What was Big Willy Shakes going for?
As a title, Much Ado About Nothing fits neatly with a bunch of Shakespeare's other plays written around the same time. His titles seem whimsical and even flippant. Twelfth Night was alternatively titled What You Will, and As You Like It seems a much less informative title than, say, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
Still, these unpredictable titles are actually as reflective of their content as any history or tragedy title. The plot of Much Ado About Nothing centers on a lot of hubbub over little misunderstandings (misnoting like we discussed earlier). There's a whole lot of fuss about stuff that ultimately isn't all that important.
We've already pointed out how a person can misunderstand a meaning, or mishear, or misreport something, in the process of noting. The foibles that result from noting (and misnoting) are central to keeping the play spinning.
If that wasn't interesting enough for you, you might want to note that "nothing" was also an Elizabethan slang term for the vagina. Yep, we went there. And not to be crass, but Much Ado About Vagina makes sense as a title, right? After all, the highs and lows of the play revolve around men and their relationships with, suspicion of, and lack of relationships with, yep, women.
Reading the title this way puts women in a central and powerful role in the play. While the men are the ones working, the women are whom they're working for. We're sure Shakespeare's audience would have gotten the pun here. The play is about both noting and nothing (in an Elizabethan sense).
Shakespeare came up with this title as a fun way of expressing that people are making a big deal of something that is nothing in both those senses of the word. He certainly used "much ado" by itself in a bunch of other plays, including King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, Timon of Athens, and The Winter's Tale. But here it was about nothing (and not, say, the complicated politics of Jolly Olde England).