The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare

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The Comedy of Errors

Comedy of Errors, The
According to an eyewitness account, ‘a comedy of errors (like to Plautus his Menaechmus) was played by the players’ during the Christmas revels at Gray's Inn on 28 December 1594: this can only have been Shakespeare's play, which is indeed based on Plautus' comedy Menaechmi, and it is unlikely that the lawyers and students would have hired actors to appear at a grand festive occasion with anything but a new, or at least current, play. Although this debt to classical farce has inclined some scholars to see the play as apprentice work from the very start of Shakespeare's career, stylistic tests confirm a dating around 1594, with rare vocabulary placing it between The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet and its heavy use of rhyme placing it early in the lyrical period initiated by Venus and Adonis.

Sources

The play's chief plot, in which a man searching for his long-lost twin brother is...

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