Plays of mistaken identity

Building on the theatrical tradition of comic incidents which arise out of the confusion involving identical twins or pairs of people who, for some reason, appear to be the mirror-image of one another, Plautus has masterfully composed his plays Menaechmi and Amphitruo—Shakespeare’s primary sources of inspiration for his Comedy of Errors—with a view to exploring issues of unreliable vision, inaccurate knowledge, unstable personal identity, illicit sexual desire, and irresponsible social behavior. This destabilization of the world in which the fictional characters lead their lives becomes an emblem for Plautine drama itself, which we are invited to view as complex and illusory, presenting us with a distorted mirror-image of “Roman” life