The Seriousness of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors The Comedy of Errors has often been dismissed as a mere farce, unworthy of any serious attention. However, when the author is Shakespeare, even a "farce" deserves a second look. Shakespeare himself may have taken his comic work very seriously, as audiences expected the comedy of his day to not only entertain, but also morally instruct. It is not surprising, therefore, that for one of his first plays Shakespeare found a model in the works of Plautus and Terence, studied in all the Elizabethan grammar schools, praised by schoolmasters and respected by critics. (Muir 3) The Menaechmi was the first work of Plautus to appear in translation, and was a popular school text (Muir 16). Amphitruo, Plautus' second work that informs The Comedy of Errors, was available in English translation in 1562-63, and was taught in a similar way (Miola 22). The texts of Plautus and Terence served schools not as entertainment, but as teaching tools for both oral and vernacular Latin literature and languages. Schoolmasters also used study guides prepared for plays in their teaching: Academic approval of Roman comedy in the Renaissance was largely a linguistic, rhetorical, and didactic undertaking: commentators provided lexical and metrical information, expository paraphrase , grammatical analyses, explanatory notes, classic texts. references and identification of rhetorical figures. (Miola 4)Richard Bernard, for example, translator of the first complete bilingual edition of Terence, organized from the text a useful list of Formulas loquendi (useful phrases for Latin conversation) and Sententiae (wise sayings) to accompany each scene (Muir 4 ). If nowhere... middle of the paper... however, it indicates that Shakespeare intended The Comedy of Errors to provide more than just a good laugh. Works cited and consulted* Brockett, Oscar G. History of the Theatre. Fifth ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1987.* Epstein, Norris. Friendly Shakespeare. New York: Viking, 1993.* Miola, Robert S. Shakespeare and Classical Comedy: The Influence of Plautus and Terence. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.* Muir, Kenneth. Shakespeare's comic sequence. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1979.* Riehle, Wolfgang. Shakespeare, Plautus and the humanist tradition. Cambridge: Brewer, 1990.* Shaheen, Naseeb. Biblical references in Shakespeare's plays. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993.* Shakespeare, William. The bank of the Shakespeare River. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.