Comedy of Errors - Romanticism What is so interesting about Shakespeare's first play, The Comedy of Errors, are the elements it shares with his later plays. The novels of his final period (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest) are all borrowed from the Romantic tradition, especially the Plautine novels. So here, as in later works, we have reunions of lost children and parents, husbands and wives; we have adventures and wanderings and the danger of death (which in this play is not as real to us as it is in the novels). Yet, despite all these similarities, the plot of the Comedy of Errors is as simple as the plots of subsequent works are complex. It is as if Shakespeare's odyssey through the human psyche in tragedy and comedy brings him back to his origins with a heightened sense of longing, intensity and feeling of loss. But to dismiss this work as merely a simplistic romp through a complicated series of maneuvers is to miss the pure theatrical feast it delivers on stage: the wit and humor of a master lyricist, the improbability of a plot that overwhelms...