1. "Errors" as a Title

Does the word "errors" adequately describe what happens in the play, or does the title ironically understate what the characters suffer?

Start by treating the title as a claim. An "error" is a mistake, something that could be easily corrected. The play's day-long confusions are often called that — accidental, comic, no harm done. But look at what happens to Antipholus of Ephesus: arrested, publicly pronounced insane, bound, locked in a dark room, subjected to an exorcism. Look at what happens to Egeon: condemned to death. Look at what happens to Adriana: left to believe her husband has denied her in the street. Your thesis should argue whether those experiences can be called "errors" without distortion. The accessible argument is that the title is ironic — these are not minor mistakes. The stronger argument complicates the irony.

Detailed Analysis

The stronger version of this essay reads the title alongside the Abbess's final speech, where she describes the day's confusion as a "sympathised one day's error" that ends in full satisfaction (5.1.395-397). The word "error" in Latin means "wandering" — ex-ire, to go astray — and Shakespeare's use of it hovers between the mild ("oh, what a mix-up") and the deeper sense of the soul in exile from its home. Antipholus of Syracuse's "drop of water" soliloquy at 1.2.35-40 names his own life as an error in this older sense: he is wandering, unable to find the self he has lost. Your sophisticated thesis might argue that Shakespeare's title deliberately activates both senses. On one level, the play is a comedy of mistakes. On another, it is a meditation on errancy — the condition of being scattered and unrecognized — and on the accidents of grace that reunite the scattered. The Abbess's birth metaphor at 5.1.401-403 would be your capstone. What looked for four acts like a series of errors turns out to have been the slow, painful labor of a family coming into being. A strong essay will not simply choose one meaning of the word over the other; it will show how Shakespeare uses both.

2. Adriana's Jealousy

Is the play sympathetic to Adriana, or does it confirm the Abbess's charge that her jealousy has poisoned her marriage?

This is genuinely contested ground. The Abbess in Act 5 delivers a brutal catalogue of how Adriana's nagging has driven Antipholus of Ephesus to madness ("The venom clamours of a jealous woman / Poisons more deadly than a mad dog's tooth"), and Adriana accepts the charge. But the play has also given Adriana two of its longest and most psychologically vivid speeches — the jealousy soliloquy in 2.1.87-101 and the "drop of water" plea at 2.2.125-147 — and surrounded her with a sister whose submissive counsel the play itself treats skeptically. A solid thesis will take a position on whose reading of Adriana the play finally endorses: the Abbess's, Luciana's, Adriana's own, or none of the above.

Detailed Analysis

The sophisticated version of this essay notices that the Abbess is not a neutral observer. She is about to turn out to be Antipholus of Ephesus's mother, which means her denunciation of her daughter-in-law is also a defense of her son. Shakespeare places this information so that it can be retroactively activated — the Abbess's authority in the scene survives, but her objectivity does not. At the same time, Adriana herself accepts the rebuke, which is unusual for a farce wife and suggests that Shakespeare takes some of the Abbess's criticism seriously. The strongest essay will argue that Shakespeare refuses to resolve the debate and instead uses it to stage a question his later plays will keep returning to: does jealousy in marriage reveal real wrong, or invent it? Compare Adriana's "I see the jewel best enamelled / Will lose his beauty" (2.1.109-110) with her actual husband's decision in 3.1 to dine with the Courtesan out of spite. She is jealous; she is also not wrong. The essay should use the play's sympathetic framing of her Act 2 speeches, and especially the "drop of water" conceit (shared with her husband's brother, the Syracusan Antipholus), to argue that Shakespeare treats her marital grievance as genuine even when her expression of it is corrosive. The final marriage is not repaired in the play's last minutes — Adriana and Antipholus exit without speaking to each other — and a strong essay will hold that silence as evidence.

3. The Servants as the Moral Center

Why does Shakespeare give the final lines of the play to the two Dromios rather than to a married couple or to the reunited parents?

Comedies almost always end with a couple. Shakespeare's later comedies end, without exception, with weddings or promises of weddings. The Comedy of Errors ends with two servants onstage, neither of whom is being married, who decide to walk through a door together. Your task is to explain why this choice is more than just a convenient curtain. The accessible thesis argues that the Dromios' closing couplet — "We came into the world like brother and brother, / And now let's go hand in hand, not one before another" — is the play's most literal image of reunion and therefore its most fitting last word.

Detailed Analysis

The stronger version of this essay connects the ending to Shakespeare's treatment of the Dromios across the play. They are beaten more than any other characters, and they do more verbal work than any other pair — most of the play's densest wordplay, including the Act 2 hair-and-baldness routine, the Act 3 "globe" map of a kitchen-maid's body, and the rhymed-couplet door scene of 3.1, belongs to them. Dromio of Syracuse's "I am transformed, master, am I not?" is one of the play's most direct statements of its identity theme. Dromio of Ephesus's catalogue of the beatings of his life — "When I am cold, he heats me with beating; when I am warm he cools me with beating" — is the closest the comedy comes to pathos.

