<P> Claudio: Now you talk of a sheet of paper, I remember a pretty jest your daughter told us of . </P> <P> Leonato: O, when she had writ it and was reading it over, she found Benedick and Beatrice between the sheet? </P> <P> in which Leonato makes a sexual innuendo concerning sheet as a sheet of paper (on which Beatrice's love note to Benedick is to have been written) and a bedsheet . </P> <P> The play was very popular in its early decades, as it would be later: in a poem published in 1640, Leonard Digges wrote, "...let but Beatrice / And Benedick be seen, lo in a trice / The Cockpit galleries, boxes, all are full ." </P>

When does much ado about nothing take place