IN The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's
Labour's Lost, and The Taming of the Shrew, overlooking nothing
in his quest of the way, Shakespeare tried four basic modes: the
Roman, the romantic, the satiric, and the farcical -- and, as he would
continue to do right down to The Tempest, mixed some of all in
each. To create comic effects he exploited in multiple ways the
resources of language, situation, and character, using puns, parody,
quibbles, caricature, slapstick and horseplay, local allusion, elabo-
rate nonsense, pedantry, high language and low -- all in profusion,
like wild growth. Variety thus characterizes the first approaches
and the first results.

Yet even here, amid the diversity of what at times seems random
experiment, certain predilections are evident, and among these the
one that best forecasts the future is the reliance upon exploitable
gaps or discrepancies among the awarenesses of participants and be-
tween the awarenesses of participants and audience. Passing review of
these first comedies may serve to introduce the subject of these gaps,
which were to become and to remain for Shakespeare an indispen-
sable condition of comedy -- indeed, an indispensable condition of
drama.

To describe the creation, maintenance, and exploitation of the
gaps that separate the participants' awarenesses and ours in The
Comedy of Errors is almost to describe the entire play, for in his
first comedy Shakespeare came nearer than ever afterward to
placing his whole reliance upon an arrangement of discrepant
awarenesses. This comedy has no Falstaff, Toby Belch, Dogberry --
not even an Armado. Comic effect emerges not once from character
as such. If the Dromios prove laughable, it is not in themselves but
in the incompleteness of their vision of situation that they prove so.
Language, which regularly afterwards is squeezed for its comic

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