Romance in Shakespeares Comedy of Errors Essay -- Shakespeare Comedy

Comedy of Errors - Romance What is so interesting about Shakespeares origin play, The Comedy of Errors, are the elements it shares with his last plays. The romances of his final period (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winters Tale, The Tempest) all borrowed from the romantic tradition, particularly the Plautine romances. So here, as in the later plays, we be in possession of reunions of lost children and parents, husbands and wives we have adventures and wanderings, and the danger of death (which in this play is not as real to us as it is in the romances). Yet, for all these similarities, the plot of The Comedy of Errors is as transparent as the plots of the later plays are complex. It is as though Shakespeares odyssey through the human psyche in tragedy and comedy brought him back to his beginnings with a sharper backbone of yearning, poignancy, and the feeling of loss. But to dismiss this play as merely a simplistic romp through a complicated set of maneuvers is to miss the shar p theatrical feast it offers on the stage - the wit and humor of a master wordsmith, the improbability of a plot that sweeps...