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It is a pleasure to record the agreement on this point, because it is believed to be unique: but many precedents for plunging the reader in medias res, as does the surviving text, might be found in the modern short story of the artist in style. Cf. Plautus Menaechmi, II, 2, 279.
The Menaechmi and Trinummus are the best known of his plays; the former would be hard to parallel for effective humour: the point on which the plot turns, viz. the resemblance between two pairs of brothers, which causes one to be mistaken for the other, and so leads to many ludicrous scenes, is familiar to all readers of Shakespeare from the Comedy of Errors.
The Menaechmi is one of the immortal comedies and has survived in many forms on the modern stage all over Europe. He changed his name as stated in the text, the new name being that of an uncle who adopted him, as we learn from his life by Nepos. A similar necessity and bad roads created in England, before the eighteenth century, a demand for long legged sheep. His bone throughout heavy.
There are a few passages which may pass for imitations, but so few, that the exception only confirms the rule; he obtained them from accidental quotations, or by oral communication, and as he used what he had, would have used more if he had obtained it. The "Comedy of Errors" is confessedly taken from the Menaechmi of Plautus; from the only play of Plautus which was then in English.
Father and son were altogether dressed like Menaechmi. The emperor's domestic robes, of purple-colored silk, richly adorned with pearls and stones, as well as his crown, sceptre, and imperial orb, struck the eye with good effect. For all in them was new, and the imitation of the antique was tasteful.
Thus such a plot as that of the Menaechmi was by no means the sheer impossibility which Shakespeare made it by attaching indistinguishable Dromios to his indistinguishable Antipholuses. To reduplicate a coincidence is in fact to multiply it by a figure far beyond my mathematics. The term logic is often very vaguely used in relation to drama.
Plays of this lighter character were all that were attempted until 1890, when another Latin play, Plautus' Menaechmi, was given so successfully under the direction of Professor J.H. Drake, '85, that it was later presented in Chicago. This was the last effort in classical drama until twenty-six years later, when the Menaechmi was repeated with great success in Hill Auditorium on March 30, 1916.
"Pigs are considered to be clean ten days after birth, and for that reason were then called by the ancients sacred, as being then first fit for sacrifice: and so in the Menaechmi of Plautus, when a character thinking some one in Epidamnus to be out of his wits and seeking to purify him, asks: 'How much are sacred pigs here. "If the farm affords them, pigs should be fed grape husks and stalks.
Plutarch, Roman Questions, 6. Aulus Gellius, x, 23. Athenaeus, x, 56. Valerius Maximus, vi, 3, 9. For this he was not even blamed, but rather received praise for the excellent example. Aulus Gellius, x, 23. A woman in the Menaechmi of Plautus, iv, 6, 1, complains justly of this double standard of morality: Nam si vir scortum duxit clam uxorem suam, Id si rescivit uxor, impune est viro.
I shall waive the question whether it were not possible for Shakespeare to obtain a view of the manuscript translation of plays of Plautus made by Warner for his unlearned friends, and so to use the Menaechmi as the model of The Comedy of Errors. He does not borrow phrases from it, as he does from North's Plutarch.
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