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The Comedy of Errors

From Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare by E. Nesbit (1907) and William Shakespeare

This reader is drawn from Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare (1907), E. Nesbit's prose retellings of Shakespeare's plays for young readers, and behind it stands Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors (c. 1594), itself adapted from the Roman playwright Plautus. The play is Shakespeare's shortest and most farcical, a clockwork comedy of mistaken identity whose every confusion follows logically from a single impossible coincidence: two sets of identical twins, separated in infancy, converge in the same city on the same day without knowing the other exists. What makes it worth reading now is not the slapstick—though that is expertly constructed—but the questions it raises about identity, recognition and the fragility of the social self. When two men are indistinguishable, how do we know who anyone is? And when the people we trust most no longer recognise us, what is left of who we are? This text reflects its era.

Band

Blue · Independent readers, confidentTypical starting range: ages 12–14

Length

long · about 1068 words in 5 sections · 2 pictures

Source

Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare, E. Nesbit and William Shakespeare

First published

1907

Regions

Canada · United States

Included formats

• · Web reader and PDF
• · EPUB for e-readers
• · Home-print sheet
• · Folded booklet
• · Binder edition (8.5 × 11)
• · Worksheet
• · Quick Check (10 questions) with answer key
• · Read-aloud script
• · Teacher’s Edition (members)

Readers are engineered from the original public-domain text with AI under HummingRead’s published canon and Content Philosophy, checked by automated audit and sampled by a person. Pictures are made with AI to HummingRead’s brief for each story. How a reader is made.

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