at which all relevant facts have been put into our minds, and the
ending, we neither need nor get additional information in order to
hold our one great advantage over the participants. The many ex-
pository devices by which Shakespeare was later to sustain the
advantage given us in the initial exposition -- as soliloquies and asides
strategically placed, scene-introductions which shed special light
on following action, confidential dialogue of persons perpetrating
some 'practice' on their unwitting fellows -- are here absent because
they would be superfluous. For whereas in later comedies situations
emerge, swell, and multiply, generating new ones to replace the old,
so that repeated injections of fact are needed to keep our vision
clearer and wider than the participants', in The Comedy of Errors
the first situation holds firm, unaffected by the frantic activity
which it contains. The play has not one 'aside', and though there are
brief soliloquies they exist not to advise us of what we had been
ignorant but to exploit the speaker's ignorance of what we already
know.

The Comedy of Errors is unique also in that its exploitable gap
between awarenesses is created and sustained throughout the play
without the use of a 'practiser'. No one here wilfully deceives
another or even passively withholds a secret -- for none here knows
enough of the situation to deceive others about it, and none has a
secret to withhold. In later comedies, some 'practice', some form of
deliberate deception, is foremost among the means by which Shake-
speare creates discrepancies in awareness and is prominent also
among the means by which he maintains or widens these. Moreover,
in all the later plays in which exploitation of discrepancies is of
primary importance, the role of the deceiver is also of primary
importance; that is to say, in plays that show a high proportion of
scenes in which most participants perceive the situation less clearly
than we do, this high proportion is typically the result of the
presence and activity of one or more wilful practisers. Many of
these practisers -- in the histories and the tragedies especially -- are
of a villainous turn, or are outright villains, whose practices on their
fellows are wicked. In Richard III the huge proportion of scenes
which exploit participants' ignorance of their situations owes
largely to Richard's secret machinations; in Titus Andronicus, to
those of Aaron and Tamora; in Othello, to those of Iago; in Much
Ado about Nothing, to those of Don John; in Cymbeline, to those
of Iachimo. But not all the practisers who serve the dramatist well
by opening exploitable gaps between the awarenesses of participants
and audience are vicious. There are far, far more 'good' than 'bad'
practisers in Shakespeare's plays, and accordingly more scenes of

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