‘Urging Helpless Patience’: Domesticity, Stoicism, and Setting in the Comedy of Errors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Comedy of Errors depicts a struggle for social unity in the face of violent passions. Shakespeare’s adaptation of the Plautine farce, Menaechmi, is oft considered a comedy of humours, and critics tend to overlook the play’s emotional complexity, on the assumption that Shakespeare based his characters on the two-dimensional “types” used in the Roman source text. To fill this critical gap, my paper will argue that it is the play’s very concern with the classical dichotomies of master-servant and husband-wife that avails it to the early modern paradigm of the emotions as embodied. In relocating the play’s setting from Plautus’s Epidamnus to Ephesus, Shakespeare alludes to St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, which fittingly introduces the play’s emotional conflict of social disunity on account of violent and conflicting passions. Drawing on critics such as Gail Kern Paster, Wolfgang Riehle, and Joseph Candido, my contribution to this special issue will examine Shakespeare's approach to the play’s conflict as an inroad into the early modern appropriation of the Roman ethos of Stoicism. Shakespeare introduces a Christian brand of Stoicism in which wives and servants must learn to subordinate their passions to those of their masters, calmly enduring their brutality, no matter the perceived injustice. Instead, the play shows, they must resolve the masters’ violent passions by reading their physical features in order to interpret their emotional needs. Introducing the new character of the Abbess, Shakespeare integrates the Roman farce into a Christian ethos. This character resolves the comic tension by preaching a domestic brand of Christianity in which the rewards of Stoicism, learning to subordinate the passions, can be reaped in the mortal realm. While this message hails primarily from Paul’s Letter , the Stoicism that it preaches within the Christian paradigm suggests not a departure, but rather Shakespeare's return to the values of his Roman sources.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".