The Comedy of Errors

• 1. Introduction

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  The Comedy of Errors is one of William Shakespeare's earliest plays, and it gave the English language something most plays never do: a common idiom. To call a chaotic string of blunders a "comedy of errors" is now perfectly ordinary speech, centuries after the play that coined the phrase first appeared on stage. How did Shakespeare's shortest comedy, built on slapstick and mistaken identity, earn a place in everyday conversation? And what does it reveal about where his talent was headed?

  The play centres on two sets of identical twins, separated at birth, who unknowingly converge on the Greek city of Ephesus. The chain of confusion that follows produces wrongful beatings, a near-seduction, an arrest, and accusations ranging from theft to demonic possession. Underneath all that farce, scholars have spotted the bones of an ancient Roman comedy, a meditation on identity, and a portrait of social relationships buckling under new economic pressures. The first documented performance took place on the 28th of December 1594, in a hall at Gray's Inn, London, before an audience that had gathered for a night of revels.

• 2. A Roman Blueprint

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  Plautus, the Roman playwright who died around 184 BC, wrote a comedy called Menaechmi about a pair of separated twins causing havoc through mistaken identity. Shakespeare read it, or heard it, and decided to double the chaos. Where Plautus had one pair of twins, Shakespeare constructed two: the Antipholus brothers and the Dromio brothers, each set a mirror of the other.

  William Warner's English translation of Menaechmi was entered into the Register of the Stationers Company on the 10th of June 1594. Scholar Charles Whitworth argues that Shakespeare wrote The Comedy of Errors in the latter part of that same year, partly on the strength of historical records and the play's textual similarities to other works Shakespeare was producing at the time. It is possible Shakespeare read Warner's translation in manuscript before it was even printed, though it is equally possible he knew the Plautus original in Latin. Either way, he worked fast. The play contains a reference to the wars of succession in France, which would fit any date from 1589 to 1595, but the evidence tilts toward 1594.

  The play also drew on another Plautus text, Amphitryon, for the subplot involving the locked-out husband. Shakespeare was not merely imitating Roman comedy; he was layering two of its structures together, producing a more elaborate architecture of confusion than either source could generate on its own.

• 3. The Plot's Machinery

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  Aegeon, an elderly merchant from Syracuse, faces execution in Ephesus because a law forbids Syracusan traders from entering the city. He can escape only by paying a fine of a thousand marks. He tells the Duke of Ephesus, Solinus, how his family was split apart at sea decades earlier by a tempest. His wife was rescued by one boat; he was rescued by another. Each took two infants, and neither party ever found the other again.

  His son Antipholus of Syracuse, who has come to Ephesus searching for his twin, sets off a day of compounding confusion the moment he sends his servant Dromio on an errand. The identical Dromio of Ephesus appears almost immediately and knows nothing of any errand, while the identical Antipholus of Ephesus is locked out of his own house by the Syracusan Dromio. Adriana, wife to Antipholus of Ephesus, confronts the wrong Antipholus, convinced her husband is straying. A goldsmith named Angelo delivers a gold chain to the wrong Antipholus. A conjurer named Pinch attempts an exorcism on the wrong set of twins entirely.

  The resolution comes not through any human detective work, but through the intervention of an Abbess at a priory. When she steps forward to protect the Syracusan twins who have taken sanctuary there, she reveals herself to be Emilia, Aegeon's long-lost wife. The Duke pardons Aegeon, and both sets of twins are finally in the same room at the same moment, for the first time in their lives.

• 4. Critical Standing

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  Harold Bloom wrote that The Comedy of Errors "reveals Shakespeare's magnificence at the art of comedy", and praised it for showing "such skill, indeed mastery, in action, incipient character, and stagecraft" that it surpasses the three Henry VI plays and what Bloom called the "rather lame" comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Stanley Wells described it as the first Shakespeare play in which mastery of craft is displayed. These are striking claims for a play that for centuries was seen as thin.

  For a long stretch of the eighteenth century, the play failed to attract leading actors. David Garrick, the era's dominant theatrical presence, could find no role in it grand enough to exploit. The comedies that fed star performances required a different kind of architecture, one built around a single towering figure. The Comedy of Errors distributes its energy across four interchangeable men.

  The play held an unusual distinction in the classical criticism of that same era. Critics who followed the French standard of judging drama by its adherence to Aristotle's classical unities found that only two of Shakespeare's plays met the test: The Comedy of Errors and The Tempest. Law professor Eric Heinze has offered a different lens entirely, arguing that the play's most notable feature is a web of social relationships in crisis as feudal structures give way to the market forces of early modern Europe. A farce about twins is, on that reading, also a map of an economy changing shape.

