Enlightenment, Understanding, and Confusion in Love’s Labor’s Lost and Comedy of Errors Sara Manlowe College

In Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost and Comedy of Errors, confusion is central to the plot, as well as perceived and subsequent enlightenment. In Love’s Labor’s Lost, confusion and enlightenment are played out through the lenses of education, and love, whereas Comedy of Errors explores these themes through a sense of place and through the central characters deciding simply to play along with what they perceive to be madness. Confusion and misunderstanding, followed by understanding, is, in a sense, the structure of any plot, and in these two plays one can trace how these threads of confusion wind the narrative into motion. Critics have discussed at length ‘the apparent lack of a well-ordered plot’ (Carroll, 7) in Love Labor’s Lost, while within that plot ‘characters may not admit the artifice of their own behavior, but they are quite willing to point out the artifice of other people’s’ (Leggatt, 64). If that were not enough, narratively, to preclude any great sense of clarity in Love’s Labor’s Lost, ‘its plausibility is hopelessly undermined by elaborate puns, daring tropes, novel epithets, multilingual malapropisms, and ambiguities intended and unintended by the characters’ (Maus, 206). There is confusion on every level of...