SOURCE: Crewe, Jonathan V. “God or the Good Physician: The Rational Playwright in The Comedy of Errors.” Genre 15, nos. 1-2 (spring-summer 1982): 203-23.

In the following essay, Crewe examines two idealizations of the playwright—one divinely omniscient, one the “good physician”—implied in The Comedy of Errors and explores themes related to these designations.

In the ensuing discussion I will be concerned with the playwright of The Comedy of Errors. I will, that is to say, consider “the playwright” implied in the play rather than the William Shakespeare whom we believe on good authority to have written The Comedy of Errors. This “playwright” is not the real-life author but the idealized figure whose nature and activity the play itself implies. The “rationality” of this playwright is not, I would suggest, to be taken for granted—on the familiar if radically untenable assumption, for example, that Shakespeare “always knows what...