The dream of restoration haunted Shakespeare throughout his life. In The Comedy of Errors, a merchant of Syracuse, in search of his lost twins, is arrested in the rival city of Ephesus and is threatened with death if he cannot pay a heavy fine. At the end of a zany tangle of confused identities, in which one of his sons is arrested for debt by a leather-clad officer (of the type that used to accompany the bailiff John Shakespeare), the father is reunited with the twins and with their mother, the beloved wife from whom he had been separated in a shipwreck thirty-three years before.
