Playing the Law for Lawyers: Witnessing, Evidence and the Law of Contract in The Comedy of Errors

Summary

The Comedy of Errors’ opening focus on the twins’ father Egeon was not suggested by either of the play's two principal sources (Plautus's Menaechmi and his Amphitruo), but the addition of this new plot element immediately directs audience attention to a number of different kinds of bonds – from the physical restraints visible on the prisoner to the law's theoretical restraints on the Duke; from the history of Egeon's severed family ties to the history behind the severed commercial and social relations between Ephesus and Syracuse now motivating the old man's imprisonment. Though Egeon's plight remains disjoined from the comedy of the twins’ mistaken identities until the final scene, the opening view of the bound and imperilled father launches visual and narrative elements decidedly pertinent to the play that follows, for the bonds and obligations of family and commerce – subsequently to find their key metaphor in the chain (which itself appears in interchangeable symbiosis with the rope) – provide the impetus for almost every plot turn. The play's first known audience, assembled at Gray's Inn on Holy Innocents Night (28 December) 1594, had a close professional interest in such questions. The Comedy of Errors was perhaps written specifically for that occasion but the surviving evidence of that performance was published almost a century later. The play was long considered an early piece of writing (Shakespeare's presumed lack of experience thus becoming a reason for some to disparage it).