SOURCE: “The Comedy of Errors,” in Shakespeare's Comedy of Love, Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1974, pp. 1-19.

In the following essay, Leggatt focuses on the “interweaving of the fantastic and the everyday” in the play, contrasting it to Plautus' Menaechmi.

In the second scene of The Comedy of Errors, Dromio of Ephesus meets Antipholus of Syracuse for the first time, and rebukes him for not coming home to dinner. Antipholus ignores the rebuke (which means nothing to him) and turns to a more urgent matter:

antipholus s: Stop in your wind, sir; tell me this, I pray: Where have you left the money that I gave you? dromio e: O—sixpence that I had a Wednesday last To pay the saddler for my mistress' crupper? The saddler had it, sir; I kept it not. 

(I. ii. 53-7)

We settle ourselves for a couple of hours of farce. The confusion seems...