Customer Reviews

The Comedy of Errors (Oxford Shakespeare)

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As someone who is reading Shakespeare for the second time at the age of 40 and who considers himself a careful reader, I am always surprised to find the Oxford editors bring new ways of looking at the plays. In this introduction, Whitworth does a commendable job of explaining the importance of The Comedy of Errors which is usually dismissed as light weight farce, by explaining the history of critiism of the play and it social relevance.
Presented as a Christmas entertainment for the queen, The Comedy cleverly combines plots from two Plautus plays as well as introducing plot elements of his own.
I-- a mere mortal-- have no ability to criticize Shakespeares truly immortal genious. As the best writer ever, all I can do is enjoy the work. The scholarly intro allows you to heighten the pleasure seeing thing that might not be seen at surface level.
An additional benefit of the Oxford Shakespeare is that it is annotated with just enough notes-- on the same page as the text.
If you read Shakespeare for enjoyment or for a class, Oxford is the best.

I love all Shakespeare's works in all his genres, but this play is my favourite one of the Comedies. I have read it numerous times, but I have also seen it played on the stage, and it was unbelievably funny there. This play is actually one of Shakespeare's earliest. The play is a story about doubles, and the confusion that arises from this. Shakespeare protagaonists are a pair of twins, and to complicate things further each twin has an identical twin for a servant. Shakespeare's humour is bawdy as it was expected to be during the Elizabethan age. Some people think this particular play displays farcical humour because the humour is so broad, but I truly enjoyed reading it and seeing it. I think the genius of this particular play is in the deftness of the plot and the fast-paced perfection and timing of its action. I laughed out loud many times during this wonderful play.