the Complete Comedy of Errors: An Annotated Edition Shakespeare Play

Perhaps the most comedic of all the Shakespeare plays, The Comedy of Errors, verges on farce with its confused identities, slapstick violence, and confused intentions. This play vociferously demands Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief.” As comedy, it resists analysis beyond its structure. Perhaps Mark Twain’s admonition preceding The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is relevant here: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”