The Comedy of Errors has been consistently under-appreciated, I’d argue, in part because we don’t know how to appreciate plot. Contemporary culture, the study and performance of Shakespeare and our own intrinsic narcissism tend to encourage the view that character is destiny. Errors challenges this humanistic view of the world by emphasizing, in ways that anticipate the experience of modernity, the alienation of a mechanical universe. Think Charlie Chaplin on the accelerating assembly line in Modern Times (1936), and you have something of the comic terror captured in The Comedy of Errors.
