, xii+180 pages. $ 19.75

This text provides an extraordinarily fine introduction to Much Ado About Nothing as it is very well organized and wonderfully erudite.  Ghose’s introduction thoughtfully discusses the topic of genre as it relates to the play in question.  Ghose thoughtfully outlines the significant contributions of C.L. Barber and Northrup Frye, and sensibly brings up the play’s “preoccupation with language”(11) and the influence of Ciceronian rhetoric and euphuism, a popular mode of writing prose beginning in the 1580’s.  Ghose concisely discusses the sources for Much Ado About Nothing providing the reader a comprehensive overview of its beginnings.  Finally, Ghose does an admiral job of laying out the dominant themes that concern the play.

In Chapter 1, “Language in Context,” Ghose provides an excellent introduction to the historical and cultural contexts in which the play was printed.  There is a useful discussion of the influence of Cicero’s De Oratore [On the Ideal Orator] on Baldassare Casiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, first published in 1528 and then translated into English by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561.  It is hard to underestimate the influence of Castiglione’s courtesy manual, which had gone through 125 editions about 60 of which were in translation within 100 years of its publication.  As Ghose asserts, “What Much Ado About Nothing shares with Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier is not only a dazzling…