The Comedy of Errors: Prologue

From The Mystical Art of Shakespeare Volume I

The Comedy of Errors is one of Shakespeare’s nascent works. It demonstrates that Shakespeare, even from his inception as a playwright, has already crystallized his intent to deliver profound messages through his plays. All of Shakespeare’s plays are meticulously crafted to convey deep messages to humanity, with the meaning of each play instilled in us—at times, subconsciously—through our emotional involvement in the drama. The Comedy of Errors clearly displays this quality, an initiatic quality akin to learning from direct experience. 

While many view The Comedy of Errors as an early farce by the bard, Shakespeare injects it with an astonishing new dimension. He frames the entire play within two scenes quite foreign to the genre. These scenes grimly focus on a man being condemned to die for merely being a “Syracusian.” Thus, with almost alarming artistic originality, Shakespeare provides an ominous backdrop to the comedy, effectively transforming it from a mere farce into a powerful message for humanity.

The real “error” highlighted in The Comedy of Errors is not that of mistaken identity. It is something deeper. The real error—that the play focuses on—is our distorted perception of reality. This flawed perception obscures the spiritual truth of our universal oneness, and instead conjures up a shattered world of separation, conflict and turmoil. 

The actual error, highlighted in the play, is in our mistaking the artificial labels—that we bestow upon ourselves—as being inherently real. While labels may be needed for communication, we unfortunately bestow them with a property that labels do not possess. We treat labels as intrinsically real entities that truly exist on their own right, rather than as mere names artificially assigned by us. This mistake perverts our lives and destroys the experience of our transcendent unity. 

In The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare sets up a thematic resonance on how we reify labels illogically, in a way that may lead to tragic consequences. In particular, the labels “Syracusian” and “Ephesian” are considered, by our deluded perception, to be inherently real. So real, in fact, that one’s life can be forfeit for merely possessing the wrong label!

While The Comedy of Errors does barely escape a tragic end—courtesy of extraordinarily fortuitous circumstances—the situation in real life may not be as fortunate. The message in the play is thus a crucial one, and Shakespeare characteristically conveys its meaning by making us live through it. Our propensity for reifying our artificial labels has dire consequences in the real world, and in The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare makes us experience the potential harm of this critical flaw in our thinking.