The Comedy of Errors: Ephesian Effusions Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors is a crazy game of errors and misadventures, which contains two Plautine comedies steeped in Renaissance writing and poetry . However, the intricate web of estranged families that Shakespeare weaves presents significant differences from all of his originals, indicating ideas about family and marriage that Shakespeare undoubtedly had, and would develop further in later works. Plautus' Menaechmi provides a basic structure for Shakespeare's plot: two brothers long separated, mistaken for each other. Yet Plautus' two brothers differ markedly in attitude: one is "gay, generous and fun-loving", the other "cunning, calculating and cynical" (Kinko, p. 10). Shakespeare's Antipholi seem as confusing as their Menaechmi relationships, but more interchangeable in overall temperament. Plautus's Host provides the idea of ​​doubling the servants as well as the masters, but these are duplicated by divine action: one group are transvestites fully aware of the situation, the others confused mortals. So why the device of mortal twins behaving alike? Perhaps it is in the family members that Shakespeare adds – Egeon, Aemilia, Luciana – that we discover the reasons for his adaptations. One of the main themes of Shakespeare's comedy is that of the new community: hence the stereotypical cycle of marriages that is a given for almost all Act V comics. Here we have only one new marriage, between the (Syracusan) Antipholus Erotes and Luciana, the restoration of happiness to (Ephesian) Antipholus Sereptus and the former shrew Hadrian, and the renewal of the long-separated nuptial bonds between Aegeon and Aemilia (taken and developed from Gower's Confessio Amantis). But the characters begin the work almost completely separated from the community: Egeon has long since lost both his wife and half of his offspring, and has abandoned his known son on a seven-year quest; Antipholus Herotes seems blithely unaware of his father's presence in the city, so complete is their separation; Antipholus Sereptus also distances himself from his wife Adriana, not enjoying the fruitful state of marriage that must be the lot of comic characters. They are all immersed in a capitalist society of business and obligations, with little room for generosity but plenty for the Officer, debtors' prison and harsh laws against Syracusan foreigners that not even the Duke can revoke. Here Saint Paul comes into play, with the prescriptions of his Letter to the Ephesians (!): «Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as to the Lord... Husbands, love your wives, as Christ also loved them. the church, and gave himself for it... So men must love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. (Ephesians 5:22, 25, 28). Through Luciana's philosophy and Emilia's revelation of Adriana's cunning, The Comedy of Errors displays, in a more diluted form, the same philosophy of mutual and cooperative submission that Shakespeare would explore more fully in The Taming of the Shrew a few years later . Without the structure and society that a family produces, a Shakespearean character is lost in the turmoil and chaos of civilization: the harsh Jaques who abandons Arden weddings, the ascetic Malvolio bound in the dank cellar, the mad Lear who wanders on the moor, Leontes pining for his lost Hermione. The Comedy of Errors is the prologue and experiment for family dramas to come.