The Shakespeare-Expositor

Was The Comedy of Errors borrowed from Plautus—or from a play performed before the Queen at Hampton Court? Thomas Keightley opens with a literary mystery whose clues reach back to 1576.

In this late-nineteenth-century companion to Shakespeare’s plays, Keightley follows the comedies through their early editions, uncertain dates and possible sources. He weighs old texts against one another, asking what Shakespeare borrowed, what he made his own, and what a small detail in a scene can reveal. His judgments are sometimes firm, sometimes candidly unsure: even the order of the early plays, he admits, is difficult to settle. Read closely, the guide turns familiar dramas into works of investigation, where a rhyme, a name or a passing allusion may alter the story of how a play came to be. Which clues will change the way you read Shakespeare?

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