max theodore’s Reviews > Shakespeare After All > Status Update

on CoE: "Like many of Shakespeare's comedies, The Comedy of Errors begins with an inflexible law and the human dilemma caused by the law's impersonal enforcement."

"...the threat of death frames all Shakespearean comedy. No character we meet in the course of a play will die, but outside, just beyond the boundary of the stage, death lurks and threatens. Comedy exists... poised between darkness and darkness."

on much ado: "It is worth noting that in other Shakespearean comedies of this period the heroine does become a man, at least for a little while. Portia, Rosalind, and Viola all cross-dress, assuming male costumes and names in order to perform some act of rescue, release, or revenge. But Beatrice has this opinion only in the wishful form of a condition contrary to fact."

also, calling b&b "impervious sophisticates"

on taming: "When in the Induction the cross-dressed page tells Sly, 'I am your wife in all obedience' (Ind. 2.104), the question of wifely obedience is already put in play--especially when the first thing this 'wife' does is disobey her 'husband's' peremptory command, 'Madam, undress you and come now to bed' (113)."

forgot to post any quotes from each chapter so: two gents essay reads the play as "deliberately superficial" and an easily-available psychodrama where valentine and proteus kinda represent various facets of a person. i like when writers drag this one

most historic used bookstore steal of my life was finding this in good condition for $8 usd