That trope didn't survive as anything more than absurd in the later Roman interpretations of the play, but knowing that the Greek is at the root of the story makes Shakespeare’s play a little less farcical and a little more poignant.
#PLAUTUS MENAECHMI FULL TEXT FREE#
In fact, those men were writing during the great Hellenistic wars, when "children were often ‘lost’ by parents too poor or too distracted to cope with them at the time of their birth, and where free citizens could become slaves overnight." Separation, unwanted children, and geographical transience were realities in the Greek world. She notes that Greek comedy writers, like Menander and his contemporaries in 4 BC, would not think of children separated at birth as such a big stretch.
Critic Anne Barton points out that behind every Roman tragedy, there’s a Greek one as a foundation.
With an eye to the classics, it’s also important that the comedy isn't as farcical in its foundations as some would think.
Additionally, Egeon, instead of being portrayed as the stereotypical meddling parent, received a sympathetic "makeover" as a tragic and abandoned father by Shakespeare’s pen. Shakespeare didn’t only borrow from these classical plays, he built them up, too – by taking out some of the more absurd and one-dimensional characters and replacing them with deeper, feeling players. The story of separated twins comes from Plautus’s Menaechmi, while the separated servants motif comes from another Plautus play called Amphitruo. It’s also important that Shakespeare was trying to draw on his audience’s knowledge of theater by combining two plays from antiquity in the plot of The Comedy of Errors. It’s like how Picasso, revered for his abstract art, was initially a classical portrait painter. Shakespeare’s decision to draw on the erudite classics, and to preserve the three theatrical unities (time, space, and action), might be the playwright proving he could master the traditional form before altering it (as he does in his later plays). Shakespeare and his company were still relatively new to the theater scene, and the fact that they were asked to play at Grey’s Inn, one of the courtly venues, before a big-deal crowd, is pretty significant. The play’s first recorded performance takes place on December 28, 1594, as part of the raucous and disorderly Christmas festivities at Grey’s Inn. To dismiss this play, however, is to fail to realize the importance of The Comedy of Errors in view of Shakespeare’s other works.
The play is definitely full of foolishness and frippery, and that lack of deep content, combined with its "by-the-book" writing, often leads critics to conclude there’s nothing more to this play than Shakespeare working out a couple of his writing kinks as an amateur playwright. It seems "textbook" in a way we’re not really used to with Shakespeare – it draws from two earlier classical plays, and has a unity of time, place, and action that only appears once more in Shakespeare’s entire portfolio. Since this play appears early along Shakespeare’s writing timeline, critics tend to dismiss it as his more juvenile work. The play is about two sets of identical twins separated as infants, and the absurdity surrounding their accidental reunion. The Comedy of Errors is – you guessed it – a comedy by William Shakespeare written in 1594. Read the full text of The Comedy of Errors with a side-by-side translation HERE.
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