Comedy Of Errors Research Articles

The Actor as Performer of the Implied Spectator's Role

Omri Nitzan's direction of Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters at the Israeli National Theatre Habimah in 1993 was one of the most ingenious and locally-bound contemporizations of a classical play that I have ever seen, as well as one of the most dependent on a correlatively attuned recipient. Nitzan sets out from the viewpoint that Goldoni's comedy of errors, derived from the commedia dell'arte and negating it, is not a stylized refined and exclusively theatrical pastime, set in the never-never locus of a glamorous stage Venice, as implied by Strehler's famous precedent, but is rather a kind of socially critical and realistically inclined play, ‘dealing with crime, class-distinctions and the capitalist structure of society’. ‘As I repeatedly read the play’–maintains Nitzan–‘I felt myself attracted to its human tale. I have seen suffering, miserable characters, relentlessly striving for unattainable happiness. There are three suicide attempts in the play […], which sometimes seems like a nightmare.’ Nitzan's production is set in a derelict square, a cross between a contemporary shabby Italian piazza and the backyard of a ramshackle, old Bauhaus building in a Tel Aviv suburban slum. The set of enclosing walls, lit by harsh Mediterranean lighting, and its multiple doors including a revolving one, vaguely alludes to the traditional setting of a farce. However, this impression is contradicted by the very theatrical and yet lifelike signs of depravity, instability and aggression: the thin paper walls, which are punctured and vandalized throughout the performance, are smeared with hostile graffiti expressing the pent-up feelings of its emotionally mute inhabitants. Heaps of trash lie scattered. The performance does not start with Clarice's engagement to Silvio, but with an invented mimed scene of Federigo Rasponi's murder by his sister Beatrice's lover, Florindo Artusi, performed to flickering disco lighting and accompanied by the shrill music of a Gothic horror melodrama. The actors speak a brilliantly processed vulgar slang; their body language is erratic and violent, including in the love scenes; these are lovers who swiftly resort to blows or pull out knives with long blades resembling shabarias, the weapon of Palestinian terrorists in 1993. Truffaldino wears the stained blue overall of a delivery boy, with an empty money pouch, typical of many such lads seen driving third-hand scooters in the streets of Tel Aviv. He is no smart comedy servant, but a hungry, humiliated and bitter unemployed youngster, although some remnants of the traditionally stooped posture are still vaguely in evidence. The archetypal attributes of the commedia masks are also belied by the performance of other characters such as Pantalone, who appears here as a small-time Levantine merchant, clad in a cheap suit, an unlit cigarette butt between his lips, bragging with his car keys in the typical macho gesture of working-class Israeli males.

Shakespeare's the Comedy of Errors

Shakespeare's the Comedy of Errors

Slavery, English Servitude, and The Comedy of Errors

Slavery, English Servitude, and <i>The Comedy of Errors</i>

Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context.

Acknowledgments Introduction: Edification from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context 1: Preposterous Estates, Preposterous Events: From Late to Early Shakespeare 2: The Bible and the Marketplace: The Comedy of Errors 3: Rude Mechanicals: A Midsummer Night's Dream and Shakespearean Joinery 4: Illegitimate Construction: Translation, Adultery, and Mechanical Reproduction in The Merry Wives of Windsor 5: Conveyers Are You All: Translating, Conveying, Representing, and Seconding in the Histories and Hamlet 6: Dilation and Inflation: All's Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida, and Shakespearean Increase 7: Othello and Hamlet: Spying, Discovery, Secret Faults Notes Index

Citation analysis for measuring the value of scientific publications: quality assessment tool or comedy of errors?

The basic concepts of citation analysis and journal impact factors are discussed in the light of quality assessment of scientific publications, individual scientists and research units. The major controversies concerning this topic are addressed: technical limitations, database selectivity, time and discipline-related biases, language and publication type biases, multiple authorship merits and citing motivations. Both positive and negative aspects are put into perspective. The authors conclude that citation analysis, even when based on journal impact factors, can be a worthwhile criterion for evaluating publication records of individual scientists or research units, as long as some of the problems discussed are sufficiently taken into account. However, this conclusion in no way implies that citation analysis may be considered as the one and only evaluation criterion.

Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious (review)

Reviewed by: Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious, Lance Taylor Peterson Jacques Bouveresse, Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious, translated by Carol Cosman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. xx + 143 pages. Some time ago, America witnessed the arrival on its shores of the so-called French Freud, but at the moment is perhaps still unfamiliar with the existence [End Page 1034] on the horizon of a French Wittgenstein. As the English-speaking analytic philosophers who lay claim to Wittgenstein would probably have little interest in the relationship of their master with Freud, perhaps only a French philosopher like Jacques Bouveresse, answering to the prestige of psychoanalysis in his country, would take up the project. Bouveresse, who teaches at the Collège de France, has over a dozen books to his credit, but the present volume on Freud and Wittgenstein is his first to appear in English translation. On the surface, the book is a fairly quiet, scholarly exercise, certainly providing, as Vincent Descombes writes in his introduction, an “attentive commentary on all the texts in which Wittgenstein mentions Freud . . . and second, a discussion of all the literature on the question (viii).” Yet, as Descombes emphasizes, this book also represents a chance to reassess in a French theoretical context the Lacanian program through Wittgenstein, who is painted as an “anti-Lacan avant la lettre (41).” For this reason, this thin volume might, in addition to clarifying the relationship of two idiosyncratic Viennese thinkers, provide for an English-speaking audience some acquaintance with the changes that have overcome French intellectual life since the eclipse of the maîtres à penser in the early eighties. Indeed, these latter French intellectuals have often been credited with the resurgence of American interest in the work of Freud. Stateside proponents of psychoanalysis, particularly numerous in literature departments, have always been acutely aware of the institutional resistance to Freud within the scientific culture of the university. Within this context, proponents recast Freud’s claim to be “the heroic scientist who imposes revolutionary discoveries by conquering formidable prejudice (13)” by systematically evacuating the scientific status of its theories, yet retaining claims to be discovering a new, uncharted terrain (the “unconscious”) and making the importance of this discovery philosophical (as a critique of the “philosophy of consciousness”). Bouveresse emphasizes, however, Freud’s claim that his discoveries were scientific; and this claim provoked most of Wittgenstein’s sharp critical commentary. Bouveresse recalls that Wittgenstein, exposed to a vibrant Viennese psychoanalytic culture, saw the work of the master quite differently: not as a brave expression of difficult unpalatable truths, but as a seductive way of seeing the world of human affairs that had already laid rhetorical siege to a large audience. This “way of seeing” appropriated the prestige of science without submitting to the trial of hypothesis and theoretical revision. Wittgenstein seconded this criticism of the scientific claims of the doctrine with a philosophical analysis of the master’s thought: Freud was a good place to look for “philosophical mistakes” (51). Bouveresse manages to paint a coherent picture of Wittgenstein’s scattered analyses of these errors. In these analyses, we can see how the contemporary French readers of the later Wittgenstein find a new kind of philosophical analysis: one that corrects errors by making distinctions, rather than deconstructing them. This comedy of errors takes place on two stages. The first is Freud’s philosophy [End Page 1035] of mind and, of course, the role played by the unconscious; and the latter does not fare too well. Bouveresse emphasizes that Freud’s conception of the nature of consciousness (as “the internal perception of ‘objects’ of a certain type”) remained utterly traditional compared to that of Wittgenstein. Far from decentering consciousness, the hypothesis of the “unconscious” amounts to a theoretical sleight of hand, inventing a theoretical entity, a homunculus inside the global subject, whose activities retain all the philosophical problems involved in the description of the actions of traditional subjects. This is the side effect of a mistake that Wittgenstein found often in philosophy: the nominalization of a linguistic expression whose only valid descriptive uses are of the unassuming adverbial kind (“She did it unconsciously”). The introduction of the nominal...

On the Parametrization of the Afocal Stable Distributions

Thanks to Hall's documentation of a situation he described as a 'Comedy of errors' in the earlier literature on stable distributions, there is now general agreement as to the parametrization of these distributions when standardized as to location and scale. However, two subtly different parametrizations of location and scale remain current in the afocal stable cases, defined as those with characteristic exponent a = 1 and skewness parameter /? + 0. The more widely used parametrization, adopted by Hall and two recent monographs, lacks the linearity property that is ordinarily expected of location and scale parameters. This note shows that the alternative parametrization has this linearity property, and compares the implications of the two parametrizations for properties of stable distributions. A third recent monograph seeks to avoid these issues by denying that the afocal stable distributions are stable at all, but it is shown that they are, in fact, integral members of the stable family. Peter Hall, writing in this Bulletin [4], described as a 'Comedy of errors' the repeated confusion that had arisen over the sign of the skewness parameter P in the stable probability distributions. 'Scarcely an Authority,' he wrote, 'has escaped this nemesis.' Hall admitted that he himself had erred in some of his own earlier writing on the subject. Most authors now agree with Hall that the standard stable distribution, SaP(x), is most usefully parametrized in terms of the log characteristic function

