tainty with respect to who a person may be. Any satisfying aware-
ness of identity involves, nonetheless, something more than this;
it involves some certainty as to what a person is. Uncertainty about
this aspect of identity is only too common. We say of someone
with whom we have believed ourselves intimately acquainted,
"I should never have known her last night. She seemed like a
stranger, a different woman." Or, in discussing one friend with
another, "You seem to be talking about a wholly unfamiliar
creature. He seems totally different from the man I know." Or,
and perhaps most important of all, "I shouldn't have supposed
myself capable of such a thing. I didn't know that I was like
that." Each of these remarks implies confusion concerning the
real nature of the person under consideration. The first presents
an old friend as someone scarcely known at all, outwardly recog-
nizable but inwardly unknown. The second reveals that one's
concept of a friend's character is so different from another's con-
cept of him that there is necessarily error somewhere. Unless one
or the other opinion be wrong, there are here psychologically two
persons where physically there is only one. The third of the re-
marks discloses a fundamental uncertainty with respect to one's
own real identity, the error that is at once the most important
and the most difficult to recognize, the error with which, as we
shall see, Shakespeare was ultimately to be most concerned. But,
whether the mistake be about oneself or about another, it is still
a mistake concerning the real identity of the person concerned,
a mistake about an inner reality which is at least as important
as a mistake made about external facts, and usually much more
significant.

It would be possible to show that Shakespeare made some use
of this sort of error in every comedy save that called The Comedy
of Errors. To do this adequately would be to write a book rather
than an essay. At the moment I wish merely to suggest that in
such universal human errors Shakespeare found one of the essen-

-156-