Comedy Of Errors Research Articles

Shapes of hatred and violence in Shakespeare

I use five Shakespearean plays to discuss how the meaning of the shapes of hatred and violence depend on individual character traits. In this sense, hatred and violence can either make comic characters meet some sort of reconciliation or self-destruction in the case of tragic characters. In The Comedy of Errors, the Dromio brothers, who are subject to violence from their master’s part, are the ones who can find redemption nonetheless. In The Merchant of Venice, the structural hatred between Shylock and Antonio seems to configure a form of meaning to them. In King Henry V, the enablement of violence during war time seems to suggest that the capacity for violence is inherent to every human being. This suggestion is carried over through Titus Andronicus, in which Shakespeare explores the traumatic effects of violence within a mythical realm. Finally, in Macbeth, we see how the protagonist, who is accustomed to the violence of war, can have his own nature changed when he is forced to unwillingly commit a murder outside the context of war.

The Queen’s Favorite Unknown Dramatist: Were There Other Royal Plays By Shakespeare? A Research Inquiry

Surviving records of Queen Elizabeth’s revels briefly list performance dates, expenses, and sometimes titles of plays and masques that she had seen. Evidence suggests that, sometimes under titles different from the ones we know, the queen viewed at least 18 different Shakespeare plays – about half the canon – clearly proving him as her favorite dramatist. The most obvious example is royal performances of The History of Error in 1577 and 1583, and Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. King James, Elizabeth’s successor, saw at least 17 Shakespeare plays. Yet no evidence exists that either monarch knew, met or corresponded with anyone named William Shakespeare. And no one in the court of either Elizabeth or James ever claimed to have known William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon during his lifetime or had anything to say when he died. This blankness supports the notion that the name was a pseudonym for someone wishing to remain publicly anonymous. This essay – and its attached research inquiry – examines the plays and masques performed at Elizabeth’s court and suggests that many of them were actually Shakespeare plays. If so, then they precede traditional Shakespeare play composition dates by a decade or more, which, in many cases, would invalidate the Stratford man’s authorship, and favor the idea that the true author was writing anonymously.

Intertextuality of the Personosphere as a Factor of Meta-Genre (Clifford Simak “Shakespeare’s Planet”)

The article under studies deals with the issue of regeneration of genre forms of science fiction literature through its evolution. In the context of topical issues of poetics, it outlines the genrological status of science fiction and fantasy in terms of genre modifications – genre, genre variety, sub-genre, mega-genre, and meta-genre. Particular emphasis has been placed on the fact that the evolution of science fiction into a meta-genre format is due to a number of factors, such as the simulative nature of the chronotope of possible and parallel worlds, the change in the anthropological vector of texts, and the involvement of samples of other art forms (intermedial components). In addition, the activation of intertextual narratives in the personosphere (which becomes an important parameter of the meta-genre) has been identified as a marker of the genre evolution of fantasy. The creative activity of the American classic of science fiction prose Clifford Simak (1904–1988) may be regarded as a typical example of how science fiction writers appeal to “other authors’ texts”. This research relies on the analysis of his novel “Shakespeare’s Planet” (1976), in which the reader’s attention is mainly focused on the intertextual parameters of the personosphere, which significantly expands the hyper-real chronotope of the science fiction world. The works by William Shakespeare are identified as the prototexts for fantasy texts. Interpreted by Simak, the Shakespearean imagological narratives are implemented through quotations, reminiscences, anthropological allusions (the use of Shakespeare’s characters’ names), as well as through the introduction of the figure of Shakespeare himself into the fantasy personosphere. What is more, the figure of the English classic occasionally appears as the very center of the personosphere, its confocal axis. It has been determined in the article that the mystified and ironic story of Shakespeare’s timeless existence ferments the internal content of the fantasy text. Besides, the personosphere of a fantasy novel with several fictional narratives also includes the classic’s texts, such as “Hamlet”, “Twelfth Night”, “The End Praises the End”, “The Comedy of Errors”, “King Lear”, “Macbeth”, “Othello”, “Pericles”, “The Taming of the Shrew”, “Richard III”, and “Titus Andronicus”. In this case, in Simak’s “Shakespeare’s Planet”, they perform the function of additional (implicit) narratives, and, consequently, as a particular (intertextual) link in the personosphere. In conclusion, the article claims that the consistent generation of new literary genre formats in the field of the cultural continuum is an immanent feature of the complex literary process, which can be fully realized only with the help of the reader’s rich receptive background.

