Globe Education Online
Resources for people passionate about learning and engaging with Shakespeare's plays
The Comedy Of Errors (1999)
One of these men is genius to the other:
And so of these, which is the natural man,
And which the spirit?
5.1.334-336
The city of Ephesus, a cult centre of the goddess Diana, with a bad reputation for pagan magic, has inflexible laws about immigrants. When a strager searching for his lost family and servamts is sentenced to death, the goddess fortune plays her part, reuniting the scattered family and restoring the battered self.
As Sir Philip Sidney wrote, comedy:
"is an imitation of the common errors of our life," which the dramatist represents "in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be, so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one."
