Much Ado About Nothing, comedy in five acts by William Shakespeare, written probably in 1598-99 and printed in a quarto edition from the author's own manuscript in 1600. The play takes an ancient theme-that of a woman falsely accused of unfaithfulness-to brilliant comedic heights. Shakespeare used as his main source for the Claudio-Hero plot a story from Matteo Bandello's Novelle (1554-73); he also may have consulted Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. The ...