Language, Magic, the Dromios, and The Comedy of Errors

Abstract

Words and thoughts in The Comedy of Errors acquire magical agency, and the magical and fantastical also acquire the potential for truth. The play delves beyond its overt empiricism toward a substructure of fantasy and enchantment that conveys a sense of the "real" and that indicates a residual medievalism. The magical resonates, too, in expressions of copia and festivity. Instances of amplitude, doubleness, and repetition eddy uncannily through the play's scenic structure and language. The Dromios are the characters most sensitive to the magical, and, in their festivity, unruly speech, and responsiveness, they enhance the sense of magic's odd realism.

Tudor Shakespeare: Taking the Long View

“…A number of recent print and digital resources will increase access to primary materials as well as cutting‐edge thinking on these texts. Helpful special issues of Studies in English Literature (47.2 in 2007) and The Yearbook of English Studies (38.1–2 in 2008) on Tudor literature preceded the publication of three massive collections of essays, many cited above, that are invaluable to the field. The essays collected in editors Pincombe and Shrank's award‐winning Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature introduces readers to several Tudor writers who had never before been treated in a major volume and provides essays that address the breadth of Tudor history while focusing on the neglected period of 1530–80.…”