Two masters and two servants share two names between four men
Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse arrive in the city where Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus live
Shakespeare · Comedies
The Comedy of Errors
c. 1594
Comedy — from Plautus' Menaechmi, with the storm-night from his Amphitruo
Shakespeare's shortest play, and his tightest farce. Two sets of identical twins — masters and servants, separated in a shipwreck years earlier — are loose in the same city on the same day, and every beating, dinner, gold chain and accusation of madness lands on the wrong man. The frame is grim: an old Syracusan merchant has until sunset to raise a ransom or be executed for entering Ephesus. He turns out to be the twins' father.
How to spot them
- ▸Ephesus, in a single day, with an old man under sentence of death at sunset
- ▸Two pairs of identical twins with identical names, unaware the other pair is in town
- ▸A wife locks her own husband out of his house while dining with his brother
- ▸A disputed gold chain and an arrest for debt drive the second half
- ▸An abbess gives sanctuary and turns out to be the long-lost wife and mother
Scenes, characters & lines
A merchant of Syracuse must raise a thousand marks by sundown or die
Egeon, condemned under the trade war between the two cities, tells the shipwreck story that opens the play
A servant describes a kitchen-maid as spherical, like a globe, and finds countries in her
Dromio of Syracuse on Nell, in the geographical joke with Ireland, Scotland, France and the Netherlands
A conjuring schoolmaster is called in to exorcise a man believed possessed
Doctor Pinch, who is later bound, singed and left in a cellar
A wife shuts her husband out of his own door while his twin dines within
Adriana entertains the Syracusan Antipholus while the Ephesian beats on the gate
An abbess of Ephesus proves to be the condemned man's wife
Emilia, who has given sanctuary to the twins and reunites the whole family in the final scene
Key ideas
- Almost alone among Shakespeare's plays it observes the classical unities of time, place and action
- Doubling the twins of Plautus' original makes the confusion geometric rather than linear — four men, not two
Quick-fire facts
- •At roughly 1,780 lines it is the shortest play in the Shakespeare canon
- •It was performed at Gray's Inn on 28 December 1594, during festivities so chaotic the night was afterwards called 'the Night of Errors'
- •Not printed before the First Folio of 1623
- •Ephesus was chosen partly for its biblical reputation for sorcery and its Epistle, with its instructions to husbands and wives
- •Rodgers and Hart's 1938 musical The Boys from Syracuse is based on it, giving the songs 'Falling in Love with Love' and 'This Can't Be Love'
- •Adriana's sister Luciana is courted by the Syracusan twin, to Adriana's fury
- •The play is one of the few in which the audience knows the whole truth from the first scene while nobody on stage does
Drill it — 9 cards
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Sources
- Folger Shakespeare Library — The Comedy of Errors
- Royal Shakespeare Company — The Comedy of Errors