he corrections, from certain mistakes of the printer,
appear to be in the speeches of the wittiest of the lords and ladies,
Biron and Rosaline. The play next appeared in the Folio.

+Source+.--No direct source has been discovered. In 1586, Catherine
de' Medici, accompanied by her ladies, visited the court of Henry of
Navarre, and attempted to settle the disputes between that prince and
her son, Henry III. Other hints may also have come from French
history. The masque of Muscovites may have been based on the joke
played on a Russian ambassador in York Gardens in 1582, when the
ambassador was hoping to get a lady of Elizabeth's court as a wife for
the Czar. A mocking presentation of this lady was made with much
ceremony.

{147}

+The Comedy of Errors+.--Mistaken identity (which the Elizabethans
called "Error") is nearly always amusing, whether on the stage or in
actual life. _The Comedy of Errors_ is a play in which this situation
is developed to the extreme of improbability; but we lose sight of this
in the roaring fun which results. Nowadays we should call a play of
this type a farce, since most of the fun comes in this way from
situations which are improbable, and since the play depends on these
for success rather than on characterization or dialogue.

A merchant of Syracuse has had twin sons, and bought twin servants for
them. His wife with one twin son and his twin slave has been lost by
shipwreck and has come to live in Ephesus. The other son and slave,
when grown, have started out to find their brothers, and the father,
some years later, starts out to find him. They come to Ephesus, and an
amusing series of errors at once begins. The wife takes the wrong twin
for her husband, the master beats the wrong slave, the wrong son
disowns his father, the twin at Ephesus is arrested instead of his
brother, and the twin slave Dromio of Syracuse is claimed as a husband
by a black kitchen girl of Ephesus. The situation gets more and more
mixed, until at last the real identity of the strangers from Syracuse
is established, and all ends happily.

+Date+.--There is much wordplay of a rather cheap kind, much doggerel,
and much jingling rime in this play. All these things point to early
work. A reference (III, ii, 125-127) to France "making war against her
heir" admits the play to the period 1585-1594, when Henry of Navarre
was received as king {148} of France. The play was probably written
not later than 1