Comedy of Errors - Family and marriageShakespeare'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 which would be developed further in later works. Plautus' Menaechmi provides a basic structure for Shakespeare's works. plot: two brothers separated for some time, 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: thus the stereotype of marriages which is a fact for almost all the comics of Act V. Here we have only one new marriage, between Antipholus Erotes (Syracusan) and Luciana, the restoration of happiness to Antipholus Sereptus (Ephesian) and the former shrew Hadrian, and the renewal of the long life of Aegeon and Aemilia. split nuptial ties (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 enters the fray, with the prescriptions of his Letter to the Ephesians (!): "Wives, submit to your husbands, as to the Lord.