The Comedy of Errors (Vol. 34) - Appearance Vs. Reality
APPEARANCE VS. REALITY
Sidney R. Homan (essay date 1984)
SOURCE: "The Comedy of Errors and Its Audience: 'And Here We Wander in Illusions'," in The CEA Critic, Vol. 47, Nos. 1/2, Fall-Winter, 1984, pp. 17-30.
[In this essay, Homan discusses The Comedy of Errors' myriad collisions of reality with misleading or misunderstood appearances.]
What we hear and see at the present moment constitutes an experience unique to the theater, one not shared by non-dramatic works that, operating by their own unique principles, must perforce have their own definitions of "experience"1 This theatrical "presence" is especially ironic in The Comedy of Errors, given the significance of its past, that "history" extending from the birth of the twins, and from the coincidental birth of twin servants, to the accident at sea separating the family, to the separate lives led in Ephesus and Syracuse, with roughly seventeen...
[The entire page is 13486 words long]
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