A Critical Analysis of Adaptation, Domestication and Foreignization as Effective Strategies for Translating Shakespeare’s Plays into Assamese

One of the major challenges faced by the translators is finding equivalence in the target language. The translators of Shakespeare plays have used Assamese words as appropriate equivalence of English words used by Shakespeare. However, it is not possible for the translators to claim that a particular kind of translation is the most faithful to the source text or the original text. The critics of translation studies are divided on deciding the parameters to assess whether a particular translation is faithful or not. The translators face various challenges in the process of translation such as finding equivalence, truthfully representing the linguistic and cultural nuances etc. In this process, the Assamese translators of Shakespeare’s plays have used adaptation, domestication, foreignization etc. Although the methods are different, they serve a common purpose, i.e., to bring a culturally and linguistically different text close to Assamese readers. The Comedy of Errors was the first Shakespeare play to be translated into Assamese by Ratnadhar Barua, Ramakanta Barkakoti, Gunjanan Barua and Ghanashyam Barua as Bhramaranga in 1888. Since then, a good number of Shakespeare plays have been either adapted or translated into Assamese. As You Like It, Cymbeline, Macbeth, Troilus and Cressida, Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream etc. were adapted into Assamese. Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Twelfth Night etc. were translated using domestication as an effective strategy. Othello, Macbeth, Measure for Measure were also translated by other translators using foreignization as an effective strategy. The paper examines the multiple methods that have been used for translation of Shakespeare’s plays into Assamese across time with special emphasis on adaptation, domestication and foreignization. As multiple translations of the same Shakespeare plays are available in Assamese, the paper also highlights the features of those translations and critically comments on their effectiveness in terms of strategies used by the translators. It also underlines the challenges faced by the translators while translating Shakespeare’s plays into Assamese. Specific examples from both the source texts and target texts are given to assess the process of translation. A few translators have retained the original names in the translations. A few others have change the names completely giving some indigenous flavor to the target texts. The choices of the translators and the factors responsible for such choices have also been discussed in this paper. The paper also documents most of the Shakespeare plays translated into Assamese since 1888. However, the assessment of the strategies used to translate the plays is not chronological. The paper is divided into three main parts: ‘Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Plays into Assamese’, ‘Domestication in Translation of Shakespeare’s Plays into Assamese’ and ‘Foreignization in Translation of Shakespeare’s Plays into Assamese’.

Thinking Does Not Make It So

Thinking Does Not Make It So

Further Allusions to Marlowe in The Comedy of Errors

Further Allusions to Marlowe in <i>The Comedy of Errors</i>

Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Plays into Assamese Farce: A Study on Historical Perspective

William Shakespeare has always been unanimously the most accepted model to follow for the writers of tragedy, comedy and other types of dramas. He enjoyed a great fascination in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth in India and almost all his works were translated to or adapted into different languages. As the Assamese writers did not lag behind in this respect too, they were inspired to translate and adapt Shakespeare in 1887 starting with The Comedy of Errors as Bhramaranga in Assamese. In this article, the researcher aims to examine the available Assamese translations and adaptations of Shakespearean comic plays and studied how far they contributed to the growth and development of Assamese comedy in particular and modern Assamese drama in general. With the help of the comparative method of analysis, the researcher found that Assamese comedy specially farces and the complete pre-independent Assamese dramatic literature have been impacted by the dramas of Shakespeare.

