Summer Shakespeare II

The Comedy of Errors

Things to consider while reading 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.

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 oldest of the great Roman comic poets. It’s worth comparing the Shakespeare play to its source to see how he has adapted his material.

You can find The Menaechmi linked here at the Perseus Project.

A narrative retelling of The Comedy of Errors from Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb is linked here at the Eldritch Press Site.

Here is the Royal Shakespeare Company’s page on The Comedy of Errors, containing a production history with the company.

Here is the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s page on The Comedy of Errors, containing a broader summary of noteworthy performances.

Here’s my own web index of available versions of The Comedy of Errors on film.

Shakespeare’s Sources

• What has Shakespeare borrowed from his Plautine source?
• What has he changed from his source?

Themes that emerge in the play (only a few of the many)

• Pairings and opposites: how do the doublings create and drive the plot? What does the story have to tell us about pairings and similarities?
• Plausibility: how does the implausibility of the situation break affect your grasp of the comedy?
• If you have read or seen Twelfth Night, how does the resolution of the problem of the twins resemble and/or differ from the solution there?

Symmetries in the play

• The whole point of this play is obviously symmetries and parallels, to a fairly ridiculous degree. What effect does that have on the unfolding of the play?
• Do the obvious symmetries suggest differences under the surface?

Problems in the play

• Does the intrinsic implausibility of the play undermine your enjoyment of it?
• How does it happen that two people in search of a twin should be so blind to the possibility of the missing twin actually appearing, and the kinds of problems that it would be likely to raise?
• Does the resolution of the final problem with the pending death sentence seem satisfactory to you, or is a kind of deus ex machina solution to an intrinsically insoluble issue?

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