Much Ado About Nothing modern-day studios of Wessex Tonight, a fictional regional news programme, as part of the "ShakespeaRe-Told" season, with Damian Lewis, Sarah Parish, and Billie Piper. The first cinematic version in English may have been the 1913 silent film directed by Phillips Smalley. Martin Hellberg's 1964 East German film Viel Lärm um nichts was based on the Shakespeare play. In 1973 a Soviet film adaptation was directed by Samson Samsonov which starred Galina Jovovich and Konstantin Raikin. The first sound version in English released to cinemas was the highly acclaimed 1993 film by Kenneth Branagh. It starred Branagh as Benedick, Branagh's then-wife
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