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The Comedy of Errors, being one of Shakespeare's earliest efforts, is almost universally viewed as inferior to his other plays. Some critics have offered negative reviews of the work not just in relation to his later plays but also in absolute terms--calling, say, the characterization not just worse than in any other Shakespearean drama but simply bad. In the early nineteenth century the literary critic William Hazlitt, in his Characters of Shakespear's Plays, reflected a certain degree of annoyance with the work, declaring with respect to its source, ''This comedy is taken very much from the Menaechmi of Plautus, and is not an improvement on it. Shakespear [sic] appears to have bestowed no great pains on it, and there are but a few passages which bear the decided stamp of his genius.'' Hazlitt goes on to express the opinion that the nature of the situation--two twins being mistaken for each other--simply translates poorly into drama, as on the stage the twins will either be impossible to distinguish or so different as to shatter the illusion of their identicalness, while on the written page their characters fail to substantially distinguish themselves from each other. Hazlitt notes that Shakespeare was simply more virtuous as a creator than as an adapter: ''We do not think his forte would ever have lain in imitating or improving on what others invented, so much as in inventing for himself, and perfecting what he invented.''

Many critics have given the play a fair degree of respect. The renowned German Shakespearean scholar August Wilhelm Schlegel remarked, with regard to the comically ambitious inclusion of two sets of twins, ''If the spectator is to be entertained by mere perplexities they cannot be too varied.'' Making reference to both actual and possible reinterpretations of Plautus's drama, Schlegel concluded (in direct opposition to Hazlitt), ''This is perhaps the best of all written or possible Menaechmi; and if the piece be inferior in worth to other pieces of Shakespeare, it is merely because nothing more could be made of the materials.'' This view is directly contrary to Hazlitt's opinion of Shakespeare's artisanship, which was that the play was ''not an improvement'' on Menaechmi.

Some critics have gone as far as to bestow The Comedy of Errors with admiring praise. C. L. Barber argued that the presence of certain profound thematic elements cannot be ignored: ''Shakespeare's sense of comedy as a moment in a larger cycle leads him to go out of his way, even in this early play, to frame farce with action which presents the weight of age and the threat of death, and to make the comic resolution a renewal of life, indeed explicitly a rebirth.'' T. S. Dorsch, in turn, seems to appreciate the play simply as a source of entertainment: ''The Comedy of Errors is not only very good theatre, it is also very good reading. It is a finely-balanced mixture of pathos and suspense, illusion and delusion, love turned bitter and love that is sweet, farce and fun.'' In explicating the allegorical aspects of the plot, as tied to Egeon's plight, Barbara Freedman notes that many critics had reviewed the play negatively owing to their failure to ''resolve two major issues central to an understanding of the play as a meaningful unity: first, the purpose of the farcical confusion of the twins' identities in the main plot, and second, its relation to their father's progress in the frame plot from separation to reunion with his family, and from crime and debt to redemption.'' Indeed, if these issues are not resolved, the play seems little more than a exercise in farce with a few fairly substantial themes; Freedman's explication of what is perceived as the allegorical aspects of the plot, as tied to Egeon's self-redemption, leaves the play looking far more profound.

As did Hazlitt, many critics have offered perspectives on how the presentation of the play in the theater might affect its dramatic power. The French intellectual Etienne Souriau notes that for such a farcical comedy of errors to be swallowed by the audience, the characters who ''grope among the shadows and . . . play blindman's buff with their souls'' are almost required to bear themselves in a very particular way: ''The danger, in the theater, is to show those souls as too lucid and too sure of themselves, of what they are doing, and of their situation, rather than to show them as too wild and uncertain, proceeding by trials and errors.''

References:

1) Barber, C. L., ''Shakespearian Comedy in The Comedy of Errors,'' in College English, Vol. 25,April 1964, pp. 493-97.

2) Dorsch, T. S., ''Introduction,'' in The Comedy of Errors, by William Shakespeare, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 12-8.

3) Freedman, Barbara, ''Egeon's Debt: Self-Division and Self-Redemption in The Comedy of Errors,'' in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 10, No. 3, Autumn 1980, pp. 360-83.

4) Hazlitt, William, Characters of Shakespear's Plays, 2nd ed., Taylor & Hessey, 1818.

5) Schlegel, August Wilhelm, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, translated by John Black, George Bell& Sons, 1889.

6) Souriau, Etienne, ''From The Two Hundred Thousand Dramatic Situations,'' translated by Harry Levin, in The Comedy of Errors, by William Shakespeare, Signet Classic, 2002.

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