Read Much Ado About Nothing by email.
Three weeks, and the wedding morning runs eleven minutes without a break.
A soldier home from a war and the woman who out-talks him are tricked into each other by their friends, on purpose, in a garden. Twenty-one mornings in Messina — one of which is the wedding, eleven minutes long and arriving in a single unbroken piece.
Four or five minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
Three weeks from now, you will have read Shakespeare.
21 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1598
- Installments
- 21
- Each installment
- 4–5 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 22,662
- Reading time
- 1 hour 34 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 3 weeks
- At 10 minutes a day
- 9 days
- At 20 minutes a day
- 5 days
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read Much Ado About Nothing?
Much Ado is built out of eavesdropping, and eavesdropping is scene-shaped: somebody hides, somebody else says the useful thing loudly, the hider comes out changed. Seventeen scenes over twenty-one mornings, and its two great set-pieces are a matched pair — Benedick in Leonato’s orchard hearing that Beatrice loves him, then Beatrice in Leonato’s garden hearing the same about him — which land on consecutive mornings and are funnier for the gap. In between, the Watch overhears the actual crime and fails to understand a word of it, which is also how the play gets fixed.
Verse arrives as verse and prose as prose, and that distinction does more work here than in any other play in the catalogue: roughly seven-eighths of the speeches are prose, and the verse is not spread evenly — seven verse speeches in Act I, fifty-five in Act V. The play talks its way into trouble and versifies its way out. Speaker names sit in small capitals, stage directions in italics. Four of the seventeen scenes are too long for one email, each cut at a stage direction marking an entrance or an exit rather than at a word count. Act IV Scene 1 is the exception, and it is worth saying plainly rather than hiding: the broken wedding in the church runs 2,700 words — about eleven minutes — and the only stage direction standing between speeches is the entrance at the very top. Every later one is tucked inside somebody’s line. There is nowhere to cut it, so it arrives whole, which is also the right way to receive it.
Installment 1 is the playbill — nineteen persons of the play, a setting given in one word, Messina — then a messenger with a letter saying the war is over and the men are coming back. Asked how many gentlemen were lost, he answers “few of any sort, and none of name,” and the comedy starts there. What follows is three weeks of overheard conversations, exactly one of which is true. The run has room for both extremes: a morning that is under 250 words of Claudio reading an epitaph at a monument by torchlight, and a morning that is the entire wedding. Beatrice’s most famous speech in that wedding is two words long.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read Much Ado About Nothing?
About an hour and a half straight through (22,662 words). By email, it’s 21 daily installments of four to five minutes — three weeks exactly, or faster at a premium pace of two or three scenes a day.
Is this the complete, unabridged text?
Yes — all seventeen scenes in the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition, including Dogberry’s examination of the prisoners in full, all three songs, and the dramatis personae. Nothing is trimmed or modernized.
How does a play work as email?
One scene per email, in play formatting: speaker names in small capitals, stage directions in italics, verse kept as verse and prose kept as prose. The median installment is 1,027 words, four or five minutes. Four of the seventeen scenes split at an entrance or an exit; the other thirteen arrive whole, Act IV Scene 1 included — 2,700 words in one piece, because Shakespeare left no stage direction inside it to stop at.
Do the recaps spoil anything?
Each recap covers only the previous scene, so nothing arrives before the play delivers it. The play gives itself away far earlier: you watch Don John arrange the slander in Act II, and you watch the Watch arrest the men who carried it out the night before the wedding. The last week is spent waiting for a constable to reach the point.
How does it arrive?
One installment per email, one email a day, at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous scene at the top. Free. Unsubscribe or pause anytime.
Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.