The Comedy of Errors

The Comedy of Errors is considered to be one of the first plays of Shakespeare and is also his shortest. Double roles and mistaken identities often serve as easy gateways for displaying a writer’s ingenuity; Shakespeare, however, raises the stakes by introducing two sets of identical twins, allowing confusion itself to drive the comedy. The entire action happens during one day.  

Gulzar adapted this play in Angoor (1982) in which Sanjeev Kapoor played the roles of Antipholus. Somehow, the slapstick humour didn’t work for me and I had to quit the movie midway.

The most memorable lines from the play are spoken by Dromo. After being pursued by a large, aggressive kitchen maid who claims him as her lover, Dromo expresses his horror by imagining her body as a globe, with different countries mapped onto her physical features.

ANTIPHOLUS: Then she bears some
breadth?
DROMIO: No longer from head to foot than
from hip to hip. She is spherical, like a globe. I
could find out countries in her.
ANTIPHOLUS:  In what part of her body
stands Ireland?
DROMIO: Marry, sir, in her buttocks. I
found it out by the bogs.
ANTIPHOLUS:  Where Scotland?
DROMIO: I found it by the barrenness,
hard in the palm of the hand.
ANTIPHOLUS:  Where France?
DROMIO: In her forehead, armed and
reverted, making war against her heir.
ANTIPHOLUS:  Where England?
DROMIO: I looked for the chalky cliffs, but
I could find no whiteness in them. But I guess it
stood in her chin, by the salt rheum that ran
between France and it.
ANTIPHOLUS:  Where Spain?
DROMIO: Faith, I saw it not, but I felt it hot
in her breath.
ANTIPHOLUS: Where America, the Indies?
DROMIO:  sir, upon her nose, all o’erembellished
with rubies, carbuncles, sapphires,
declining their rich aspect to the hot breath of
Spain, who sent whole armadas of carracks to be
ballast at her nose.
ANTIPHOLUS:  Where stood Belgia, the
Netherlands?
DROMIO:, sir, I did not look so low. 

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The Shakespeare Project so far: Macbeth | The Tempest | The Merchant of Venice | Twelfth Night | As You Like It | Much Ado About Nothing | King Lear | Hamlet | Julius Caesar | Antony and Cleopatra | Coriolanus | A Midsummer Night’s Dream | Othello