In the Babylonian Epic of Gilgalosh, the eponymous king finds himself caught in an almighty deluge.
In the final moments of the play, Gorgias leaps so high to convince the army that he is, in fact, a toad, that the actor had to be flown out of the skene by a device known as the mechane which latterly inspired the engineers behind the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Refusing to accept that he has been drafted into the army, owes enormous gambling debts and has been caught painting another man’s wife on the side of his best urn, he maintains he is actually a toad, and goes to live in Lake Kerkini where he invents the Barkini for his mistress. Having no time to re-draft, Plautus had Gromio sold to a lion-feed canning factory and delivered to his agent what became one of the most famous comedies outside the M25.īefore Plautus, Aristophanes had dabbled with mistaken identity in his satirical farce The Toads in which Gorgias, a thinly-veiled but often dusted caricature of the statesman Cleon, mistakes himself for someone else after a run-in with a bent mirror and two gallons of Ouzo. On his return, Plautus unwittingly carried on writing a scene with the wrong Menaechmus, and nearly dropped his stylus when he got to the end of the play and realised there were two of the same character. Plautus’ mischievous servant, Gromio (son of Gromiown, the grocer), added a second character by the same name when Plautus was out of the villa buying extra pins for a rather roomy toga. Plautus, meanwhile, had originally intended to write a straight drama about a single character, Menaechmus, who went about town having a fairly ordinary kind of day with slight drizzle around the forum just before prandium. In this way, Shakespeare was mistaken regularly for Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Campion, John Webster, Delia Smith and a French poodle after a haircut-too-far. Consequently, whenever people danced the Eightsome Reel, The Quadrille or any other dance divisible by two, they would at some stage bow low and lose their wigs on the floor everyone would pick up the first wig that came to hand and quite possibly go home in the wrong carriage. Swapping of wigs was common is those days given that everyone lost their hair on account of rubbing deadly nightingales into their pates to keep off nits, gnats, tax inspectors and hair.
What is not so well known is that Shakespeare also had a very personal experience of mistaken identity in that many people used to get him mixed up with Elizabeth I – look at any portraits from the time and you will see that with some careful (some would say prudent) swapping of wigs, beards etc., the two are virtually indistinguishable save by birth. It’s very well known that The Comedy of Errors was adapted by William Shakespeare from a play by Plautus called Menaechmi.