SOURCE: “Egeon's Friends and Relations: The Comedy of Errors,” in Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealths, University of Toronto Press, 1993, pp. 13-31.

In the essay below, Slights studies the portrayal of personal and political relations in The Comedy of Errors.

‘We being strangers here, how dar'st thou trust …’ 

(I.ii.60)

Preaching on Ephesians 5, a text that seems to lie behind the setting of The Comedy of Errors,¹ John Donne offers an analysis of the essential nature of all human societies since the birth of Eve's first son: ‘from that beginning to the end of the world, these three relations, of Master and Servant, Man and Wife, Father and Children, have been, and ever shall be the materialls, and the elements of all society, of families, and of Cities, and of Kingdomes.’² Whether or not all societies of all times consist of these three relationships, as Donne alleges, The Comedy of Errors...