William Shakespeare

The Comedy of Errors William Shakespeare

According to the laws of the lands of Ephesus and Syracuse, it is forbidden for a native of one land to journey to the other; the penalty for the crime is execution or the ransom of a thousand marks. Aegeon, a merchant of Syracuse who recently traveled to Ephesus, is to be put to death because he cannot raise the thousand marks. When Solinus, duke of Ephesus, hears Aegeon's story, he gives the merchant one more day to raise the money. It is a sad and strange tale Aegeon tells. Many years earlier, he journeyed to Epidamnum. Shortly after his wife joined him there she delivered identical twin boys. Strangely enough, at the same time and in the same house, another woman bore identical twin boys. Because that woman and her husband were so poor that they could not provide for their children, they gave them to Aegeon and his wife Aemilia, to be attendants to their two sons. On the way home to Syracuse, Aegeon and his family were shipwrecked. Aemilia and the two children with her were rescued by one ship, Aegeon and the other two by a different ship, and Aegeon did not see his wife and those two children again. When he reached eighteen years of age, Antipholus, the son reared by his father in Syracuse, grows eager to find his brother, so he and his attendant set out to find their twins. Aegeon comes to Ephesus to seek them.