The use of mistaken identities, as well as the confusion of twins, had long been popular in the Western theater tradition. While Plautus had only one set of twins, Shakespeare has two; thus, in his comedy, he increases to a great extent the possibility of confusion. The comedy was a huge success then, and it has continued to be popular.
Indeed, even Broadway audiences were ecstatic over a spectacular musical adaptation of Comedy of Errors in , entitled The Boys from Syracuse.
To begin with, the plot situation seems hopeless a melodramatic and romantic touch : a father has lost a son and a wife, and his remaining son has gone in search of his long-lost twin brother, and the desolate father has not heard from his remaining son for a long time; thus, he sets out in search of his son and, by accident, arrives in a city that is a sworn enemy to his own city.
Accordingly, he faces almost certain death; yet, by the close of the play, the entire family — servants included — are reunited, and marriages are in the offing. Eventually they survive, but in a mistake only one set of names survive and both boys are called Antipholus and both servant boys are named Dromio. Eventually the mother, her one son and his servant end up in Ephesus. The other two boys end up in Corinth, but eventually make their way back to Syracuse.
The play then jumps ahead about 30 or more years. Antipholus of Syracuse and Dromio of Syracuse travel to Ephesus as part of a search for his missing mother and brother. He hopes to rely on Antipholus to help him and he agrees.
Wealthy and renowned, Shakespeare retired to Stratford, and died in at the age of fifty-two. At the time of Shakespeare's death, such luminaries as Ben Jonson hailed him as the apogee of Renaissance theatre. Shakespeare's works were collected and printed in various editions in the century following his death, and by the early eighteenth century his reputation as the greatest poet ever to write in English was well established.
The unprecedented admiration garnered by his works led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare's life; but the paucity of surviving biographical information has left many details of Shakespeare's personal history shrouded in mystery. Some people have concluded from this fact that Shakespeare's plays in reality were written by someone else--Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford are the two most popular candidates--but the evidence for this claim is overwhelmingly circumstantial, and the theory is not taken seriously by many scholars.
In the absence of definitive proof to the contrary, Shakespeare must be viewed as the author of the 37 plays and sonnets that bear his name. The legacy of this body of work is immense. Like the Greek and Roman classics, the Bible cannot be underestimated as an influence on writers of Shakespeare's period.
St Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians is full of advice on the right way for husbands and wives - as well as masters and servants - to behave; advice most pertinent to the various pairings in Shakespeare's play. Shakespeare and more twins Shakespeare makes many changes and additions to the story of The Menaechmi. Confessio Amantis The characters of the father Aegeon and that of his long-lost wife, Abbess Emilia, can trace their ancestry back to John Gower's Confessio Amantis The Bible Like the Greek and Roman classics, the Bible cannot be underestimated as an influence on writers of Shakespeare's period.
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