Terms of engagement: keywords of identity, race, and human mobility in early modern England

This essay focuses on current research on keywords of identity and difference in early modern England, and draws attention particularly to the etymological oscillation of guest and host, stranger-friend and stranger-enemy, in Indian incarnations of The Comedy of Errors. It argues that the preoccupations of the original play with the unsettling, uneasy reciprocity of guests and hosts, strangers and friends, becomes an internal, structural trope for Indian negotiations with the Shakespearean canon itself.