A sophisticated essay might argue that Shakespeare gives them the ending because they are the play's most honest observers — servants who see from below, who cannot appeal to credit or reputation, whose identities are most nakedly at stake in every scene. Their reconciliation, unlike their masters', requires no marriage, no inheritance, no royal pardon. They simply recognize each other and decide to enter together, refusing the hierarchy of "senior" and "younger" that the social order would impose. Ending on that image is a quietly radical gesture. Shakespeare's comedy will rarely again give its last word to servants, but in Comedy of Errors the final image of twinship — two of the exact same face, hand in hand — is placed with two men whose entire day has been spent being mistaken for each other. The play trusts them with the image of reconciliation because they are the people the errors have most physically cost.

4. Comedy of Errors and the Classical Unities

Evaluate the play's strict observance of the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action. Is this formal discipline a strength of the play or a limitation?

This is a formalist essay with real stakes. The Comedy of Errors is the only Shakespeare play that rigorously observes all three classical unities — one day, one place, one continuous plot — and the compression that forces on the plot is the play's most distinctive formal feature. The question is whether the discipline produces the play's energy or starves it of the thematic room Shakespeare usually takes. The accessible thesis argues one side. The stronger essay will test the claim against specific scenes.

Detailed Analysis

Argue the defense: the unity of time (everything happens between morning and sunset of a single day) creates the frantic accumulation of error that gives the play its comic engine. The unity of place (a few squares and doorways in Ephesus) allows the characters to keep colliding with each other in ways that would be implausible over a longer span. The unity of action (no subplot that is not integrated into the main confusion) gives the play its tight, almost mathematical structure. Compared to the sprawl of A Midsummer Night's Dream or Twelfth Night, Comedy of Errors is a small machine that runs exceptionally well.

Argue the prosecution: the compression leaves the emotional plots — Adriana's marriage, Luciana's courtship, Egeon's reunion with Emilia — underdeveloped. Adriana and her husband exchange almost no words at the end; Luciana's betrothal is implied but not staged; Egeon's thirty-three-year loss is compressed into a few lines of recognition. The play earns its conclusions by farce rather than by earning them emotionally. A stronger essay refuses to choose and argues that the unities are deliberately in tension with the material. The Plautine source (the Menaechmi) fits the classical form comfortably; the romance additions Shakespeare makes (Egeon, Emilia, the Luciana subplot) strain against it. That strain is exactly what gives the final scene its odd charge — thirty-three years of grief delivered in twenty lines because the play has left no room for more. Use the Abbess's birth metaphor at 5.1.401-403 as your closing evidence: Shakespeare is aware that the play has been compressing too much into too little space, and the "thirty-three years" speech is his acknowledgment of the disproportion. The unities are both the play's strength and its limitation, and Shakespeare's ambivalence about them is written into its final minute.

5. Ephesus and the Supernatural

The play is set in Ephesus, a city with strong biblical associations with magic and sorcery. How does Shakespeare use that setting, and what does the play's treatment of the supernatural finally argue?

Start with the audience assumption. An Elizabethan audience would have known Ephesus from Acts 19 as a city of sorcerers, exorcists, and magic books. Shakespeare activates that association constantly: Antipholus of Syracuse calls Ephesus "full of cozenage" (1.2.97), Dromio of Syracuse believes he has been transformed by witches, Dr. Pinch is a literal exorcist, the Abbess runs a priory. But no actual magic happens in the play. The "sorcery" the visitors attribute to the town is always the physical fact of an identical twin. Your thesis should argue what Shakespeare is doing by invoking a supernatural register for purely natural events.

Detailed Analysis

The strongest argument reads the supernatural language of Ephesus as Shakespeare's way of testing how thin the membrane is between the natural and the numinous. In everyday life, a twin is a curiosity; in a city already primed to expect the uncanny, a twin becomes witchcraft. Shakespeare is demonstrating that the supernatural is often just the ordinary, imperfectly understood. This is a skeptical move — comedies in this vein tend toward the Enlightenment side of the ledger — and yet the ending pushes the opposite way. The family reunion in 5.1 is staged with enough formal weight that it feels like a genuine wonder. "I think you all have drunk of Circe's cup," the Duke says, and in a sense he is right: there is no rational explanation for what the stage is showing him. The recognition scene is not rationally processed so much as experienced.

A sophisticated essay will argue that Shakespeare uses Ephesus to hold open a double register. The farce in Acts 2-4 rationalizes every apparent enchantment as twin confusion; the romance in Act 5 re-enchants the resolution by showing a family restored to itself against all probability. Dr. Pinch's fraudulent exorcism in 4.4 is the play's satire of sham magic; the Abbess's priory in 5.1 is the play's real magic — not supernatural but undeniably miraculous in the secular sense. The play's final attitude is that the everyday world is already full of the kind of grace that looks, from inside it, like enchantment. Connect this to Shakespeare's later work: the same move recurs in A Midsummer Night's Dream (is it really a dream?), The Winter's Tale (is the statue really alive?), and The Tempest (is Prospero really a wizard or an old duke with books?). Ephesus is where he first stages the ambiguity.