Review: Play: The Comedy of Errors

Review: Play: The Comedy of Errors

Revisionism (Part II): The 1995 Stratford Festival

Revisionism, (Part II): The 1995 Stratford Festival As his foreword in House programs showed, Richard Monette organized his first (1995) season as artistic director of Stratford Festival around theme of love: triumph of young (and not so young) over improbable obstacles in The Boy Friend and The Gondoliers; love's contribution our sense of in The Comedy of Errors; impossibility of bargaining for divine love in Amadeus; as a bargain in The Merry Wives of Windsor; cynical amatory bargains in The Country Wife; the dangerous power of love in both Macbeth and Long Day's Journey Into Night; and the sacrifice of self that makes possible in The Stillborn Lover. The repertory range was impressive, bases of revisionism varied. Revisionism ran gamut from parody and Expressionism, to radical re - imaginings of time - honoured classics, to subtle adjustments in presenting works with less impressive pedigrees. Every musical that Brian Macdonald directs is revised in a fundamental way at Stratford, and none more so than his productions of Gilbert and Sullivan, where absolute need to sabotage slavish adherence to original tone of librettos is exercised with genius. If to some Stratford productions would be tantamount to heresy, few even amongst purists still take seriously their silly plots, illogical situations, cliched characters and absurd dialogue. A director can be forgiven impulse to send up work, provided, of course, that his mockery is good - natured and has a signature style. Brian Macdonald honours Gilbert and Sullivan more in breach than many would in observance of a world that is essentially artificial. The Gondoliers suited Macdonald's satiric sense especially well. He had already turned it to gold in 1983, and present production was a fine tuning, as it were, of most things that had worked in that version. The satire on republicanism was preserved but without undue dominance in a mounting that was extrovertive, mirthful and quite over top in its relish of all things broad and vulgar. It included preening and posing male chorus; slow, stately, sensual entrance of gondoliers; an ogling, tactile Contadine; wild carnival of swirling mannequins; burlesque entrance of sea - tossed barge bearing Duke and Duchess of Plaza del Toro, with Douglas Chamberlain's panto Dame an outrageous consort for Eric Donkin's bored Duke. His finery topped by a galleon headpiece, and with billowing hooped hips sufficient to capsize barge, Chamberlain sashayed and sulked, played coquette and vamp, and sang of patient taming of Duke well enough for any camp. While good and bad puns and topical allusions to political correctness, CBC, and Royals whirled by courtesy of David Mayerovitch, much of production's success could be attributed to Michael J. Whitfield's rich lighting (except for a fizzled fireworks display in Part One) and Susan Benson's exquisite costuming and set design. With a white Venetian flagstone floor and a few props such as step - ladders, a trunk, a bird cage, and pillars, Benson turned design into geste, a ludic composition enhanced by simplest exercises of mime and imagination. The Gondoliers was more easily revised than The Boy Friend, Sandy Wilson's affectionate, simple - hearted tribute to frivolous '20s and their styles of romantic musical entertainment. Wilson's is a period piece with no room for updated lyrics and no value in parodying what is simply (as its author termed) a loving salute to those faroff days of cloche hat and short skirt, a valentine from one post - war period to another. What matters are such things as stance, posture, gesture and movement. The characters are mere fluff: young English ladies at a finishing school on French Riviera; a headmistress with a robust voice, body, and libido; a beautiful young heiress forlornly seeking love; a stern father who wishes to protect her from fortune hunters; a handsome delivery boy with, for incongruous parents, a lecherous aristocrat and his formidable wife. …

