The Comedy of Errors Synopsis

From The Pocket Companion to Shakespeare by J C Trewin

Aegeon, a veteran merchant of Syracuse, is in distress in Ephesus, his town’s implacable enemy. Any Syracusian seen in Ephesus will be executed unless he can pay a ransom of a thousand marks. Aegeon’s goods, at the highest rate, cannot reach a hundred marks. Then why has he risked the penalty? He explains to the Duke (sympathetic, but unable to break the law), that long before, at Epidamnum, where he had gone on business, his wife had borne him twins. Strangely at that same hour and in the same inn, a peasant woman had given birth to indistinguishable twins who Aegeon had bought so that they could attend as slaves upon his sons. But on the way home their vessel was shipwrecked; he was separated from his wife, one of the twins and one of the peasant boys, and heard no more of them. When the other twins where eighteen they asked to go in search of their lost brothers. They did not return, and Aegeon, alone, had spent five years looking for them, coming at last to Ephesus and his apparent fate unless, at the day’s end, he could make up the ransom.
The second scene introduces the wanders who happen to have arrived, unknown to him, at the same time as Aegeon. Very soon, Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse are involved in a furious sequence of misunderstandings and the false identifications with Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus. (Oddly, four people but only two names.) Throughout the piece – which observes the unities of action, time and place – A is always being mistaken for B and C for D. Shakespeare keeps it up with fantastic ingenuity until when the plot seems impossible to disentangle, an abbess emerges from the priory in mid-Ephesus and reunites Aegeon and Aemilia. Within a short scene everything is more or less explained; and the Abbess invites the baffled Duke, “To go with us into the abbey here,/And hear at large discoursed all our fortunes.”