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date: 23 February 2020

Abstract and Keywords

This article suggests that Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors is almost obsessively concerned with the minutiae of social decorum in the present: in the immediacy of performance and in the present of late Tudor England. The play dramatizes repeated breakdowns in the ceremonial structures that govern social interaction in everyday life. The play's farcical miss-encounters are hilarious, but the laughter they provoke is brittle. It is born of an embarrassment that is, in turn, born of recognition: a recognition that urban social order is as fragile as egg shell, always on the verge of collapse in the present of late Tudor London no less than on the streets of Ephesus.

Keywords: Tudor theatre, plays, comedies, social decorum, social interaction, social order

Alison Findlay

Alison Findlay is Professor of Renaissance Drama and Director of the Shakespeare Programme at Lancaster University (UK). She is the author of Illegitimate Power (Manchester University Press, 1994, repr. 2010), A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama (Blackwell, 1998), Women in Shakespeare: A Dictionary (Continuum, 2010), and, most recently, Much Ado About Nothing: A Guide to the Text and the Play in Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Alison was co-director of a research project on early women's drama, producing a series of filmed performances and a co-authored book Women and Dramatic Production 1550–1700 (Longman, 2000). Her specialized study of site-specific production, Playing Spaces in Early Women's Drama, came out in 2006 (Cambridge). She has published essays on Shakespeare and his contemporaries and is a General Editor of the Revels Plays.

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