SOURCE: Whitworth, Charles, ed. Introduction to The Comedy of Errors, by William Shakespeare, pp. 1-79. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

In the following excerpt, Whitworth discusses the production history of The Comedy of Errors and the critical controversy over the play's designation as a farce.

Farce, City Comedy and Romance

E. M. W. Tillyard, in his generally sympathetic if not unequivocally enthusiastic discussion of Errors [The Comedy of Errors], followed the well-established tradition, in both criticism and stage production, of assuming its ‘core’ or essence to be farce and its comedy as being that exaggerated kind peculiar to farce. The critical tradition dates from the time of Coleridge at least. He insisted on the uniqueness of the play in the Shakespeare canon, defining it as ‘a legitimate farce’, distinct ‘from comedy and from other entertainments’ by ‘the licence … required … to produce strange and laughable situations’: ‘A comedy would scarcely...