The Comedy of Errors

The Comedy of Errors is Shakespeare's shortest play: a fast-moving farce in which two sets of identical twins, separated at birth, end up in the same city on the same day.

Main characters

• Antipholus of Syracuse and Antipholus of Ephesus, twin brothers
• Dromio of Syracuse and Dromio of Ephesus, their twin servants
• Egeon, a merchant of Syracuse, their father
• Emilia, an abbess in Ephesus
• Adriana, wife of Antipholus of Ephesus
• Luciana, her sister
• Solinus, Duke of Ephesus

Plot summary

This summary gives away the ending.

Egeon, a merchant of Syracuse, is arrested in the hostile city of Ephesus and sentenced to death unless he can pay a ransom by sunset. He explains that years ago a shipwreck split his family: he kept one twin son and one twin servant, while his wife and the other pair were lost. His surviving son, Antipholus of Syracuse, has gone in search of his brother.

That son and his servant Dromio have, unknown to Egeon, just arrived in Ephesus, where their long-lost twins live. Chaos follows. Wives, goldsmiths, merchants and officers mistake one twin for the other; servants are beaten for errors that are not theirs; the visiting Antipholus is invited to dinner by a wife he has never met and falls for her sister. Accusations of madness and sorcery pile up until everyone converges on the priory, where the Abbess reveals herself as Egeon's lost wife and the family is reunited.

Themes

• Identity and self-knowledge
• Marriage and jealousy
• Chance and reunion
• Madness and misperception

Famous lines

I to the world am like a drop of water That in the ocean seeks another drop.

Antipholus of Syracuse, Act 1 Scene 2

More in our collection of famous Shakespeare quotes.

Sources

Shakespeare adapted the Roman comedy Menaechmi by Plautus and doubled the confusion by adding a second pair of twins, borrowed from Plautus's Amphitruo. The shipwreck frame echoes the romance of Apollonius of Tyre, which he returned to in Pericles.

On stage and screen

It is the earliest Shakespeare play with a recorded performance date: it was staged during the Christmas revels at Gray's Inn, one of London's law schools, on 28 December 1594. It became the Rodgers and Hart musical The Boys from Syracuse (1938).

See where The Comedy of Errors sits in Shakespeare's career on the timeline, or read about the playhouses it was written for.