The Comedy of Errors

by Shakespeare

First published 1623

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Two sets of identical twins, separated in a shipwreck as infants, unknowingly arrive in the same city. Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant Dromio repeatedly encounter people who believe them to be their long-lost Ephesian counterparts, producing accusations of debt, infidelity, theft, madness and sorcery.

The escalating misunderstandings take place against the danger facing Egeon, the Syracusan father condemned under Ephesus’s law against foreign merchants. Shakespeare’s shortest comedy turns the machinery of mistaken identity into a rapid sequence of domestic and civic crises, ending when the family’s history is finally reconstructed and the separated twins recognise one another.