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The Comedy of Errors / The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] cover

The Comedy of Errors / The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.]

Chapter 46: Sources
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About This Book

A fast-moving comedy of mistaken identity centers on two sets of identical twins separated in childhood whose unexpected overlap in a busy port city provokes escalating confusion. Repeated misrecognitions between masters and their lookalike servants produce wrongful arrests, disrupted households, commercial quarrels, and mounting farce. A distressed parent facing legal peril and a mysterious religious figure increase the emotional tension beneath the humor. Through a sequence of comic confrontations, legal encounters, and finally recognition, the tangled misunderstandings are unraveled and family relationships are restored.

Sources

The general Preface (e-text 23041) discusses the 17th- and 18th-century editions in detail; the newer (19th-century) editions are simply listed by name. The following editions may appear in the Notes. All inset text is quoted from the Preface.

Folios:
F1 1623; F2 (no date given); F3 1663; F4 1685.

“The five plays contained in this volume occur in the first Folio in the same order, and ... were there printed for the first time.”

Early editions:
Rowe 1709
Pope 1715

“Pope was the first to indicate the place of each new scene; as, for instance, Tempest, I. 1. ‘On a ship at sea.’ He also subdivided the scenes as given by the Folios and Rowe, making a fresh scene whenever a new character entered—an arrangement followed by Hanmer, Warburton, and Johnson. For convenience of reference to these editions, we have always recorded the commencement of Pope’s scenes.”

Theobald 1733
Hanmer (“Oxford edition”) 1744
Warburton 1747
Johnson 1765
Capell 1768; also Capell’s annotated copy of F2
Steevens 1773
Malone 1790
Reed 1803

Later editions:
Singer, Knight, Cornwall, Collier, Phelps, Halliwell, Dyce, Staunton