Left to right: Michael Striano, Philip Mutz, James Michael Reilly, and Derek Wilson

Photo: Gerry Goodstein 2008

“There were other bustling cities in England, and, if he had traveled, the young Shakespeare could conceivably have seen one or two of them, but none was like London. With a population nearing two hundred thousand, it was some fifteen times larger than the next most populous cities in England and Wales; in all of Europe only Naples and Paris exceeded it in size. Its commercial vitality was intense: London, as one contemporary put it, was “the Fair that lasts all year.” This meant that it was fast escaping the seasonal rhythms by which the rest of the country lived; and it was escaping too the deep sense of the local that governed identity elsewhere. It was one of the only places in England where you were not surrounded by people who knew you, your family, and many of the most intimate details of your life, one of the only places in which your clothes and food and furniture were not produced by people you knew personally. It was in consequence the preeminent site not only of relative anonymity but also of fantasy: a place where you could dream of escaping your origins and turning into someone else.”1

                                                                 –Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World

                                        “In Ephesus I am but two hours old,
                                   As strange unto your town as to your talk”
                             --William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors


      Shakespeare did not grow up in London, but rather, was born, raised, and married in the relative peace and quiet of Stratford-upon-Avon, a small, midland town. Sometime in the mid-1580s (perhaps just after his wife gave birth to twins in February 1585), he abandoned the country-life and, leaving his wife and children behind, made his way to the bustling metropolis of London, where he would eventually become one of the greatest playwrights that the world would ever know.

      Given this detail of his biography, it is interesting that one of the very first plays he wrote, The Comedy of Errors, focuses on a set of characters who, after long travel, find themselves lost in an unfamiliar yet bustling city. The play seems so obsessed with an experience of foreignness only achievable in an urban environment – the apprehension of the unknown, the hunger for human contact, the feeling of anonymity, the loss of one’s sense of identity – that it feels as if Shakespeare was translating his experience discovering London into Antipholus of Syracuse’s experience discovering Ephesus.

      As Shakespeare would do in so many of his plays, he creates in the Ephesus of Comedy of Errors a location that feels both foreign and familiar. While Antipholus grows increasingly convinced that “none but witches do inhabit” in Ephesus, he is, in fact, surrounded by a community of personalities quite similar to those that he would have found in any English city, and certainly in London. Antipholus, believing every urban legend he has heard about Ephesus, can only understand the strange occurrences that befall him as the result of supernatural causes, yet much of the play’s comedy exists in our constant awareness that, as strange as the play’s events seem to many of its characters, the chaos we are watching is, in fact, the result of a series of incredibly worldly accidents. There is no magic in this play – or at least none of the literal kind. And yet, there is something incredibly reassuring in our ability to see that, as lost as each of the characters feels, the very thing that each is looking for lies right in front of his or her eyes.

      And so, to the frightened traveler, Shakespeare, with the experience of a few years living in London, seems to offer a bit of comfort. ‘Everything will eventually work out, and it will all be okay,’ the play seems to be saying. Despite what Adriana believes, her husband is actually not insane. Despite what Antipholus of Ephesus believes, his wife is actually not adulterous. And despite what Antipholus of Syracuse believes, Ephesus is actually not a breeding ground of sorcery. The ‘comedy of errors,’ then, is not only the series of erroneous identifications that create such chaos over the play’s two hours, but also the catalogue of erroneous beliefs and accidental convictions that turn life in Ephesus into something so much more terrifying than it actually needs to be.



1 Stephen Greenblatt. Will in the World. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 166.