The Comedy of Errors

The Comedy of Errors is certainly not one of the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays, or even one of the very best of his comedies. It draws most of its comic force from a farcical slapstick situation, and offers fairly little material for probing analysis. It is, however, fairly tightly structured, and entertaining if taken at face value without too many further expectations. If you are the sort of person troubled by intrinsic implausibility, this is probably not going to be one of your favorite plays.

It also has the distinction of being the only play in the Shakspearean corpus to have been based on an ancient dramatic model, namely the Menaechmi of T. Maccius Plautus, the older of the two Roman comic poets from whom we have significant surviving texts. It’s worth comparing the Shakespeare play to its source to see how he has adapted his material. In particular, turning one set of twins into two sets of twins multiplies greatly the opportunities for comic misunderstanding, which is most of what the play is about.