William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors

Nicholas Moschovakis (Independent Scholar - North America)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.03: English Writing and Culture: Renaissance (Elizabethan and Jacobean periods) , 1485-1625.
Vol. editors: William M. Hamlin (Washington State University), J A Roe (University of York), Virginia Mason Vaughan (Clark University), Ema Vyroubalova (Trinity College Dublin)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1592

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Comedy
Play

Resources

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The Comedy of Errors

is a drama of confused identities: two pairs of identical twin brothers, separated at birth and unaware that they are in the same city, are repeatedly taken for each other, and the members of each pair repeatedly encounter (and fail to distinguish between) the members of the other pair, while the wife of one brother even mistakes his twin for her own husband. The complication and unravelling of these confusions is set within a related narrative frame, in which a prisoner—the father to one pair of twins - is redeemed from imminent death and reunited with

his

wife after a separation that has lasted twenty-five years or more. As Shakespeare joined this latter, romantic or tragicomic premise to the largely farcical twin-plot that he found in Plautus's

Menaechmi

(see…

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4172 words

Citation: Moschovakis, Nicholas. "The Comedy of Errors". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 22 August 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1229, accessed 25 April 2024.]

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