ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an attempt on two quarries: the first, William Shakespeare's concern with the double theme of death and resurrection. The second, his creation of what T. S. Eliot calls 'the 'ultra-dramatic' — a dramatic action of beings 'who are more than human or rather, seen in a light more than that of day'. True death followed by true resurrection is therefore not easy to portray, and even in the case of Christ or Lazarus in the Gospels, the passage from one to the other is not told. Yet what Shakespeare has taken from Apollonius, judiciously limited though it is, entirely transforms his principal source, Plautus's Menaechmi. Plautus's play is confined to the social and satiric; the separation of twins that occasioned the mistaken identities was caused not by the sea but by human folly or crime, and there is no reunion of husband and wife.
