THE Comedy of Errors was first printed in the folio collection of Shakspere's Plays in 1623. There can be no doubt that it was therein printed from the author's manuscript. Appearing for the first time after the death of Shakspere, this copy presents many typographical errors; and in a few passages the text is manifestly corrupt. The difficulties, however, are not very considerable; and the original copy is decidedly better, for the most part, than the modern innovations. Malone, in adhering to this text, was more distinctly opposed to Steevens than in other plays, in which he has, though evidently contrary to his own better opinion, adopted the suggestions of Steevens and others, who introduced what they considered amendments, but which amendments were founded upon an imperfect knowledge of the phraseology and metre of their author. The rejections by Malone of the changes of Steevens are here made with somewhat more of pertinacity, and perhaps of ill-temper, than was common with him.

The Comedy of Errors was clearly one of Shakspere's very early plays. It was probably untouched by its author after its first production. We have here no existing sketch to enable us to trace what he introduced, and what he corrected, in the maturity of his judgment. It was, we imagine, one of the pieces for which he would manifest little solicitude after his genius was fully developed. The play is amongst those mentioned by Meres in 1598. The only allusion in it which can be taken to fix a date, is that which is supposed to refer to the civil contests of France P 2 211

upon the accession of Henry IV. We have noticed this passage in our Illustrations of Aet III.; but we are by no means sure that the equivoque in the description of France, "arm'd and reverted, making war against her heir," is to be received with reference to the war of the League. The spelling of heire in the original copy is not conclusive; for the words heire and haire are confounded in other places of the early copies of Shakspere's dramas. At any rate, the change of heire to haire in the second folio shows that the supposed allusion to Henry IV. was forgotten in 1632.

We must depend, then, upon the internal evidence of this being a very early play. This evidence consists,

1. In the great prevalence of that measure which was known to our language as early as the time of Chaucer, by the name of "rime dogerel." This peculiarity is found only in three of our author's plays, -in Love's Labour's Lost, in the Taming of the Shrew, and in the Comedy of Errors. But this measure was a distinguishing characteristic of the early English drama. It prevails very much more in this play than in Love's Labour's Lost; for prose is here much more sparingly introduced. The doggrel seems to stand half-way between prose and verse, marking the distinction between the language of a work of art, and that of ordinary life, in the same way that the recitative does in a musical composition. It is to be observed, too, in the Comedy of Errors, that this measure is very carefully regulated by somewhat strict laws:

"We came into the world like brother and brother,

And now let's go hand in hand, not one before another."

This concluding passage, which is cast in the same mould as the other similar verses of the play, is much more regular in its structure than the following in Love's Labour's Lost:

"And such barren plants are set before us, that we thankful should be,

Which we of taste and feeling are, for those parts that do fructify in us more than 1.e."

The latter line almost reminds us of 'Mrs. Harris's Petition,' which, according to Swift, "Humbly sheweth

"That I went to warm myself in Lady Betty's chamber, because I was cold,

And I had in a purse seven pounds, four shillings and sixpence, besides farthings, in money and gold." The measure in the Comedy of Errors was formed by Shakspere upon his rude predecessors. In some of these it is not only occasionally introduced, but constitutes the great mass of the dialogue. In 'Gammer Gurton's Needle,' for example, a long play of five acts, which has been called the first English comedy, the doggrel measure prevails throughout, as in the concluding lines:

"But now, my good masters, since we must be gone,

And leave you behind us, here all alone,

Since at our lasting ending, thus merry we b2.

For Gammer Gurton's Needle's sake, let us have a plaudytie."

Nor was

The supposed earlier comedy of Ralph Roister Doister' is composed in the same measure.
it in humorous performances alone that this structure of verse (which Shakspere always uses as a
vehicle of fun) was introduced. In 'Damon and Pithias,' a serious play, which was probably produced
about 1570, the sentence of Dionysius is thus pronouneed upon Pithias:-

"Pithias, seeing thou takest me at my word, take Damon to thee:
For two months he is thine: unbind him; I set him free;
Which time once expired, if he appear not the next day by noon,
Without further delay thou shalt lose thy life, and that full soon."

There cannot, we think, be a stronger proof that the Comedy of Errors was an early play of our author, than its agreement, in this particular, with the models which Shakspere found in his almost immediate predecessors.

2. In Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer-Night's Dream, and the Comedy of Errors, alternate rhymes are very frequently introduced. Shakspere obtained the mastery over this species of verse in the Venus and Adonis, “the first heir of his invention," as he himself calls it. He writes it with extraordinary facility-with an ease and power that strikingly contrast with the more laboured elegiac stanzas of modern times. Nothing can be more harmonious, or the har

mony more varied, than this measure in Shakspere's hands. Take, for example, the well-known lines in the Venus and Adonis, which, themselves the most perfect music, have been allied to one of the most successful musical compositions of the present day—

"Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear,

Or, like a fairy, trip upon the green,
Or, like a nymph, with long dishevell'd hair,
Dance on the sands, and yet no footing seen.'

Compare these with the following in Love's Labour's Lost:

"A wither'd hermit, five-score winters worn,
Might shake off fifty, looking in her eye:
Beauty doth varnish age, as if new born,
And gives the crutch the cradle's infancy."

Or with these, in Romeo and Juliet :

"If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this,-
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand,

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss "

Or with some of the lines in A Midsummer Night's Dream, such as,

"Why should you think that I should woo in scorn?

