The Comedy of Errors (Vol. 77) - Ann C. Christensen (essay date spring 1996)
Ann C. Christensen (essay date spring 1996)
SOURCE: Christensen, Ann C. “‘Because Their Business Still Lies out a' Door’: Resisting the Separation of the Spheres in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors.” Literature and History 5, no. 1 (spring 1996): 19-37.
[In the following essay, Christensen approaches The Comedy of Errors as a mercantile comedy that dramatizes tensions between the gendered spheres of public/commercial and private/domestic.]
‘What is habitual and domestic is seldom recorded. Only in a time of crisis are the dispositions of the household likely to be described.’1
I
The Comedy of Errors represents Shakespeare's first picture of a mercantile household—one troubled by identity confusion, lost parents, missing brothers, marital neglect, jealousy, and sour business deals. With its uncertainty about identity, and its debates about intimacy...
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