QUIZ: Shakespeare’s Siblings
How well do you know the brothers and sisters of Shakespeare’s plays?
Onstage at Lantern Theater Company May 16 through June 16, 2024, The Comedy of Errors is one of the first plays in Shakespeare’s canon and an early testing site for many themes he will return to throughout his later works. As discussed in this Searchlight article, some of these recurring themes include separated and reunited families, storms and shipwrecks, and strangers in strange lands. Another recurring theme is the sibling relationship, which Shakespeare will examine in all its facets again and again.
Siblings are central to many Shakespeare plays, including The Comedy of Errors’ close cousin Twelfth Night, in which a pair of twins is separated by the sea and then reunited while another sibling pair is permanently separated by death. Hamlet includes the murderous and vengeful brother kings as well as the more affectionate Laertes-Ophelia relationship. King Lear examines the violent differences among both a trio of sisters and a pair of half-brothers, and many other plays — including As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, and several history plays — include brothers betraying brothers. On the other hand, Cymbeline celebrates a joyful reunion of siblings who never knew they were missing each other. In The Tempest, Prospero uses his magic to heal the rift between him and his brother.
The Comedy of Errors gives us not one but three sets of siblings as pictured above: the two Antipholuses, the two Dromios, and Luciana and Adriana. In the sisters, we see how a long and close relationship can develop between two people with very different ways of approaching the world. In contrast, the Antipholuses and Dromios spend only a few minutes in each other’s company onstage, which gives us the opposite opportunity: examining how brothers who have been separated all their lives become different people, but also how their innate similarities persist. And though they are not related by blood, the Dromio and Antipholus pairings are sibling relationships in their own way, though they are related by circumstance rather than blood.
How well do you know Shakespeare’s siblings? Test your knowledge with this quiz, then join us for The Comedy of Errors!
More great reading: See other recent articles and interviews on the Lantern Searchlight blog
Lantern Theater Company’s production of William Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors is onstage May 16 through June 16, 2024, at St. Stephen’s Theater. Visit our website for tickets and information.
