'Urging helpless patience': Domesticity, Stoicism, and Setting in The Comedy of Errors

Founding the school of 'Neo-Stoicism', the tract was popular on account of its synthesis of Stoic morality with Christianity, in which the more pagan aspects of the classical philosophy, such as encouraging empowerment over death through suicide, were reduced.3 Through the humanist retrieval of Stoicism epitomized by Lipsius, Christ's passion came to signify the 'supreme instance of his patience', rendering patient resignation an 'eminently Christian virtue'.4 Rather than stemming from pride over adversity as in the classical philosophy, Neo-Stoicism finds its greatest weapon in faith in Christ's God-given purpose to endure and overcome suffering. More than embodying feminine Stoic ideal, Bruce observes how the Octavia figure represents the vexed relationship between empowerment and patient resignation, and how this trope 'is also used to explore the inadequacies of Christian Stoicism's hybrid morality presented to women, as this hybrid was popularly understood to exist in late Elizabethan England'.7 By drawing on Paul's Letter to the Ephesians to envision a uniquely domestic form of Christian Stoicism, Shakespeare was involved in this shifttowards applying Stoic principles to the unique trials of women.