SOURCE: Hall, Jonathan. “Mercantilism and Desire in The Comedy of Errors.” In Anxious Pleasures: Shakespearean Comedy and the Nation-State, pp. 239-52. Madison, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995.

In the essay below, Hall stresses that the crisis of identity experienced by Antipholus of Ephesus is related to his inability to honor his pledge as a merchant, and that through Antipholus of Syracuse, the mercantile, “venturing hero,” Shakespeare explored anxieties concerning eroticism.

The advent of mercantile capitalism should not be understood as a purely “economic” transition, if by that term we mean the severely delimited and specialized set of theories and practices characteristic of the epoch of bourgeois hegemony. The later “science” of political economy tends (naturally, as it now seems to us) to obscure its own basis in an alienation of the practices of monetary power and rationalized administration from all other social interrelations and cultural practices. It...