_Published_, in the first folio, 1623. _Source of the Plot._ The plot was taken from the _Menaechmi_ of Plautus. Whether Shakespeare read the play in Latin, or in a translation, or heard it from a friend, or saw it acted, is not known. All four are possible. The sub-plot, in this case a duplication of the plot, was suggested by a part of the _Amphitruo_ of Plautus. The play is brought on to the plane of human feeling by the character of AEgeon. This character was suggested by a story in _Gli Suppositi_ (The Supposes) of Ariosto. _The Fable._ Like all comedies of mistake, the _Comedy of Errors_ has an extremely complicated plot. The play consists of a number of ingeniously contrived situations in which either the Antipholus and the Dromio of Ephesus are mistaken for the Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse, or those of Syracuse are mistaken for those of Ephesus. The comedy of mistake is touched with beauty by the romantic addition of the restoration of old AEgeon to his long-lost wife. Poets are great or little according to the nobleness of their endeavour to build a mansion for the soul. Shakespeare, like other poets, grew by continual, very difficult mental labour, by the deliberate and prolonged exercise of every mental weapon, and by the resolve to do not "the nearest thing," precious to human sheep, but the difficult, new and noble thing, glimmering beyond his mind, and brought to glow there by toil. We do not know when the play was written, nor why it was written. If it were not written by special request, for reward, it must have been chosen either for the rest given by a subject external to the mind, or as a self-set exercise in the difficult mental labour of comic dramatic construction. Every playwright sees the comic opportunity of the _Menaechmi_ fable. A playwright not yet sure of his art sees and admires behind the comedy the firm, intricate mental outline that has kept the play alive for more than two thousand years.