The Comedy of Errors is Shakespeare's masterpiece, if weuse that word to mean the first work in which mastery ofa craft is displayed. It is a fully formed work of art, com-pletely successful in its own terms. In craftsmanship it isrivalled among Shakespeare's first eight or nine playsonly by Richard III and Love's Labour's Lost; and TheComedy of Errors is more compact, if less ambitious, thaneither of these……