The Comedy of Errors
by William Shakespeare
Twenty five years before the start of the play Aegeon's wife gives birth to identical twin sons, both called Antipholus.
He buys twin boys, both called Dromio, to serve them. During a sea voyage they become separated, and Aegeon manages
to save only one Antipholus and one Dromio.
They settle in Syracuse, and when the two boys grow up, they set out to find their twin brothers, later followed by
Aegeon. Unknown to each other they all arrive in Ephesus, a city in conflict with Syracuse, and Aegeon is condemned
to death by Duke Solinus unless he can pay a forfeit of 1,000 marks by sunset.
Unknown to all of them, the other Antipholus and Dromio happen to live in Ephesus, and this leads to considerable
confusion, with Antipholus repeatedly mistaken for Antipholus, Dromio repeatedly mistaken for Dromio, Dromio mistaking
Antipholus for Antipholus ... and vice versa ... and so on … until everything is finally resolved with unexpected
revelations and reconciliations.
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The Comedy of Errors has many elements of farce, in which the audience and the dramatist are complicit in agreeing
to accept even the most ridiculous coincidences. Two sets of identical twins, both with the same names, separated
shortly after birth, end up twenty five years later in the same place, at the same time, and both wearing identical
clothes. Each of the twins is constantly taken for the other, even by those who know them well, and the absurd
situations pile up to be resolved at the end by an even more amazing and quite unexpected coincidence.
Yet The Comedy of Errors, with its absurd plot and ingenious structure, goes well beyond the narrow confines of farce.
It opens with Aegeon under the shadow of execution, and this threat is present in the background throughout the play,
and is not resolved until the discoveries and reconciliations of the final scene. As in so many of Shakespeare's plays,
the happy ending can only be won after the passage of time and a struggle with mortality.
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"The Comedy of Errors" Set Model
The Comedy of Errors is one of Shakespeare's earliest plays, and the first recorded production was
in December, 1594 at Gray's Inn when "great disorders and abuses" were committed "by a company of base or common
fellows under the leadership of a sorceror or conjuror". The next known performance was as part of the Christmas
revels at the court of King James the First in 1604.
There are no further records of it until the eighteenth century, when it was "improved" and presented under various
titles such as Every Body Mistaken, See if You Like It, 'Tis all a Mistake, and
The Twins or Which is Which.
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The nineteenth century saw the restoration of Shakespeare's text and, in 1864, a famous production with the Irish
twins Charles and Harry Webb as the Dromios. In 1895 William Poel mounted a production which recreated the conditions
of the first Elizabethan performance.
Frank Benson presented the play at Stratford in 1905, and in 1938 Komisarjevsky staged it in an eclectic mixture
of costumes. Two years later Hollywood adapted it into the musical, The Boys from Syracuse with Rita Hayworth.
Other musical versions followed, while the original play has been revived with increasing frequency in more recent years.
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