The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare (find a book to read txt) 📕
Description
The Comedy of Errors is one of Shakespeare’s earliest and shortest plays. This comedy utilizes slapstick humor, word play, and mistaken identities to create a series of farcical accidents. Over time, the play’s title has become an idiom used to describe “an event or series of events made ridiculous by the number of errors that were made throughout.”
In Ephesus, the law forbids entry to any merchants from Syracuse, and if they are discovered within the city, they must pay a thousand marks or be put to death. Aegeon, an old Syracusian merchant, is arrested and Solinus, the Duke of Ephesus, listens to his story of coming to the city. Long ago, Aegeon was on a sea voyage. Traveling with him was his wife, his twin sons, and their twin slaves. The family becomes separated during a tempest; Aegeon, one son, and one slave were rescued together, and the others were never to be seen again. Years later his son Antipholus and his slave Dromio left to search for their long lost siblings; after the boys didn’t return, Aegeon set out to bring his son back home. Moved by this story, the duke allows Aegeon one day to get the money to pay his fine and to find his family.
This Standard Ebooks production is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.
Read free book «The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare (find a book to read txt) 📕» - read online or download for free at americanlibrarybooks.com
- Author: William Shakespeare
Read book online «The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare (find a book to read txt) 📕». Author - William Shakespeare
And pay the sum that may deliver me. Duke Speak freely, Syracusian, what thou wilt. Aegeon
Is not your name, sir, call’d Antipholus?
And is not that your bondman, Dromio?
Within this hour I was his bondman, sir,
But he, I thank him, gnaw’d in two my cords:
Now am I Dromio and his man unbound.
Ourselves we do remember, sir, by you;
For lately we were bound, as you are now.
You are not Pinch’s patient, are you, sir?
O, grief hath changed me since you saw me last,
And careful hours with time’s deformed hand
Have written strange defeatures in my face:
But tell me yet, dost thou not know my voice?
Not know my voice! O time’s extremity,
Hast thou so crack’d and splitted my poor tongue
In seven short years, that here my only son
Knows not my feeble key of untuned cares?
Though now this grained face of mine be hid
In sap-consuming winter’s drizzled snow
And all the conduits of my blood froze up,
Yet hath my night of life some memory,
My wasting lamps some fading glimmer left,
My dull deaf ears a little use to hear:
All these old witnesses—I cannot err—
Tell me thou art my son Antipholus.
But seven years since, in Syracusa, boy,
Thou know’st we parted: but perhaps, my son,
Thou shamest to acknowledge me in misery.
The duke and all that know me in the city
Can witness with me that it is not so:
I ne’er saw Syracusa in my life.
I tell thee, Syracusian, twenty years
Have I been patron to Antipholus,
During which time he ne’er saw Syracusa:
I see thy age and dangers make thee dote.
One of these men is Genius to the other;
And so of these. Which is the natural man,
And which the spirit? who deciphers them?
Whoever bound him, I will loose his bonds
And gain a husband by his liberty.
Speak, old Aegeon, if thou be’st the man
That hadst a wife once call’d Aemilia
That bore thee at a burden two fair sons:
O, if thou be’st the same Aegeon, speak,
And speak unto the same Aemilia!
If I dream not, thou art Aemilia:
If thou art she, tell me where is that son
That floated with thee on the fatal raft?
By men of Epidamnum he and I
And the twin Dromio all were taken up;
But by and by rude fishermen of Corinth
By force took Dromio and my son from them
And me they left with those of Epidamnum.
What then became of them I cannot tell;
I to this fortune that you see me in.
Why, here begins his morning story right:
These two Antipholuses, these two so like,
And these two Dromios, one in semblance—
Besides her urging of her wreck at sea—
These are the parents to these children,
Which accidentally are met together.
Antipholus, thou camest from Corinth first?
Brought to this town by that most famous warrior,
Duke Menaphon, your most renowned uncle.
And so do I; yet did she call me so:
And this fair gentlewoman, her sister here,
Did call me brother. To Luciana. What I told you then,
I hope I shall have leisure to make good;
If this be not a dream I see and hear.
I sent you money, sir, to be your bail,
By Dromio; but I think he brought it not.
This purse of ducats I received from you
And Dromio my man did bring them me.
I see we still did meet each other’s man,
And I was ta’en for him, and he for me,
And thereupon these errors are arose.
Renowned duke, vouchsafe to take the pains
To go with us into the abbey here
And hear at large discoursed all our fortunes:
And all that are assembled in this place,
That by this sympathized one day’s error
Have suffer’d wrong, go keep us company,
And we shall make full satisfaction.
Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail
Of you, my sons; and till this present hour
My heavy burden ne’er delivered.
The duke, my husband and my children both,
And you the calendars of their nativity,
Go to a gossips’ feast, and go with me;
After so long grief, such festivity!
Comments (0)