I am not a Shakespeare fan, but I am a Huge Syracuse basketball fan. So, you can imagine my excitement upon reading the first few lines of The Comedy of Errors.
And the mention of college basketball isn't limited to just that. It just so happens that the character who first speaks the words "Syracuse/Syracusians" is named "Duke." This all makes me question Shakespeare's' motives.
Were two mentions of successful basketball teams in one play a Coincidence? My skepticism leads me to believe otherwise. Maybe Shakespeare would have been a die-hard fan of college basketball if he was alive today. Was the underlying message amidst all the fancy diction and ornamented dialogue a foreshadowing of what teams would emerge at the top of college basketball? If the character of Antipholus was around today he may have been a star player for the Orange. Unless of course his twin brother from some little town called Ephesus accidently was put in the game, causing uproar and confusion when he failed to show the athletic talent that his identical brother had always displayed. Now that error would be a comedy.
Besides being utterly thrilled in Shakespeare's mention of 'cuse, I found Duke's first speech (1.1.3-25) to be telling of our past, present, and future. The attitude is so territorial and antiquated in the sense of such strict boundaries and animosity between two towns. But in the same sense, our present day foreign relations have now taken the role of this seemingly extreme town vs. town dispute in a broader scale of country vs. country. For example, we can look at the war in Iraq. There are many cases of soldiers/citizens becoming Prisoners of War for being found in their land. The torturing and deaths of POW's is still prevalent across the globe. So, as Shakespeare's words spoken through Duke, describe what is occurring, we can see that history surely does repeat itself, and maybe even exasperates itself...
I'll leave you with one last thought. Imagine the Character Duke as a sports commentator, his first speech describing the matchup and previewing the game in very lengthy, abstruse style, with a serious, stern tone. This highly contrasts the simple, terse version of sports commentating today...
Maybe, afterall, Shakespeare and I would have gotten along. He'd work all week, crafting sophisticated bardisms, and on the weekends we'd sit around and talks sports all day, betting on Syracuse games in the pubs of london...
So, was shakespeare ahead of his time?
Oh, in so many more ways than I ever thought. But as his own text reads in King Richard 111, "so wise so young, they say do never live long."
