Much Ado About Nothing in 1591. The character of Benedick too has a counterpart in a commentary upon marriage in "Orlando Furioso", but the witty wooing of Beatrice and Benedick is original and very unusual in style and syncopation. One version of the Claudio/Hero plot is told by Edmund Spenser in "The Faerie Queen" (Book II, Canto iv). The earliest printed text states that "Much Ado About Nothing" was "sundry times publicly acted" prior to 1600 and it is likely that the play made its debut in the autumn or winter of 1598–1599. The earliest recorded performances are two that were given at Court
Much Ado About Nothing the album is also a quotation from the play. The 2014 YouTube web series Nothing Much to Do is a modern retelling of the play, set in New Zealand. In 2015, Billie Joe Armstrong wrote the music for a rock opera adaptation of the play, "These Paper Bullets", which was written by Rolin Jones. In 2017, a YA adaptation was released by author Mckelle George called "Speak Easy, Speak Love", where the events of the play take place in the 1920s, focused around a failing speakeasy. In 2018, author Molly Booth released a summer YA novel adaptation called "Nothing Happened",