Dating the play

The first recorded performance of The Comedy of Errors was on 28 December 1594, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, in the hall of Gray's Inn in Holborn as part of the Christmas festivities.

Scholars are divided about the play's date of composition. Some argue that it was written in the very early 1590s but others maintain that 1594 is the more likely date and that it was, perhaps, expressly written for this performance before a legal audience at the end of that year. If the later date is correct, it was composed at the same time as Love's Labour's Lost and the narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece.

The Comedy of Errors was not printed until 1623 when Shakespeare's plays were collected in the First Folio, published seven years after the dramatist's death. 

Shakespeare's sources

The most obvious source for The Comedy of Errors is Plautus's comedy The Menaechmi.

In 16th century Europe, Plautus was perhaps the most popular of the dramatists of ancient Rome and this was certainly one of his most popular plays.

The Menaechmi of the play's title are a pair of identical twins, sons to a Syracusan merchant. One of them, Menaechmus, is lost as a child and the other is given his name in his memory. As an adult, the remaining twin goes off in search of his brother and, after many confusions of mistaken identity, the brothers find each other and all is well.

Shakespeare and more twins

Shakespeare makes many changes and additions to the story of The Menaechmi. He enlarges and enriches the role of the neglected wife and adds a sister, father and mother, as well as the new location of Ephesus.

The most striking of Shakespeare's additions is that of a second pair of identical twins - the servant Dromios. Shakespeare's knowledge of another of Plautus's plays, The Amphrituo, gave him the germ of this idea. In this play, Jupiter and Mercury impersonate a mortal master and servant so that Jupiter can make love to the mortal's wife.

In both Plautus and Shakespeare's plays, much comedy is found in seeing the rightful master denied access to his own house. In Shakespeare's hands, the play becomes not just a dazzlingly confident manipulation of fiendishly complicated plot twists, all set within one day and one place, but a poignant story of love, from the conjugal to the fraternal and parental.

George Gascoigne's play Supposes, an English version of Ariosto's I Suppositi, was performed at Gray's Inn in 1566 and offers a similar sequence of disguises and mistaken identities involving masters, servants and rich fathers. Ariosto, writing at the very beginning of the 16th century, himself drew on the comedies of Plautus and Terence.

Another English play from the period just before Shakespeare is John Lyly's Mother Bombie, in which all manner of masters, servants and young women are tangled up in false identities and confusions.

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 (1390).

Gower tells the story of Apollonius's wife who appears to die in childbirth while at sea. Consigned to the waves, her body floats to Ephesus where, revived, she becomes a priestess of Diana and is eventually reunited with her husband. This story was to provide the raw material for Shakespeare's much later play, Pericles.

The Bible

Like the Greek and Roman classics, the Bible cannot be underestimated as an influence on writers of Shakespeare's period. In St Paul's Acts of the Apostles, Shakespeare read about the strange sorceries for which Ephesus was notorious. 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.