• 5. Stage Adaptations

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  An anonymous author produced Every Body Mistaken in 1716, billed as a revival and directorial adaptation of Shakespeare's play. Eighteen years later, another anonymous adaptation, See If You Like It; or, 'Tis All a Mistake, appeared at Covent Garden in 1734. It was staged in two acts, drawing on both Plautus and Shakespeare, and Shakespeare purists condemned it as the worst alteration available.

  Thomas Hull was more persistent. His first adaptation, called The Twins, was produced for Covent Garden in 1739 and Hull himself played Aegeon. It ran for several years, though when it was performed again in 1762, that single performance was its last. Hull returned to the play with a second adaptation, Comedy of Errors. With Alterations from Shakespeare, staged frequently from 1779 onward and published in 1793. Hull added songs, sharpened the love interest, expanded the recognition scene, and built up roles for women, including a character named Hermia who sang throughout.

  John Philip Kemble's 1780 adaptation, Oh! It's Impossible, caused a different kind of stir by casting the two Dromios as black-a-moors. It was performed in York but never printed. Writing decades later, after slavery had been abolished within British domains, James Boaden observed that he thought Kemble's maturer judgement would certainly have consigned the whole impression to the flames. The Flying Karamazov Brothers brought a physical comedy approach to the play in 1983 at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, and then again in 1987 at New York's Vivian Beaumont Theater, a production that was filmed and broadcast on MTV and PBS.

• 6. Music, Opera, and Song

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  On the 27th of December 1786, the opera Gli equivoci by Stephen Storace received its premiere at the Burgtheater in Vienna. The librettist was Lorenzo da Ponte, who also wrote the texts for Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni. Da Ponte worked from a French translation of Shakespeare's play, keeping the central plot intact while cutting the characters of Aegeon and Emilia entirely and renaming Antipholus as Euphemio.

  Frederic Reynolds staged a full operatic version at Covent Garden in 1819 with music by Henry Bishop. The score was supplemented by lyrics borrowed from other Shakespeare plays, and songs drawn from melodies by Mozart, Thomas Arne, and others. The production ran under the management of Charles Kemble and was judged to need extra scenes purely to accommodate more songs. The same adaptation was revived five years later at Drury Lane.

  The most enduring musical version arrived on Broadway in 1938. The Boys from Syracuse, with music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Lorenz Hart, ran first on Broadway before an Off-Broadway revival in 1963, a West End run in 1963, and a Broadway revival in 2002. A film version followed in 1940. Closer to Shakespeare's own text, the Royal Shakespeare Company produced a musical adaptation in 1976, with a book and lyrics by Trevor Nunn and music by Guy Woolfenden. When it transferred to the West End, it won the Laurence Olivier Award for best musical in 1977. The Bomb-itty of Errors, a hip-hop one-act adaptation, was nominated for the Drama Desk Award for best lyrics in 2001, competing directly against Stephen Sondheim.

• 7. On Screen and Around the World

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  Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy made a film in 1936 called Our Relations. Its official source was a W. W. Jacobs story called "The Money Box", but the Jacobs story contains no twins at all. The film's central conceit comes directly from Shakespeare: two pairs of identical twins, one pair of Laurel brothers named Stan and Alf, and one pair of Hardy brothers named Oliver and Bert. The filmmakers acknowledged the debt with a running gag in which, whenever Stan and Ollie say the same thing simultaneously, they recite a childhood ritual beginning with the word "Shakespeare".

  The Three Stooges expanded the formula further in A Merry Mix Up in 1957, replacing two pairs of twins with three sets of identical triplets. Big Business in 1988 updated the play with female twins, starring Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin. Indian cinema has returned to the play nine times, in Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Tulu, Punjabi, and Assamese, spanning from Bhrantibilas in 1963 to Cirkus in 2022 with Ranveer Singh.

  The BBC filmed the play in 1983 as part of its complete Shakespeare series, with Roger Daltrey playing both Dromios. A two-part television adaptation was produced in the USSR in 1978 with a Russian-Georgian cast. The Bengali novelist Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar had already adapted the play as Bhranti Bilash in 1869, making it part of the Bengal Renaissance's engagement with Shakespeare and the Romantic tradition. The short film The Complete Walk: The Comedy of Errors, made in 2016, starred Phil Davis, Omid Djalili, and Boothby Graffoe, and stands as the most recent dedicated film version in the source record.