The tone of The Comedy of Errors is lighthearted and frivolous. Shakespeare wastes little time in establishing that his goal is to elicit laughter rather than tears from his audience (“comedy” is in the title, after all), and the play breezes quickly through a whirlwind of highly implausible scenarios and miraculous coincidences that would feel out of place in a more serious play. Characters rarely make reasonable decisions, nor do they behave with the deep psychic interiority for which Shakespearean theater is so well-known. In fact, there are no major examples in this play of the lengthy, reflective soliloquies that appear in plays like Hamlet or King Lear.
In some ways, the tone of the play is summarized well by the two Dromios, who serve both as servant and “fool” or jester to their respective masters. As Antipholus of Syracuse says about Dromio of Syracuse, “When I am dull with care and melancholy, / [he] Lightens my humor with his merry jests.” Whenever a serious note enters the play, one of the two Dromios is sure to step in and lighten the scene with humor and merriment. Making light of the events going on around them, the two Dromios are always ready with a pun or joke, even when they might receive a thump on the head in response.
Despite this lighthearted tone, there is also a more serious undertone in the play, which begins after all on a very serious note: if Aegeon is unable to raise an improbably high amount of money before the end of the day, he will be executed in accordance with a law that bars anyone from Syracuse from entering the city of Ephesus. So too will Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus share his fate if they are caught by the Ephesian authorities. For all of its zany antics and flippant wordplay, then, the threat of state violence punctuates the play at key moments, casting an occasional cloud over its bright and sunny spirit.
