The first printed text of Much Ado About Nothing was the quarto-format edition of 1600. Since it is a good quality text and since the 1623 folio text derives from it, all modern editors use quarto as their ‘copy-text’ for Much Ado. But it is in the folio text alone that we find a very nice Dogberryism (malapropism) — ‘statues’ in place of ‘statutes’. The quarto, presumed to be based on Shakespeare’s original manuscript, has ‘statutes’, which is semantically the right word but dramatically the wrong one. We simply do not know whether the folio editor restored a Shakespearean joke that had been obscured by a quarto misprint or inserted a joke that Shakespeare should have made but didn’t. Shakespearean editors agonise about this distinction and 10,000 others like it. Because textual orthodoxy demands that they follow quarto, they leave out the joke. I say relax: it’s a good joke, it’s there in the folio, an editor should print it and an actor should speak it. If that means accepting the anonymous folio editor of Much Ado as one of Shakespeare’s ‘co-authors’, along with his actors and the other dramatists with whom he sometimes worked in collaboration, then all well and good.
The new edition is published this month, a fitting climax to a year in which Stratford has seen Shakespeare in Japanese, Russian, Italian, German, Chinese, Portuguese, seven Indian dialects, Shakespeare performed by Bunraku puppets and by Tiny Ninjas bought from an Oregon vending machine, Shakespeare sung and Shakespeare danced. The cumulative effect has been an extraordinary reminder of the timeless and international appeal of the Heart of All England’s Elizabethan Man, a reminder, in Hazlitt’s words, of ‘the sweetness, thought, gravity, grace, wit, artless nature, copiousness, ease, pathos, and sublime conceptions of Shakespeare’s Muse.’
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