A Study Of Apostle Paul’s Theological Ideas In The Comedy Of Errors

The Comedy of Errors is the shortest and putatively the first one of Shakespeare’s comedies.It is actually not Shakespeare’s original work,but an adaption mainly from Menaechmi by Plautus,a famous Roman comic dramatist.Therefore,it is usually regarded as an imitative work.Due to such a perspective,scholars at home and abroad did not conduct many in-depth academic researches on it.What’s more,researches now mostly focused on the relationship between the play and its sources as well as the features of Shakespeare’s early comedy creation implied in this comedy.This thesis takes the special religious background of Ephesus,the setting of the play,as a point cut to the research of this play.Ephesus was an important center for early Christianity and also the base where Apostle Paul preached his theology.Thus this thesis attempts to explore Paul’s theological ideas in The Comedy of Errors and to analyze the reasonability of their existence in Shakespeare,a humanist’s work.Firstly,the thesis makes an introduction to Paul’s core theological ideas and those are closely linked to The Comedy of Errors,including his predestination theory,his marriage ethic and the theory of "justification by faith".Next,the thesis analyzes the respective manifestations of these three theological ideas in The Comedy of Errors.Paul’s Predestination stresses the sovereignty of God as well as his omniscient and omnipotent nature.He has foreseen everything in the world.Meanwhile,Paul emphasizes that human does not just passively accept all the arrangements of God.He or she should also be responsible for his or her salvation.In The Comedy of Errors,Aegeon’s persistent searching for his separated family shows human’s struggle to attain salvation from God while Dr.Pinch’s unsuccessful exorcism on Antipholus of Ephesus highlights the sovereignty and uniqueness of God from a reverse side.As for marriage,Paul believes that husbands and wives should unite as one inseparable flesh and they should submit to each other.It is not a kind of forcible submission but one that out of love and respect to each other.In The Comedy of Errors,heroine Adriana’s views on the relationship between husbands and wives in marriage reflect Paul’s marriage ethic while her sister,Luciana’s concepts embody the marriage ethic of husband as god in a patriarchal society.The contrast of their views on marriage and the change of Luciana’s attitude prove the positive effect of Paul’s marriage ethic on the marital harmony.Paul’s theory of "justification by faith" is his central theological idea.He opposes Jews’ "justification by Law",insisting that the disciples can be saved by God through faith in him.Thus,the Gentiles also have access to God’s grace and can be God’s people,like Jews are.In this play,Antipholus of Syracuse’s experience of being lost,testing by temptation and being saved embodies how disciples attain salvation by God.What’s more,the separation and reunion of the twins reflect the history of Jews and the Gentiles in Bible.Finally,the thesis goes further to analyze the reasons for the existence of Paul’s theological ideas in The Comedy of Errors.The era background and Shakespeare’s Christian belief make it impossible for him to get rid of the influence of Christian culture.The unity of early Christian doctrines and Humanism as well as the crisis of Humanism further result in his idea of taking advantage of the positive effect of early Christian doctrines to ease the crisis of Humanism.That’s why we can discover Paul’s theological ideas in Shakespeare’s humanistic comedy.Shakespeare’s embedment of so many Paul’s theological ideas in this fancy comedy reflects his percipience of the crisis of Humanism and his thinking of how to solve this crisis,which makes The Comedy of Errors not simply a shallow experimental work but a play full of social and realistic significances.