For Next Week: The Comedy of Errors, Acts 1-2

REMEMBER: Take your time reading and break down large speeches into sentences, and look for the linguistic elements that make a character/speech come alive: rhyme, metaphor, puns, etc. What would this speech sound like read out loud (you can ever try it!). Why are people as much how they speak as what they say? 

Also, remember that much of the humor in this play comes from elaborate puns on a single word, and mistaken identities. See Q3 below, which ties this into Bevis' book (it goes VERY well with this play). You might not find it hilarious when reading, but imagine how this would look...and why is it funny when someone is mistaken for someone else? You might consider how often this happens in modern comedy.

Answer TWO of the following:

Q1: The Comedy of Errors opens more like a tragedy than a comedy: Egeon is given a death sentence, and tells a long and tragic story about how he lost his family. Why would Shakespeare open a play like this? How does this 'introduce' the comedy and silliness to follow? Why might it be an effective or even necessary opening for this play?

Q2: Usually, Shakespeare's characters speak blank verse, which is unrhymed iambic pentameter. But note that the women in the play, Adriana and Luciana, often rhyme with each other (see Act 2.1 especially). Why is this? How might this contrast with the language of the men in the play? 

Q3: In Chapter 3 of Bevis' Comedy: A Very Short Introduction, he writes, "we are most alive when indulging in a fantasy of ourselves" (43). How does this relate to the comic business of Act 2, where Antipholus is literally mistaken for a twin he's never met? Also, why does he so quickly decide to go along with it, merely because his wife insists that he is him? What might this say about the nature of our identity and other people's ability to choose it?

Q4: In Act 2, Scene 2, Shakespeare does something very subtle with the characters' language which underlines the comedy of the scene. It begins on the bottom of page 49 (Act 2, scene 2, around line 180) and continues all the way to the end of the scene. How do the character begin using language differently in a way that even the audience could hear? Why does Shakespeare do this? Why might how the characters speak underline who they are--or how they feel?