Source: "The Nature of Our People: Shakespeare's City Comedies," in The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare, University of Georgia Press, 1985, pp. 178219.

[In the following excerpt, Paster argues that "only by attending to the nature of the urban environment. . . can the play's deep concern with the ambiguities of personal and civic identity be come fully revealed." She explores this idea primarily through commentary on Aegeon and his twin sans; specifically, how their personal identities are called into question in the social environment in which they find themselves.]

. . . . The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of V enice , and Measure for Measure come together by presenting urban environments faced with fundamental dilemmas, paradoxical situations whose implications call the idea of any normative urban community into severe question. In each, the city is confronted with the self-imposed necessity of enforcing a law whose consequences are so clearly...