Comedy of Duplicates

I had not realized that even in Shakespeare’s times writers often fell into the problem of common themes. When I watched this play I realized that I had already seen quite a similar story line. Comedy of Errors revolves around not one but two sets of twins. These twins not only look exactly alike but they are also wearing exactly the same clothing. These twins are named Antipholus and Dromio. Both pairs of twins have the same names and have the same master servant relationship; Antipholus being the master and Dromio the servant. To make the story more interesting the Mead drama club has put the story in the 1920’s in America. The change in the place and time does not do very much for the story. To tell truth I think the change was made to be easier on the repetitious needs of the wardrobe department.

The plot you can likely guess is similar to Twelfth Night. After twin look-alikes cause a large amount of trouble everyone in the plot is brought together and the whole plot is explained in the end. Going from one relationship to the other the twins cause problems for everyone. Though, the thing I would like explained is what parents could ever think, naming two sets of twin children the same name, is a good idea. But there are other similarities to Twelfth Night, both of the twin main characters get accused of madness much like Malvolio was. Similarly the play also makes fun of the Catholic habit of exorcism. Though in the Mead play the character that is called to help the insane main character is a doctor I’m pretty sure the original character was a priest. This change was likely made for the time period and audience.

Mead went out of its way to try to make the convoluted story a little more understandable. The first way they did that was to create a Corus that gave summaries for each section. This character would enter and explain in modern language what was about to occur in the play. Over all the play was passable but reminded me greatly of a lot of Shakespeare other, much better plays.