Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare

This play was much more serious than I remembered it being. It is certainly not a play about nothing. The verbal fencing between Benedick and Beatrice is priceless, but there is much more to the play than that, and there is more dark subject matter than light comedy in it. Thankfully the evil is thwarted and the story is prevented from being another Romeo and Juliet, but the villain is allowed to escape unpunished, and tragedy is barely averted, just as it is in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Even when Shakespeare is amusing himself and playing for laughs there is something of the tragic in him that comes to the surface; he is too great an artist to forget himself in laughter for long.