From Porto Rico to Puerto Rico: Citizenship, Race and the Politics of Worthiness

The English‐language text of the 1898 Treaty of Paris, the accord conceding Puerto Rico to the United States, misspelled the island's name as Porto Rico. The treaty's ratification entrenched the error in US law and prompted a decades‐long campaign to restore the territory's original name. More than a comedy of errors, this incident exposes conflicting interpretations of US citizenship and the worthiness of different sets of citizens. Puerto Ricans discovered that the statutory citizenship they acquired was attenuated by their perceived worthiness: a status limited by their membership of the so‐called Spanish race.

The Comedy of Errors

The Comedy of Errors

Hydroxychloroquine for COVID19: The curtains close on a comedy of errors

Hydroxychloroquine for COVID19: The curtains close on a comedy of errors

“A Night of Errors”: Chaos, Comedy, and Comparative Law at the Inns of Court

Festivities at the Gray’s Inn Revels of 1594–1595, as narrated in the Gesta Grayorum, included the first recorded performance of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. Revels at the Inns were intricate affairs parodying government rule, often involving a fictional coronation, parliament, plays, and mock trials. Recent studies in law and literature have detailed how revels created artificial city states that raised numerous questions about legal regulation and self-governance. On December 28, 1594, the Gesta Grayorum claims Shakespeare’s play created a “Night of Errors” that led to a lengthy mock trial the next day. In this article, I analyze the commerce of legal ideas occurring between Shakespeare’s play, its source in Plautus’s Menaechmi, and the ensuing commentary from the mock trial in order to demonstrate that key generic elements of Roman comedy became central to legal training at the Inns. I illustrate this intertextual development of comedy to reveal its power in representing and critiquing how law is performed in communities.

