Shakspere's first two comedies were experiments. _Love's Labour's Lost_
was a play of manners, with hardly any plot. It brought together a
number of _humors_, that is, oddities and affectations of various sorts,
and played them off on one another, as Ben Jonson afterward did in his
comedies of humor. Shakspere never returned to this type of play,
unless, perhaps, in the _Taming of the Shrew_. There the story turned on
a single "humor," Katharine's bad temper, just as the story in Jonson's
_Silent Woman_ turned on Morose's hatred of noise. The _Taming of the
Shrew_ is, therefore, one of the least Shaksperian of Shakspere's plays;
a _bourgeois_ domestic comedy, with a very narrow interest. It belongs
to the school of French comedy, like Moliere's _Malade Imaginaire_, not
to the romantic comedy of Shakspere and Fletcher.
The _Comedy of Errors_ was an experiment of an exactly opposite kind. It
was a play purely of incident; a farce, in which the main improbability
being granted, namely, that the twin Antipholi and twin Dromios are so
alike that they cannot be distinguished, all the amusing complications
follow naturally enough. There is little character-drawing in the play.
Any two pairs of twins, in the same predicament, would be equally droll.
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