Shakespeare's anti-farce : neoplatonic and Christian eclecticism in the Comedy of errors

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dc.contributor.authorHumby, Terence Edwarden_US
dc.date.accessioned2024-08-14T17:26:11Z
dc.date.available2024-08-14T17:26:11Z
dc.date.copyright1984en_US
dc.date.issued1984
dc.degree.departmentDepartment of English
dc.degree.levelMaster of Arts M.A.en
dc.description.abstractAn examination of image clusters and language in The Comedy of Errors reveals the intellectual and poetic coherence of Shakespeare's play. Throughout Errors, Shakespeare maintains a dialectic between self­-consciously presented farcical convention, epitomized by contingency, and transcendent values. The play's transcendent impulse finds expression through allegory which draws definition from neoplatonic fable, metaphy­sics, and rhetorical method. Biblical subject matter and Christian hermeneutics are eclectically employed to further the play's tendency to allegory. The Introduction presents the argument's scope, problems·, and rationale. Chapter I establishes the overarching structural and thema­tic context for the play which, in the first part, forwards correlatives for Egeon's family-splitting shipwreck in the "fall" part of the triadic cycle of generation exemplified in Ficino's Commentary on Plato's Sym­posium. In particular, Christianized interpretation of the Aristophanic primal androgyne illustrates how Egeon's shipwreck parallels mankind's loss in Genesis. Perceptual and identity confusions in Ephesus echo ­Ficino's metaphysical perspective on the fall. Eros, the restorative force in the Platonic fable, is essential to the reunion in Errors where it exists in a complex relation with Christian depictions of love. Whereas the first part of the chapter examines the play's ambivalent reference to the neoplatonic descent as division, the second part considers the concurrent process of embodiment, Chapter II focuses on the play's antithetical fluid symbolism which constitutes the neoplatonic medium of transformation,· The first part emphasizes negative aspects of flux in the text while the latter part stresses latent positive implications. The final chapter examines contemporary ideas of time and the play is temporal conflict as part of the problem of perception within the sea of time and space. Shakespeare's self-conscious attention to time provides insight into the reflexive use of the dramatic medium dependent upon time. The Conclusion embeds this last point in the wider context of the study as a whole which leads us to view Errors as a sustained play within a play which implicates every man in the farcical world of contingency through recurrent allusion to the fall and its effects.
dc.format.extent163 pages
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1828/18248
dc.rightsAvailable to the World Wide Weben_US
dc.titleShakespeare's anti-farce : neoplatonic and Christian eclecticism in the Comedy of errorsen_US
dc.typeThesisen_US

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