Abstract:
Concomitant with the sense of an impending chaos inside the urban space in The Comedy of Errors is
the problem of alienated selfhood in its struggle for recognition. It seems that Shakespeare has
precociously investigated the modern issue of alienation inside the chaotic metropolis of Ephesus.
The action of the play is initiated within a hegemonic social order which compels an inspection of the
repressive power of the city as a unanimously acknowledged source of truth. I am taking the word
truth the way Nietzsche derides it in his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Nietzsche departs from the monumental sense of truth embodied in such social institutions as the
church, the court, etc. into truth as an exclusive property of the self. He aims at a rehabilitation of the
individual away from the populace –rabble, he calls it—thanks to the critical energy of the dissenting
mind:
Could you conceive a God? - But let this mean Will to Truth to you, that
everything be transformed into the humanly conceivable, the humanly visible,
the humanly sensible! Your own discernment shall you follow out to the end!
(Zarathustra, 70)
Contrary to its first impression as a matter of laughter, Shakespeare’s comedy can be acknowledged
as a dramatic pretext for the implementation of such revolutionary hypotheses as of the self against his
society. Even though the revolution is never a full-fledged process in The Comedy of Errors,
Shakespeare manages to accentuate his philosophical tribute of self-will as man’s only savior from the
hegemonic rites and customs of Ephesus whose civic and stately authority hardly extends beyond its
Christian history.
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Keywords:
City, ritualization, ideology, coercion, monumental history, historical sense, self-will |
