Okay, so today's lecture is on Comedy of Errors.

So Comedy of Errors is written towards the beginning of Shakespeare's career.

That's one of the things I'm going to talk about about it.

And it's first printed in the first folio that posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's plays in 1623.

If you've been to any of the previous lectures in this series, you'll know that the

premise of the lectures is to try and distill quite a lot of critical areas into one question

and then to use that question on the play to reopen some different kinds of methodologies

and lines of inquiry that we might use to focus our attention.

So my question about comedy of errors, my attempt to condense what critics have said about it

is quite a simple one. Should we bother with it? Should we bother with comedy of errors? Most

criticism, I think, has been asking that question. Is it a serious play? Are the ways we can take it seriously?

So the lecture today is about seriousness, whether comedy varies is serious,

whether plays should be serious, and whether seriousness is the only thing that should grab our attention.

So of course, since I'm barely a minute into the lecture, my premise for the next

50 or so minutes is going to be that it is worth bothering with, but you will make your own judgment

about that. I'm going to start, as I will, in all the lectures, with an outline of the plot

of the play in case you're not familiar with that. So the play begins quite darkly. Egeon, who is a merchant, is under arrest and threat

of death because he is an enemy from Syracuse in Ephesus. The Duke pronounces that he has

only until evening to find the ransom.

Egyne tells us that 33 years ago a shipwreck divided his family so that he was parted

from his wife Amelia and his twin sons, Antiphilus and Antiphilus, were also separated, as were their twin servants, Dromio and Dromo.

The other twins, Antifilus and Dromio, they have both ended up in Syracuse, so we'll try and call them Antifilus Andromio of Syracuse, but in some ways, muddling

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