In the Library
The Comedy of Errors
William Shakespeare, 1594
- Form
- Form Play
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 1 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 11
- Length
- Length 16k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
I to the world am like a drop of water / That in the ocean seeks another drop,
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Tempest
William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's last great play begins where this early comedy does, with a shipwreck that scatters a family, then lets an island's magic bring them back together.
£1.99
The Importance of Being Earnest
Oscar Wilde
The Importance of Being Earnest does the same thing with mistaken identities, but swaps shipwrecked twins for two men both claiming to be the fictional Ernest.
£1.99
About the book
A merchant stands under sentence of death in Ephesus, given until sundown to raise a ransom he cannot pay, and he spends the reprieve telling the court how the sea once tore his family in half. Then the play turns that family loose in the same city without telling any of them: two sets of identical twins, two masters named Antipholus, two servants named Dromio, one afternoon, and every door in town opening on the wrong person. Shakespeare's shortest play is also his most beautifully engineered, a machine of wrong dinners, wrong wives and wrong beatings, with a gold chain delivered to one brother and billed to the other. Yet the farce keeps opening onto something desolate. One twin says he is a drop of water searching the ocean for another drop, confounding himself in the search, and everyone he meets insists they know him, and none of them do. The laughter runs on the fear underneath it: that a family is something the sea can take back, and that being recognised at all is luck.