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 and proneness to sexual lightness". In the patriarchal society of the play, the men's loyalties were governed by conventional codes of honour and camaraderie and a sense of superiority to women. Assumptions that women are by nature prone to inconstancy are shown in the repeated jokes on cuckoldry and partly explain Claudio's readiness to believe the slur against Hero. This stereotype is turned on its head in Balthazar's song "Sigh No More," which presents men as the deceitful and inconstant sex that women must suffer. A theme in Shakespeare is cuckoldry or the infidelity of a wife. Several of the