Scorn and derision never come in tears:

Look, when I vow I weep; and vows so born

In their nativity all truth appears."

Or, lastly, with the exquisite address of Antipholus of Syracuse to Luciana, in the third act of the
Comedy of Errors.

"Teach me, dear creature, how to think and speak;

Lay open to my earthy gross conceit,
Smother'd in errors, feeble, shallow, weak,

The folded meaning of your words' deceit."

There was clearly a time in Shakspere's poetical life when he delighted in this species of versification; and in many of the instances in which he has employed it in the dramas we have mentioned, the passages have somewhat of a fragmentary appearance, as if they were not originally cast in a dramatic mould, but were amongst those scattered thoughts of the young poet which had shaped themselves into verse, without a purpose beyond that of embodying his feeling of the beautiful and the harmonious. When the time arrived that he had fully dedicated himself to the great work of his life, he rarely ventured upon cultivating these offshoots of his early versification. The doggrel was entirely rejected the alternate rhymes no longer tempted him by their music to introduce a measure which is scarcely akin with the dramatic spirit the couplet was adopted more and more sparingly-and he finally adheres to the blank verse which he may almost be said to have created,-in his hands certainly the grandest as well as the sweetest form in which the highest thoughts were ever unfolded to listening humanity.

SUPPOSED SOURCE OF THE PLOT.

The commentators have puzzled themselves, after their usual fashion, with the evidence which this play undoubtedly presents of Shakspere's ability to read Latin, and their dogged resolution to maintain the opinion that in an age of grammar-schools our poet never could have attained that common accomplishment. The speech of Egeon, in the first scene,

"A heavier task could not have been impos'd
Than I to speak my griefs unspeakable,"-

is in Catullus, Ovid, and Horace. The "owls" that "suck our breath" are the "striges" of Ovid. The apostrophe of Dromio to the virtues of "beating"-" When I am cold he heats me with beating; when I am warm he cools me with beating; I am waked with it when I sleep; rais'd with it when I sit; driven out of doors with it when I go from home; welcomed home with it when I return;❞—is modelled upon Cicero :-" Hæc studia adolescentiam agunt, senectutem oblectant, secundas res ornant, adversis perfugium ac solatium præbent, delectant domi, non impediunt foris, pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur." The burning of the conjurer's beard is an incident copied from the twelfth book of Virgil's Æneid, where Corinæus singes "the goodly bush of hair” of Ebusus, in a manner scarcely consistent with the dignity of heroic poetry. Lastly, in the original copy of the Comedy of Errors, the Antipholus of Ephesus is called Sereptus-a corruption of the epithet by which one of the twin brothers in Plautus is distinguished-Menæchmus Surreptus. There was a translation of this comedy of Plautus, to which we shall presently more fully advert. "If the poet had not dipped into the original Plautus," says Capell, "Surreptus had never stood in his copy, the translation having no such agnomen, but calling one brother simply Menæchmus, the other Sosicles." With all these admissions on the part of some of those who proclaimed that Farmer had made a wonderful discovery when he attempted to prove that Shakspere did not know the difference between clarus and carus - (See Henry V., Act v., Illustration)—they will not swerve from their belief that his mind was so constituted as to be incapable of attaining that species of knowledge which was of the easiest attainment in his own day,-and for the teaching of which a school was expressly endowed at Stratford-upon-Avon. Steevens says, "Shakspere might have taken the general plan of this comedy from a translation of the Menæchmi of Plautus, by W. W., i. e. (according to Wood) William Warner, in 1595." Ritson thinks that Shakspere was under no obligation to this translation; but that the Comedy of Errors "was not originally his, but proceeded from some inferior playwright, who was capable of reading the Menæchmi without the help of a translation." Malone entirely disagrees with Ritson's theory that this comedy was founded upon an earlier production; but sets up a theory of his own to get over the difficulty started by Ritson, that not a single name, word, or line, is taken from Warner's translation A play called 'The Historie of Error' was enacted before Queen Elizabeth, "by the children of Powles," in 1576; and from this piece, says Malone, “it is extremely probable that he was furnished with the fable of the present comedy," as well as the designation of “surreptus.” Here is, unquestionably, a very early play of Shakspere,-and yet Steevens maintains that it was taken from a translation of Plautus, published in 1595; the play has no resemblance, beyond the general character of the incidents, to this translation,-and therefore Ritson pronounces that it is not entirely Shakspere's work ;—and while Malone denies this, he guesses that the Comedy of Errors was founded upon a much older play. And why all this contradictory hypothesis? Simply, because these most learned men are resolved to hold their own heads higher than Shakspere, by maintaining that he could not do what they could-read Plautus in the original. We have not a doubt that the Comedy of Errors was written at least five years before the publication of Warner's translation of the Menæchmi; and, further, that Shakspere in the composition of his own play was perfectly familiar with the Menæchmi of Plautus. In Hamlet he gives, in a word, the characteristics of two ancient dramatists; -his criticism is decisive as to his familiarity with the originals: "Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light." We shall furnish a few extracts from this translation of 1595; whence it will be seen, incidentally, that the lightness of the free and natural old Roman is wondrously loaded by the prosaic hand of Master William Warner.

The original argument of the Menæchmi, it will be perceived, at once gave Shakspere the epithet surreptus, as well as furnished him with some of the characters of his play, much more distinctly than the translation, which we present with it :