THE SOURCES OF "MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING,"

by Charles T. Prouty '3l.Yale University Press, 1950, 142 pp., $2.50.

The second half of this book is a reprint of Peter Beverley's History of Ariodanto andGenevra, first published about 1566 in an edition of which only one copy seems extant, and never reprinted before. Professor Prouty has rendered a service to scholarship by reproducing and editing a rare document of considerable importance, even though Beverley's blathering transmogrification of Ariosto's Genevra incident is very dull.

The real worth of Mr. Prouty's book is hardly suggested by its title. It is improbable that any research will ever find or ascertain the "sources" of Much Ado about Nothing in the narrow sense of that term: nobody now knows what book Shakespeare read or what tale he heard that suggested to him the particular complications of the plot contrived around sweet innocent Hero "the slandered bride." But Mr. Prouty has given us an intelligent and enlightening discussion of materials and ideas which must have been familiar to Shakespeare in one form or another, and of Shakespeare's motives and methods in producing high comedy from crude stuff. Particularly useful is the light shed on Claudio, that execrable prig, who, as Mr. Prouty points out, was never meant to be romantic or admirable, but absurb, somewhat like Jane Austen's Mr. Collins, though unfortunately not so funny. Students of Much Ado should be grateful for Mr. Prouty's demonstration that the significance and coherence of the play are derived from consistent though varied ridicule of false doctrines about love and marriage—falsely romantic, falsely mercenary, falsely cynical.