The Comedy of Errors (Vol. 34) | Douglas Lanier (essay date 1993)
Douglas Lanier (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: "'Stigmatical in Making': The Material Character of The Comedy of Errors," in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 23, No. 1, Winter, 1993, pp. 81-112.
[In this excerpt, Lanier argues that the instability of the characters in The Comedy of Errors proceeds from disjunctions between apparent and actual identity.]
[A cultural crisis of self-representation] clearly fascinated Shakespeare throughout his career.1 Barry Weller's observation that "much of the action of Shakespearean drama [might be seen] as a struggle, not so much for self-awareness, as for self-representation" (p. 342) is particularly appropriate for the early comedies. Shakespeare's Plautine adaptation The Comedy of Errors, for example, takes as its focus the discontinuity between identities and the external marks that display, support, and confirm them. Despite the play's Christian overlay and its extensive...
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