Shakespeare, Molière, and the Comedy of Ambiguity

Summary

Exactly three hundred years ago, in September 1668, in the presence of the Russian ambassadors, Molière was performing his great success of that year, Amphitryon, a comedy based on a play of Plautus which, as it happens, Shakespeare had also used in his only imitation of the Latin poet. In the eyes of one who has been invited to speak of Molière on the occasion of a Shakespeare Conference—a rather perplexing privilege—the coincidence is too remarkable not to seem, as Duke Vincentio would say, ‘an accident that Heaven provides’. I see no reason to deny myself the benefit of this happy coincidence, especially since there is much more in common between The Comedy of Errors and Amphitryon than their comparatively unimportant debt to Plautus.

It is currently said that Shakespeare, whose plot is chiefly drawn from the more down-to-earth, naturalistic, Menaechmi, went to the play of Amphitruo for the sake of additional comic effects, the double master-servant theme, and the incident of the husband locked out of his own house. This may be true, but does not invalidate deeper motives. Always a very intelligent reader, he may well have been shrewd enough to recognize that The Menaechmi and Amphitruo are substantially the same kind of story.