The Classical Tradition in Operation

In these five essays Niall Rudd presents an eclectic set of comparisons between certain ancient authors and later English writers ranging from Chaucer to Pound. He shows how five English writers consciously used and adapted classical works, and in so doing he illuminates both the classical authors and their English imitators and admirers. Readable translations and summaries of the Latin sources make these stimulating studies accessible even to scholars and students with little or no Latin. The first essay compares Chaucer's treatment of Dido in The House of Fame and The Legend of Good Women with Virgil's presentation of Dido in the Aeneid, and Ovid's in Heroides 7. The second essay, comparing Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors with Plautus' Menaechmi, demonstrates how Shakespeare, weaving Roman farce into the framework of Hellenistic romance, developed both genres into something richer and more complex. The third essay on Pope's Epistle to Augustus shows his conversion of Horace's praise of Augustus into an anti-royalist attack on George II. In the fourth essay, Rudd discusses how much of Tennyson's Lucretius is invented and imported by Tennyson as a way of externalizing the inner conflicts he experienced in the age of doubt. The final essay, on Pound and Propertius, looks at Pound's representation of the Latin poet in Homage to Sextus Propertius, specifically in the areas of imperial politics, love, and language. In his preface Rudd writes: 'Everyone knows of the Classical Tradition - comprehending it is another matter.' This book brings it closer to our understanding.

Human Development: Means and Ends (The Quaid-i-Azam Lecture)

Sometimes the change in the fashions of thinking about development appears like a comedy of errors, a lurching from one fad to another. Economic growth, employment creation, jobs and justice, redistribution with growth, basic needs, bottom-up development, participatory development, sustainable development, market-friendly development, liberation, liberalisation, human development; thus goes the carousel of the slogans. But this would not be a correct record. There has been an evolution in our thinking about development. Both internal logic and new evidence have led to the revision of our views. Previous and partly discarded approaches have taught us much that is still valuable, and our current approach will surely be subject to criticisms. A brief survey of the evolution of our thinking may be helpful. The discussion started in the 1950s, influenced by Arthur Lewis (1955) and others, who emphasised economic growth as the key to poverty eradication. Even at this early stage, sensible economists and development planners were quite clear (in spite of what is now often said in caricature of past thought) that economic growth is not an end in itself, but a performance test of development. Arthur Lewis defined the purpose of development as widening our range of choice, exactly as the Human Development Reports of the United Nations Development Programme do today.

Reviews

Acknowledgements Notes on Transcriptions, References and Abbreviations Introduction: The Signs of Friendship Part I: Mental Husbandry 1. The Housewife and the Humanists 2. Economies of Friendships The Textuality of Amicitia Part II: Anxieties of Textual Access 3. From Errant Knight to Prudent Captain: Masculinity and 'Romantic' Fiction 4. Usurers' Daughter and Prodigal Sons: The Gendered Plot of Authorship in the 1570s Part III: The Theatre of Clandestine Marriage 5. Household Stuff: Terence in the Reformation 6. Why do Shakespeare's Women Have 'Characters'? Error, Credit and Sex in The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew Conclusion: Shylock: Why This Usurer Has a Daughter Notes Primary Sources Secondary Sources Index

Unconformities in Shakespeare's Later Comedies.

Preface - Introduction - Comedy of Errors? - Friends and Lovers: The Two Gentlemen of Verona - A Kind of History: The Taming of the Shrew - Love's Labour's Lost or the Revenge of the Shrews - Doth the Moon Shine that Night? A Midsummer Night's Dream - Windsor Humours - So May the Outward Shows ... The Merchant of Venice - In Conclusion - Notes - Bibliography - Index

Presupposition failure — A comedy of errors

Abstract Presuppositions of utterances are the pieces of information you convey with an utterance no matter whether your utterance is true or not. We first study presupposition in a very simple framework of updating propositional information, with examples of how presuppositions of complex propositional updates can be calculated. Next we move on to presuppositions and quantification, in the context of a dynamic version of predicate logic, suitably modified to allow for presupposition failure. In both the propositional and the quantificational case, presupposition failure can be viewed as error abortion of procedures. Thus, a dynamic assertion logic which describes the preconditions for error abortion is the suitable tool for analysing presupposition.

Review: Play: The Comedy of Errors

Review: Play: The Comedy of Errors

Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660-1671 by Nancy Klein Maguire

