Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors Author:William Shakespeare Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: TEMPLE OF DIANA AT EPHESUS. INTRODUCTION THE COMEDY OF ERRORS. I. THE HISTORY OF THE PLAY. All the critics agree that the Comedy of Errors, thou... more »gh first printed in the folio of 1623, is one of the earliest of the plays. It is mentioned by Meres (see M. N. D p. 9), andis probably the " Comedy of Errors, like to Plautus his Me- nechmus," which, according to the Gesta Grayorum, was " played by the players " at Gray's Inn, one night in December, 1594. The pun in iii. 2. 121 on France "making war against her heir " would seem to show that the play was written between August, 1589, when the civil war about the succession of Henry IV. began, and July, 1593, when it ended. Furnivall makes the date 1589, Collier "before 1590," Chalmers, Drake, Delius, and Stokes 1591, Malone 1592, Fleay (Chronicle Ltfe of Shakespeare, 1886) 1594, the play having been revised, as he thinks, from the original version of 1590, which may have been partly from another hand. ' The Comedy of Errors is the shortest of the plays, having, according to Mr. L. M. Griffiths (Evenings with Shakspere, Bristol and London, 1889), only 1778 lines ("Globe" ed.), while Hamlet, the longest, has 3930, Richard III. 3620, etc. The next shortest is the Tempest with 2065, the next Macbeth with 2108, and the next the Midsumm r Wglifs Dream with 2180. II. THE SOURCES OF THE PLOT. "The general idea of this play," as Singer remarks, "is taken from the Menachmi of Plautus, but the plot is entirely recast, and rendered much more diverting by the variety and quick succession of the incidents. To the twin brothers of Plautus are added twin servants, and though this increases the improbability, yet, as Schlegel observes, ' when once we have lent ourselves to the first, which certainly borders on the incredible, we ...« less