Performance review: The Comedy of Errors by Phillip Breen

Performance review: <i>The Comedy of Errors</i> by Phillip Breen

Shakespeare’s Englishes: Against Englishness by Margaret Tudeau-Clayton

Reviewed by: Shakespeare’s Englishes: Against Englishness by Margaret Tudeau-Clayton Tom Rutter Shakespeare’s Englishes: Against Englishness. By Margaret Tudeau-Clayton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2020. ix+245 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–108–49373–4. The title of Shakespeare’s Englishes: Against Englishness neatly encapsulates Margaret Tudeau-Clayton’s argument: that Shakespeare’s dramas stage a clash between a view of the English language (and of Englishness) that values plainness, uniformity, and restraint, and another one open to extravagance, diversity, and play. In Shakespeare’s time, this clash reflected a wider cultural shift that would ultimately produce a sense of national and linguistic identity at whose centre was ‘the plain-speaking, plainly dressed virtuous citizen’ p. 3) as opposed to the cosmopolitan courtier, the naturalized stranger, or the lower-class Englishman (still less Englishwoman). Tudeau-Clayton’s survey focuses primarily on Shakespeare’s Elizabethan plays: the second tetralogy and The Merry Wives of Windsor in particular, but with substantial discussion of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and The Merchant of Venice. It is also informed by some excellent research into the history of a range of cultural tropes. One is ‘the King’s English’, whose early usage turns out to be as a means of excluding those who do not speak it. Another is the use of financial metaphors (‘clipping the King’s English’, ‘counterfeit’ words; p. 82), which Tudeau-Clayton links to the Elizabethan monetary reforms overseen by Thomas Gresham. A third is ‘the figure of the elite Englishman dressed in a motley of foreign fashions’ (p. 97), which she traces from Andrew Boorde’s Introduction of Knowledge (1547) through Protestant reformers and the chorographer William Harrison to the anonymous play Woodstock and [End Page 112] Shakespeare’s Richard II and The Merchant of Venice. Readers interested in the development of these notions will find Tudeau-Clayton’s work invaluable. However, she is also keen to delineate the broader cultural contest—between inclusivity and exclusion—in which they were made to serve. She identifies the banishment of the ‘extravagant, nomadic’ Falstaff in 2 Henry IV as the victory of a ‘plainness’ (p. 178) that is, in Hal/Henry, merely the cover for a cynical will to power. By contrast, she finds in Shakespeare’s contribution to Sir Thomas More a sympathy for the straying and the strange that is both in keeping with his documented relationships with foreigners and his own status as a migrant to London, and informed by parliamentary debates about the treatment of ‘strangers’ (p. 135). The second tetralogy, with its stress on regional, stylistic, and lexical diversity, depicts the English as ‘a nation of strangers’ (p. 146), while the early comedies evoke a Christian sense of all humanity being both pilgrims and members of the city of God. Other than a brief reference to Brexit, Tudeau-Clayton wisely soft-pedals the modern relevance of these ideas, but the hospitable, diverse version of Englishness with which she aligns Shakespeare will be appealing to many readers. However, she also notes the exclusion of Parolles in All’s Well that Ends Well and the ambivalence with which Othello’s verbal extravagance is treated, wondering if these indicate a ‘shift towards cultural reformation ideology’ as the dramatist aged (p. 130). This point left me wondering, though, whether the openness to diversity that she discusses may stem from the inherently dialogic nature of drama as much as from Shakespeare’s own attitudes. Nor was I entirely convinced by the contrast she draws between Shakespeare and allegedly more xenophobic dramatists such as William Haughton, whose Englishmen for my Money is certainly exclusionary in some respects but which in depicting ‘the triumph of three English citizen daughters’ over foreigners (p. 66) also depicts (from another perspective) the success of three daughters of a Portuguese immigrant, possibly of Jewish descent, in marrying into English gentry. Critical elevation of Shakespeare depends, perhaps, on its own acts of exclusion. Nevertheless, the vision of Shakespeare’s drama that this book offers is a timely and generous one, underpinned by careful scholarship and nuanced critical analysis. Tom Rutter University of Sheffield Copyright © 2022...

Slavery and White Womanhood in Early Modern England

This article argues that early modern literary and visual texts from Shakespeare's “Comedy of Errors” to Spenser's “Faerie Queene” repeatedly represent and render womanhood as a specifically and singularly white construction; in so doing, they establish the co-constitution of gender and race and their conscription by the contingencies of class. As this formation of white womanhood is in turn mobilized to underwrite the operations of violence and enslavement, white women themselves—and white womanhood as a politically and socially disciplined and disciplining category—emerge as not only the mediators but also the authors of these global and transhistorical processes.

Shifting Heads to Solve a Crux in Comedy of Errors

Shifting Heads to Solve a Crux in Comedy of Errors

The stuff irony is made of: Translators as scholars

Though barely known in the United States, Achille Campanile (1900-19 77) is considered one of Italy ’s major humorists of the twentieth century. In one of his most memorable short pieces entitled “La lettera di Ramesse” (Campanile, 1984), Campanile takes his cue from the traditional comedy of errors and gives it an original twist by setting it in ancient Egypt and creating a series of misunderstandings of a love letter written in hieroglyphics. He then tops it off by introducing a renowned scholar who, centuries later, discovers the message and publishes it in a highly acclaimed translation which, ironically, is yet another misinterpretation. This paper examines “Ramses's Letter” as a tongue-in-cheek commentary on interpretation and translation, a translation where subjectivity and desire prevail over content. It also discusses how, by rising to the empyrean of scholars, the translator becomes the target of the same irony that Campanile directs against all men of letters, and against writers in particular. Finally, since “Ramses ’s Letter” has never been available to an English-language audience, the paper features my own translation of the piece and a brief examination of the challenges I faced in approaching the ironical aspects of this text.

