The constructive art with which Shakspere shaped history into drama is well seen in comparing his King John with the two plays on that subject which were already on the stage.  These, like all the other old “Chronicle histories,” such as Thomas Lord Cromwell and the Famous Victories of Henry V., follow a merely chronological, or biographical, order, giving events loosely, as they occurred, without any unity of effect, or any reference to their bearing on the catastrophe.  Shakspere’s order was logical.  He compressed and selected, disregarding the fact of history oftentimes, in favor of the higher truth of fiction; bringing together a crime and its punishment as cause and effect, even though they had no such relation in the chronicle, and were separated, perhaps, by many years.

Shakspere’s first two comedies were experiments. Love’s Labour’s Lost was a play of manners, with hardly any plot.  It brought together a number of humors, that is, oddities and affectations of various sorts, and played them off on one another, as Ben Jonson afterward did in his comedies of humor.  Shakspere never returned to this type of play, unless, perhaps, in the Taming of the Shrew.  There the story turned on a single “humor,” Katharine’s bad temper, just as the story in Jonson’s Silent Woman turned on Morose’s hatred of noise.  The Taming of the Shrew is, therefore, one of the least Shaksperian of Shakspere’s plays; a bourgeois domestic comedy, with a very narrow interest.  It belongs to the school of French comedy, like Moliere’s Malade Imaginaire, not to the romantic comedy of Shakspere and Fletcher.

The Comedy of Errors was an experiment of an exactly opposite kind.  It was a play purely of incident; a farce, in which the main improbability being granted, namely, that the twin Antipholi and twin Dromios are so alike that they cannot be distinguished, all the amusing complications follow naturally enough.  There is little character-drawing in the play.  Any two pairs of twins, in the same predicament, would be equally droll.  The fun lies in the situation.  This was a comedy of the Latin school, and resembled the Mennaechmi of Plautus.  Shakspere never returned to this type of play, though there is an element of “errors” in Midsummer Night’s Dream.  In the Two Gentlemen of Verona he finally hit upon that species of romantic comedy which he may be said to have invented or created out of the scattered materials at hand in the works of his predecessors.  In this play, as in the Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Winter’s Tale, All’s Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and the Tempest, the plan of construction is as follows.  There is one main intrigue carried out by the high comedy characters, and a secondary intrigue, or underplot, by the low comedy characters.