SOURCE: “Patterns of Resolution in Shakespeare's Comedies,” in The Happy End of Comedy: Jonson, Molière, and Shakespeare, pp. 124-37, University of Delaware Press, 1984.

In the excerpt below, Jagendorf analyzes the discovery scenes in The Merchant of Venice, All's Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure in the context of the comic conventions of recapitulation and return. In each of these plays, Jagendorf notes, the final scenes are preceded by ones which feature a real or proposed substitution that complicates the plot; the satisfactory consequences of these exchanges, the critic maintains, are then revealed in trial-like, concluding episodes.

Readers of Roman comedy are familiar with the exploitation of confusion about identity for the creation of deadlock and comic upheaval. Characters ignorant of who they are hold the key to many happy endings that are held up until someone arrives to identify them. In Terence's Woman of Andros...