case a duplication of the plot, was suggested
by a part of the _Amphitruo_ of Plautus.

The play is brought on to the plane of human feeling by the
character of AEgeon. This character was suggested by a story in _Gli
Suppositi_ (The Supposes) of Ariosto.

_The Fable._ Like all comedies of mistake, the _Comedy of Errors_
has an extremely complicated plot. The play consists of a number of
ingeniously contrived situations in which either the Antipholus
and the Dromio of Ephesus are mistaken for the Antipholus and
Dromio of Syracuse, or those of Syracuse are mistaken for those of
Ephesus. The comedy of mistake is touched with beauty by the
romantic addition of the restoration of old AEgeon to his long-lost
wife.

Poets are great or little according to the nobleness of their endeavour
to build a mansion for the soul. Shakespeare, like other poets, grew by
continual, very difficult mental labour, by the deliberate and prolonged
exercise of every mental weapon, and by the resolve to do not "the
nearest thing," precious to human sheep, but the difficult, new and
noble thing, glimmering beyond his mind, and brought to glow there by
toil. We do not know when the play was written, nor why it was written.
If it were not written by special request, for reward, it must have been
chosen either for the rest given by a subject external to the mind, or
as a self-set exercise in the difficult mental labour of comic dramatic
construction. Every playwright sees the comic opportunity of the
_Menaechmi_ fable. A playwright not yet sure of his art sees and admires
behind the comedy the firm, intricate mental outline that has kept the
play alive for more than two thousand years.

The _Menaechmi_ of Plautus is a piece of very skilful theatrical craft.
It is almost heartless. In bringing it out of the Satanic kingdom of
comedy into the charities of a larger system Shakespeare shows for the
first time a real largeness of dramatic instinct. In his handling of the
tricky ingenious plot he achieves (what, perhaps, he wrote the play to
get) a dexterous, certain play of mind. He strikes the ringing note,
time after time. It cannot be said that the verse, or the sense of
character, or the invention is better than in the other early plays. It
is not. The play is on a lower plane than any of his other works. It is
the only Shakespearean play without a deep philosophical idea. If it be
not a s