Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Man is so eager to know about Shakespeare that he is tempted to find personal confession in the plays. It is true that the art of a young man is too immature to be impersonal. In an achieved style we see the man; in all striving for style we see what hurts him. But in poetry, human experience is wrought to symbol, and symbol is many virtued, according to the imaginative energy that broods upon it. It is said that Shakespeare holds a mirror up to life. He who looks into a mirror closely generally sees nothing but himself. The Comedy of Errors Written. Before 1594. Published, in the first folio, 1623. Source of the Plot. The plot was taken from the Mm- techmi of Plautus. Whether Shakespeare read the play in Latin, or in a translation, or heard it from a friend, or saw it acted, is not known. All four are possible. The sub-plot, in this case a duplication of the plot, was suggested by a part of the Amphtiruo of Plautus. The play is brought on to the plane of human feeling by the character of /Kgcon. This character was suggested by a story in (Jli 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 whicheither 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 JSgeon 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 ev...