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Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors: A Psycho-Semiotic Analysis uses semiotics along psychoanalytic to offer a granular analysis of one of Shakespeare’s funniest and most interesting comedies. It is distinctive in that it offers a discussion of the basic techniques found incomic literature of all kinds and applies these techniques to events in the play.
It also offers a discussion of the basic theories of humor and a syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis of the play.
Arthur Asa Berger has done it again. A brilliant semiotician, a renowned humor scholar and visual artist, Berger has used all three skills for this remarkable book on Shakespeare’sComedy of Errors. Applying selected aspects of the many theories of humor, along with semiotic methods of narrative analysis, Berger shows how they make their way concretely into Shakespeare’s play, itself a theatrical essay on why we laugh—by making us laugh. This book is not only enjoyable because of Berger’s own caricature art, which he intersperses throughout, but also because he has written it in his usual fluid style, making no special technical assumptions on the part of the reader, without ever comprising the scholarly seriousness of his approach. Reading this book we are enlightened and entertained at the same time, realizing by the end that life is indeed a “comedy of errors.”—Marcel Danesi, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto.
Dedication; Epigraph; 1 Introduction ; 2 Theories of Humor; 3 Semiotics and Humor; 4 Glossary: The 45 Techniques of Humor; 5 The Comedy of Errors; 6 Coda; References; About the Author; Index