Shakespeare’s impersonations: Ariosto and the game of 'sorti' in Much Ado About Nothing

Abstract

'Much Ado About Nothing', first published in 1600, is a play of dissimulation. Complex disguises, literal and emotional, persuade individuals into both declarations and disavowals of feelings. Claudio, in particular, is duped into humiliating his betrothed Hero by an elaborate trick in which she is made to seem unfaithful through a proxy performance of erotic arousal. It has long been assumed that a direct or indirect source for this major element in Shakespeare’s plot derives from Canto V of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, in which the servant Dalinda impersonates Ginevra on the balcony, to the most painful chagrin of Ginevra’s lover Ariodante. However, Shakespeare’s interest in dissimulation goes much further than this. Dissimulatio is the Latin rhetorical term in which the whole point is that the distinction between real and simulated feeling is often impossible to decipher, as Cicero and Quintilian discussed on several occasions. Moreover, the idea of impersonation merges with the developing discourse of personation on the stage: the ability of an actor to simulate the feelings of a different person, even without disguise. By ‘traveling through a textual labyrinth’, as Umberto Eco puts it, this essay investigates the presence of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso among the complex sources of this Shakespearean play, whose comedic plot apropos of an unjustly accused character may reveal elements of tribute to Giordano Bruno’s ‘heroic’ pursuit of truth. In doing so, we aim to discern how Ariosto’s allegoric effects are diffused in Shakespeare’s play of betrayed emotions and epistemic quest.</p