1. The date of composition for The Comedy of Errors has been narrowed to between 1S92 and 1594. The first recorded performance was on December 28, i594, at Gray’s Inn Hall. No quartos exist of this play; it appears only in the 1623 Folio. See T. S. Dorsch, “Introduction,” in William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, ed. T. S. Dorsch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 38–40.
2. Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), chap. 2.
3. John Hambly, who was executed in 1587 as a Catholic priest, con-fessed to performing Catholic rituals at Gray’s Inn over the period of a year. See Lisa McClain, Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642 (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 142–143.
4. Editor T. S. Dorsch, for one, writes, “by turning the Dromios into identical twins serving twin masters, [Shakespeare] increased beyond measure the opportunities for confusion and error, increased too, with the reunion of a second pair of twins, the happiness at the end of the play.” William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, ed. T. S. Dorsch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 8.
5. See, e.g., F. Elizabeth Hart. “‘Great Is Diana’ of Shakespeare’s Ephesus,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 43.2 (Spring 2003): 350. Jeanne Addison Roberts compares Aemilia’s voice with Volumnia’s of Coriolanus. She writes: Like Volumnia, the Abbess presides almost goddesslike over the final scene; but unlike Volumnia, she has the power to give birth to the promise of the future with her two finally mature sons. By giving the mother such power, however, Shakespeare has risked jeopardizing the patriarchal vision. He has carefully hedged the issue by making the mother an abbess — almost a virgin mother — and he has ensured that there is no united front among the women. The voice of the Abbess, like Volumnia’s, is, finally, the voice of patriarchy, incorporating but confining the female.