The Comedy of Errors (Vol. 34) | Eamon Grennan (essay date 1980)
Eamon Grennan (essay date 1980)
SOURCE: "Arm and Sleeve: Nature and Custom in The Comedy of Errors," in Philological Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 2, Spring, 1980, pp. 150-64.
[In this essay, Grennan argues that The Comedy of Errors is structured by a dialectic between the concepts of nature and custom.]
In the midst of the comic jostling that gives life to "perhaps the most uncomplicatedly funny of all Shakespeare's plays,"1 lurk a theme and a "structural idea"2 serious enough to command attention not only for the light they cast on this play but for the first sight they give of a concern that was to persist throughout Shakespeare's work. The dialectic of nature and custom variously repeated in the theme, structure, and language of The Comedy of Errors offers, for all its sober overtones, a way into the play that is true to its textual and theatrical possibilities, and provides yet another hint of the...
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