SOURCE: O'Brien, Robert Viking. “The Madness of Syracusan Antipholus.” In Early Modern Literary Studies 2, no. 1 (April 1996): 3.1-26.

In the following essay, O'Brien asserts that Shakespeare exploited his Elizabethan audience's emotional response to The Comedy of Errors by suggesting that Antipholus of Syracuse is truly in danger of succumbing to madness.

Many readers of The Comedy of Errors notice that Egeon's possible execution provides a dark frame around what appears to be one of Shakespeare's most light-hearted comedies. Yet the threat of death that hangs over Egeon in the frame plot also hangs, in the main plot, over his Syracusan son. This threat results from Antipholus' Syracusan origins, of course, but also—less obviously and more significantly—from the possibility that Syracusan Antipholus is losing his mind. The Elizabethans believed that, without correction, insanity usually led to death; for Shakespeare's audience, the deaths of Lear and Ophelia probably seemed...