So Don John is believed by the characters and by the plot because two contesting storylines run through Much Ado and give it narrative torque. One impulse reinstates male bonds and is therefore, implicitly, anti-comic; the other educates men into accepting primary allegiances with women, and thus conforms to comic necessity. Don John spins the play towards tragedy, and momentarily it obeys, bringing out a friar and a crazy plan to make a difficult marital situation better by pretending a woman is dead. That worked so well in Romeo and Juliet – a play already well known by the time of Much Ado.
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