By Emma Smith, author of This Is Shakespeare

We all love a rom-com – and that’s just what Much Ado About Nothing is. Depending on your vintage, Beatrice is a character played by Katharine Hepburn, or Julia Roberts, or Cameron Diaz. She is in a recognisable plot revolving around a couple who we can clearly see should get together.

The script is full of witty dialogue, the context is generally feel-good. Much Ado begins with Don Pedro’s soldiers returning from the wars: the setting is recuperative, the bad stuff is, largely, pushed outside the play’s boundaries.

Part of the pleasure of watching it is that the jeopardy is not too worrisome: that ‘will-they-won’t-they’ dynamic is reassuringly skewed towards they-will. The play shows us that resistance is futile – just as Beatrice and Benedick just need to acknowledge their feelings, so we, the audience, need to set aside our cynicism and enjoy ourselves.

So far, so familiar. What’s different about this play from Shakespeare’s other comedies is its modern sense of what could impede a happy ending. As A Midsummer Night’s Dream puts it, ‘The course of true love never did run smooth’ – but more usually, Shakespeare suggests that it is external factors that threaten to mess things up: authoritarian fathers who don’t approve, or apparent mismatch of social status, or the small detail that one of the partners is dressed in the clothing of the opposite sex.

In Much Ado it’s clear that it is the couple themselves who are too emotionally bruised and defensive to admit to the vulnerability that’s inherent in romantic partnership. No-one is stopping them – in fact, everyone in the play is desperately working to get them together. Rather, it’s their own personal resistance to risk.

Beatrice’s acknowledgement in the play’s first scene, ‘I know you of old’, opens a window into a past relationship and its hidden scars. Humour in this play – as so often – is a defence mechanism which prevents anyone from getting too close.

For modern audiences, Beatrice and Benedick are the play’s central couple. Their sparring, their familiarity, their equality, that sense that they have a past together – these are all aspects of twenty-first century relationships which may have looked idiosyncratic to the play’s first spectators.

Hero and Claudio are more firmly Elizabethan figures. They paired off via an arrangement between powerful men rather than their own agency, and they never appear alone on stage together.

The play suggests that this conventional model of marriage doesn’t have the necessary resilience to meet difficulty. When Claudio hears – and thinks he sees – that Hero has been unfaithful, he takes matters up with her father at the interrupted wedding, rather than talking directly to his bride. ‘Give not this rotten orange to your friend’: the phrase echoes with misogyny. Whether Hero is right to recommit herself to the repentant Claudio at the end of the play is very much a matter for directorial choice.

Rom-com’s powerful structure carries the play along to its conclusion, and makes us overlook some of its more coercive cultural baggage. Rom-coms now, as then, tend to be socially conservative (who ever saw a rom-com about polygamy, for instance?), re-imposing traditional heterosexual norms. Acknowledging this helps us to acknowledge the darker undercurrent of Much Ado About Nothing.

Just as the friends of Beatrice and Benedick trick them into declarations of love, so too Donna Joanna (in the original, Don John) tricks Don Pedro and Claudio into believing Hero’s disgrace. The same techniques are used both to bring about the happy ending, and to try to sabotage it. Perhaps, like many holiday destinations, the playworld starts to seem a bit claustrophobic, a place in which everything is overheard or spied on, and where privacy is in short supply.

The play’s dialogue and characterisation, however, helps us to suppress these undercurrents. Humour dominates the tone of Much Ado About Nothing, from the choreography of Beatrice overhearing herself called proud, to Dogberry’s pompous (but eventually successful) policing and the sparkling foreplay of the banter between Beatrice and Benedick.

In the end, this is a play in which the central couple are both quirky individuals and representatives of communal values and celebration. As Benedick comes to realise, ‘the world must be peopled’. Modern romcoms tend to be associated with female spectators, but the Elizabethan version was aimed squarely at young men. Grow up, settle down, make the future, the play urges them.

Where tragedies end in isolation and destruction, comedies end with a reassertion of community and regeneration. We can all recognise that message of the importance of being together, of individuals supported by communities, and of a better future, right now.