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Poster for an 1879 production on Broadway, featuring Stuart Robson and William H. Crane.. The Comedy of Errors is one of William Shakespeare's early plays. It is his shortest and one of his most farcical comedies, with a major part of the humour coming from slapstick and mistaken identity, in addition to puns and word play.
The mistaken identity (often of one twin for another) is a centuries-old comedic device used by Shakespeare in several of his works. The mistake can be either an intended act of deception or an accident. Modern examples include The Parent Trap; The Truth About Cats and Dogs; Sister, Sister; and the films of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.
Little is known of Shakespeare's personal life, and some anti-Stratfordians take this as circumstantial evidence against his authorship. [37] Further, the lack of biographical information has sometimes been taken as an indication of an organised attempt by government officials to expunge all traces of Shakespeare, including perhaps his school records, to conceal the true author's identity.
Shakespeare's fools address themes of love, psychic turmoil, personal identity, and many other innumerable themes that arise in Shakespeare, and in modern theater. Shakespeare's earlier fools often seem to be written for the particular talents of famous Elizabethan actor, William Kempe .
Mainstream Shakespeare scholars maintain that biographical interpretations of literature are unreliable for attributing authorship, [10] and that the convergence of documentary evidence for Shakespeare's authorship—title pages, testimony by other contemporary poets and historians and official records—is the same as that for any other author ...
William Shakespeare (c. 23 [a] April 1564 – 23 April 1616) [b] was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. [3] [4] [5] He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard").
The youth's identity is also often disputed, and his true identity is not known for certain. However, one of the more probable candidates is that of Henry Wriothesley , the Earl of Southampton. This theory states that the Earl, one of Shakespeare's patrons, became the subject of Shakespeare's love, and the majority of the Sonnets are addressed ...
In 1981, Mordecai Marcus argued for a new meaning of Eros (Love) and Thanatos (Death) in this play. In his view, Shakespeare suggests that love requires the risk of death. Love achieves force and direction from the interweaving of the life impulse with the deathward-release of sexual tension. He also viewed the play as suggesting that the ...