The Comedy of Errors
The Comedy of Errors
Shakespeare's shortest and most manic comedy runs on a brilliant mechanical absurdity: two sets of identical twins, separated at birth, collide in the ancient city of Ephesus. Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant Dromio arrive unaware that their doubles, Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus, have lived there all along. What follows is a spiraling catastrophe of mistaken identities, where the wrong men are beaten, accused of theft and infidelity, seduced by the wrong women, and dragged off to a madhouse. The real engine here isn't just farcical chaos, though. It's Shakespeare's razor-sharp wordplay and his obsessive interest in the question of identity itself. If no one can tell you from your double, who are you? The play never quite answers this, but it asks it with such gleeful ferocity that you stop caring. Nearly five centuries later, the farcical machinery still works: the timing, the escalating absurdity, the puns that land like small explosions. It's for anyone who wants to see comedy built with the precision of a Swiss watch and the energy of a controlled explosion.
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“A wretched soul, bruised with adversity, We bid be quiet when we hear it cry; But were we burdened with light weight of pain, As much or more we should ourselves complain.””
— William Shakespeare
“We came into the world like brother and brother,And now let's go hand in hand, not one before another.””
— William Shakespeare
“He that commends me to mine own contentCommends me to the thing I cannot get.I to the world am like a drop of waterThat in the ocean seeks another drop,Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself:So I, to find a mother and a brother,In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.””
— William Shakespeare
“I to the world am like a drop of waterThat in the ocean seeks another drop, Who, falling there to find his fellow forth, Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.””
— William Shakespeare
“O, grief hath changed me since you saw me last,And careful hours with Time's deformed handHave written strange defeatures in my face.But tell me yet, dost thou not know my voice?””
— William Shakespeare
“If the skin were parchment and the blows you gave were ink,Your own handwriting would tell you what I think.””
— William Shakespeare
“Until I know this sure uncertainty,I'll entertain the offered fallacy.””
— William Shakespeare
“O, train me not, sweet mermaid, with thy note,to drown me in thy sister’s flood of tears.””
— William Shakespeare
“If she lives till doomsday, she'll burn a week longer than the whole world.””
— William Shakespeare
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Shakespeare, William. The Comedy of Errors. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-comedy-of-errors-3a1227d8-546c-447d-9b62-a16777fdbb13.Shakespeare, W. (n.d.). The Comedy of Errors. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-comedy-of-errors-3a1227d8-546c-447d-9b62-a16777fdbb13Shakespeare, William. The Comedy of Errors. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-comedy-of-errors-3a1227d8-546c-447d-9b62-a16777fdbb13.
