SOURCE: “Playing with Discontinuity: Mistakings and Mistimings in The Comedy of Errors,” in Shakespeare's Comedies of Play, Columbia University Press, 1981, pp. 14-34.

In the following essay, Huston reads The Comedy of Errors as a comic representation of the instability of human behavior and experience, and examines the dissonantly tragic beginning and the lingering tensions in the resolution of the play.

The Comedy of Errors announces Shakespeare's joy in play-making to the world, for it is the work of a dramatist who, above all things else, delights in his medium. In it he finds a reality easily assimilated and manipulated by his newly discovered dramatic powers, since he manages the dramatic microcosm with absolute control. He builds a plot of mistaking, self-consciously contrived, and then he exuberantly pushes his characters around the world he has trapped them in, all the while encouraging his audience, which knows the reason for...