The stuff irony is made of: Translators as scholars

Though barely known in the United States, Achille Campanile (1900-19 77) is considered one of Italy ’s major humorists of the twentieth century. In one of his most memorable short pieces entitled “La lettera di Ramesse” (Campanile, 1984), Campanile takes his cue from the traditional comedy of errors and gives it an original twist by setting it in ancient Egypt and creating a series of misunderstandings of a love letter written in hieroglyphics. He then tops it off by introducing a renowned scholar who, centuries later, discovers the message and publishes it in a highly acclaimed translation which, ironically, is yet another misinterpretation. This paper examines “Ramses's Letter” as a tongue-in-cheek commentary on interpretation and translation, a translation where subjectivity and desire prevail over content. It also discusses how, by rising to the empyrean of scholars, the translator becomes the target of the same irony that Campanile directs against all men of letters, and against writers in particular. Finally, since “Ramses ’s Letter” has never been available to an English-language audience, the paper features my own translation of the piece and a brief examination of the challenges I faced in approaching the ironical aspects of this text.

Between Worlds in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors

ABSTRACT This article turns to Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors (1594) in order to revise critical accounts of globalization and to propose a contrasting notion of “world” as a function of affective experience, collective narration, and virtual witnessing. Shakespeare’s play captures how a newly global imaginary was beginning to disrupt many of the foundations of personal identity and the familiar reference points of the worlds that sustained it. The Comedy of Errors acknowledges the integrative effects of a globalizing system while also emphasizing its multiply-centered, regional specificity; Shakespeare models not a single, totalizing globality but a plurality of worlds characterized by continuous rupture, reconfiguration, and an ongoing state of in-betweenness. Not only does the play illuminate a non-Eurocentric view of globalization but it explores the alienation that attends migration and displacement at a global scale and the ways these movements mark the body for violence and refigure the human relationships that bond people together. In doing so, the play reveals an experience of exclusion that is constitutive of race insofar as its somatic determinations follow a logic that is both incomprehensible and absolute. The play also demonstrates how dramatic processes of collective story-telling and mutual witnessing can re-world both subject and community alike, showing us how “globalization” is an historically-contingent iteration of “worlding” that is neither static, inevitable, nor permanent.

A STUDY OF BOLLYWOOD’S COMEDY OF ERRORS: AN INTERTEXTUAL APPROACH

The cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare's play never been antediluvian around the world. There are a plethora of lms in Hindi cinema which have been adopted from literary works by lm makers. When it shows up to adaptation of William Shakespeare's epic tales in Hindi cinema, Vishal Bharadwaj acclaimed trilogy of Maqbool, Omkara and Haider comes rst in mind but not comes rst in the history of Indian cinema. This paper will begin with analysing one of the rst adaptation of Brad's epic-the 'comedy of errors' into Gulzar's enduring popular 'Angoor'(grapes) considered one of the Bollywood's best comedies. This research article is an attempt to understand and answer these questions with intertextually approach. Why a comedy of error is an appropriate choice for an adaptation? How the Gulzar's Angoor has an accurate title for an adaptation of Brad's saga of two sets of identical twins? And how Gulzar has done justice to his Bollywood adaptation of an epic play with obvious similarities and difference in plot and characterization? The paper will end with the discussion over the very rst adaptation of comedy of errors into Bengali theater well as Bengali cinema with the same name by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar's -' Bhranti Bhilas' which can also be considered as inspiration for Gulzar's tribute to Shakespeare.

Terms of Engagement: Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility in Early Modern England

ABSTRACT This essay focuses on current research on keywords of identity and difference in early modern England, and draws attention particularly to the etymological oscillation of guest and host, stranger-friend and stranger-enemy, in Indian incarnations of The Comedy of Errors. It argues that the preoccupations of the original play with the unsettling, uneasy reciprocity of guests and hosts, strangers and friends, becomes an internal, structural trope for Indian negotiations with the Shakespearean canon itself.