SOURCE: Christensen, Ann C. “‘Because Their Business Still Lies out a' Door’: Resisting the Separation of the Spheres in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors.” Literature and History 5, no. 1 (spring 1996): 19-37.

In the following essay, Christensen approaches The Comedy of Errors as a mercantile comedy that dramatizes tensions between the gendered spheres of public/commercial and private/domestic.

‘What is habitual and domestic is seldom recorded. Only in a time of crisis are the dispositions of the household likely to be described.’¹

I

The Comedy of Errors represents Shakespeare's first picture of a mercantile household—one troubled by identity confusion, lost parents, missing brothers, marital neglect, jealousy, and sour business deals. With its uncertainty about identity, and its debates about intimacy and distance in the household and the marketplace, and in its concerns for the permeable boundaries of exchange, Shakespeare's farce offers us a palimpsest of tensions emerging alongside...