Almost everything in the play is overlooked or overheard, from the opening rumours that Claudio intends to woo Hero, to the inadvertent confession of the plot in Borachio’s loose talk which brings about the play’s resolution. Our presence as audience adds another level to the surveillance culture which governs social codes and sacrifices privacy to a potentially coercive version of ‘community’ – a kind of comic Sicilian Nineteen Eighty-Four.
