Much Ado About Nothing and pain

Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing especially focuses upon pain. A great build-up of physically but mainly verbally caused pain dissolves in the play’s final episodes. This essay explores this paradox by analysing the pain Beatrice and Benedick, Don John, Claudio and Hero, Leonato and Anthony feel and mutually inflict. Variously charged by local dramatic contexts, such suffering invites the application of past and contemporary theories of pain for its fullest interpretation in this comedy. The possibility of empathy depends in the case of Much Ado upon this application