Reviews257 Shakespearean plays as the dreams of idiosyncratically chosen characters (e.g., The Comedy of Errors' Aegeon) is so silly that it deserves minimal comment; however, the Stockholder section is so funny the reader doesn't really mind. Funniest of all is Vickers' last-chapter analysis of Christian allegorical readings such as J. A. Bryant's essay on Othello which "equates . . . Cassio with Adam, lago with Lucifer, Desdemona with Christ" and the suicidal Othello "with God" (p. 378). Later in this chapter, Vickers, linking such bizarre Christian allegorizing with out-of-control Marxist allegorical readings, lampoons Terence Hawke for his straight-faced insistence that the most comic of Shakespeare 's characters, A Midsummer Night's Dream's rude mechanicals, stand for the noble proletariat, and that Bottom's relationship with the play's aristocrats figures Elizabethan workers' general social oppression . Perhaps the battle which Appropriating Shakespeare both clarifies and helps wage between post-structuralist anti-humanistic and both old and new humanistic literary theory will have the ultimate positive effect of clarifying our understanding of what language and literature are for and can do: of their tremendous moral and creative potential, or rather of our tremendous potential, with language and literature as our creative instruments. In 1968 Roland Barthes prematurely proclaimed the death of the author; it might also be premature to assert the death of post-structuralism, but I would note, as does Vickers, that poststructuralism 's absurd theories and idioms are everywhere being dealt well-aimed blows which should be mortal (and Vickers' book is a helpful catalogue of many of these). It is hard to conceive of any meaningful counter-argument to this supremely well-reasoned book, and most post-structuralist critics, as Vickers himself points out, characteristically offer no response, meaningless or otherwise, to attacks on their theories anyway. Thus, all readers need do is assess this coherent work next to some of the current critical babble it attempts to dispel and the argument (thank God) is over. As every undergraduate English major knows, deconstructionism is boring; Shakespeare is cool. Vickers is cool too. Can we talk about Shakespeare now? GRACE TIFFANY University of New Orleans Nancy Klein Maguire. Regicide andRestoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660-1671. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xvi + 276. $59.95. Serious drama in the first decade of the Restoration consists very largely of tragicomedy in one or other of its usual senses, and the chief—almost the only—topic of tragicomedy was usurpation leading to restoration. Nancy Maguire's attractive and subtly argued case is 258Comparative Drama that the generic potentialities of tragicomedy, in its dual sense, were tailor-made to represent the ambiguities of royalist sentiment after the Restoration. The generic pattern of happy ending after apparently imminent tragedy is archetypally realized in the miracle of 1660, while the split-plot alternation between ideal and low-life characters corresponds to the tension between continuing reverence for the martyred saint and recognition that he had been reincarnated in distinctly unsaintly form: "the divided kings in divided tragicomedy mirror the culture 's conflicting experiences of kingship" (p. 138). Interestingly, though perhaps with some over-simplification, Maguire attributes the popularity of Fletcher's plays, with their rapid and inorganic reversals of plot, to the guilt and unease of the post-Restoration years, arguing that they presented "a fictional world distanced from predictable causeeffect relationships where deeply-felt issues could be ignored" (p. 124). More thoroughly convincing is her account of the transformation of masque ideology as the scenic devices of the pre-Restoration stage were transferred for the first time to the public theater, to be transformed both under the influence of a new political culture and under the debasing pressure of commercial commands. Maguire often has a keen ear for political resonance: for example, she links the royal marriage negotiations in Sir William Killigrew's Ormasdes to the author's presence in the retinue which greeted Catherine of Braganza on her arrival in England (pp. 117-18). She can, however, be over-ingenious and labored in her pursuit of topical allusion , sometimes awkwardly detecting a medley of disparate or even conflicting allusions within a single incident. Herein lies the main limitation of...

The Performance of Feminism in The Taming of the Shrew

Performance is ideology! This is particularly true of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, one of his two comedies concerning the behaviour of husband and wife after the marriage ceremony—the other being The Comedy of Errors. Here he makes use of what may well be the longest-running English female stock character, the recalcitrant wife, who goes back to Mrs Noah, the disobedient woman of the mediaeval religious cycle plays. But at the same time he adapts the technique of classical farce to observation of human behaviour, by taking an impossible premise (that a wife can be tamed) and extending it logically to the utmost limits of absurdity. He also combines the Mrs Noah figure with the Judy puppet and the clever woman of the Interludes who outwits her husband, but with one distinctive omission: the physical violence commonly assumed essential to shrew-taming. I believe that here Shakespeare has forged a new dramatic mode by humanizing the intellectuality of rhetorically based classical farce and psychologizing the knockabout physicality of its Plautine offshoot.

Metamorphosis in Shakespeare's Plays: A Pageant of Heroes, Gods, Maids and Monsters by Elizabeth Truax

538Comparative Drama Elizabeth Truax. Metamorphosis in Shakespeare's Plays: A Pageant of Heroes, Gods. Maids and Monsters. Lewiston, N.Y: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Pp. xi + 298. $69.95. Elizabeth Truax's Metamorphosis in Shakespeare's Plays is basically a study of Ovidian allusion in nine of Shakespeare's plays. To say that, however, is to limit the book too much, for it also seeks to place such allusion in Shakespeare's work as a whole, to relate it to the theme of transformation in that work, and to connect it to the pictorial history of Ovid in the Renaissance. Professor Truax succeeds in accomplishing these aims but occasionally stretches her evidence beyond a reasonable point; furthermore, the organization relies too much on plot summary so that the reader is irritated by being told what is already known. The book stresses the early plays with only two chapters on plays after Hamlet. The Comedy of Errors "does not depict true metamorphosis , but illusions of change, invented through stagecraft, which generate confusion and spawn a multitude of errors" (p. 28). The images of Centaur, Tiger, Porpentine, and Phoenix suggest the change from "irresponsible human behavior" to a "sensible resolution to problems and a happy reunion" (p. 54). However. The Taming of the Shrew is not only about apparent changes but about real change in character. Actual mythological pictures are described in the Induction, and these suggest the importance of real transformation to the plot. In Love's Labor's Lost there are many mythological images which suggest the masks the characters wear but must relinquish in order "to respond to nature in a manner that is simple, honest and sometimes wonderfully absurd" (p. 79). The fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream, like the gods in Ovid's Metamorphoses, provide changes in the loves of the humans, thus making this play unique among Shakespeare's comedies. A key transformation here is that of the tragic story of Pyramus and Thisbe to comedy. The Pyramus-Thisbe story is mirrored, this time tragically, in Romeo and Juliet. An illustration of problems in methodology appears in this chapter. Citing various Renaissance depictions of Perseus in relation to Romeo's leaping the wall in the balcony scene (p. 161) seems to be rather far-fetched. But there would be few disagreements to the general thesis that the melodramatic Ovidian tale has been transformed into one "of deep and powerful love" (p. 168). Following her discussion of four early comedies and one early tragedy. Professor Truax takes on only one of the middle comedies. The Merchant of Venice. In the early comedies, young lovers adopt mythological roles for which they are ill-suited. Bassanio and Portia, on the other hand, pick roles which suit them—Jason and Medea. However, the story of Medea is so horrible in its associations that it is perhaps just as well that the name is only brought up once in the play Reviews539 (V.i. 12-14). Again, it seems doubtful that "the aura of Medea is present throughout the play, affecting it on every level" (p. 184). The chapter on Hamlet interprets the protagonist as a character seeking to transform himself into a Hercules type hero. Though the number of classical allusions declines in the later plays, the ones that do appear "grow in power and intensity as they function as icons for dramatic action" (p. 204). Again, perhaps the basic identification is carried rather far—Horatio's "flights of angels" (V.ii.359-60) would surely call up Christian iconography in a Renaissance audience rather than "the promise of Scipio the Elder that when a hero dies his immortal soul will leave his body and fly to heaven" (p. 219). The mythological allusions in Othello are submerged—so much so that one wonders if Professor Truax is justified in associating Iago's bestial images for Othello with Jupiter's transformations (p. 232) or Desdemona's arrival in Cyprus with Venus (p. 239). Indeed, the latter description again is more Christian than Ovidian with its "divine Desdemona" (Il.i.73) and "grace of heaven" (II.i.85). To say that Cassio is transformed by Circe when Cassio himself refers to...

Making the Twins Realistic in The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night

Making the Twins Realistic in The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night

In a word: the importance of Shakespeare's subtexts

The subtexts of Shakespeare's plays often provide surprisingly accurate insights not only into the central themes of the plays, but also a greater understanding of the unifying elements. The subtexts from a representative sampling of plays from each of the major periods reveals that such subtextual elements as repeated words, near synonyms and recurrent images are fairly accurate assessors of the playwright's central intent. The best way to approach the plays is through a method that considers not only the text and plot, but the poetic devices that arise by considering the subtext. This study explores the nature-nothing subtext in King Lear, the seeing-seeming disparity in Othello, the repeated references to chains and gold in A Comedy of Errors, the explorations of fortune in As You Like It, the persistent emphasis on words and voices in Coriolanus, and the subtextual significance of wonder and rebellion in The Tempest. In each case, attention to the sound devices, repetitions and patterns of imagery yields a more thorough understanding of the play under consideration than the standard imagery studies or plot analyses.