Shakespeare set The Comedy of Errors in Ephesus because his audience knew the city from the Bible as a home of sorcerers, exorcists and burned books of magic. He never explained the choice, but the play shows it: a Roman farce set in Epidamnus moved to a town where every mix-up could be blamed on witchcraft.
That is the short answer. The longer one is more interesting, because the play's Ephesus and the real city overlap in ways most readers miss, and some of that overlap still stands on the site.
Why is The Comedy of Errors set in Ephesus?
Because Ephesus had a reputation. Shakespeare moved Plautus's twins story from Epidamnus to Ephesus, a port his audience knew from Acts 19 for magicians, failed exorcists and burned spell books. In a town like that, a stranger greeted by name by people he has never met assumes he is bewitched.
In the second scene, Antipholus of Syracuse has just landed and been ordered home to dinner by a servant who looks exactly like his own. His first thought is the town's reputation: "They say this town is full of cozenage," of "dark-working sorcerers that change the mind" (Act 1, Scene 2).
Notice the "they say." He arrives already expecting magic, and so does the audience, which is being told how to read every error that follows.
The fear keeps coming back. His servant decides "this is the fairy land," Antipholus concludes that "Lapland sorcerers inhabit here," and in the last scene the Duke of Ephesus tells the whole confused crowd, "I think you all have drunk of Circe's cup."
What Shakespeare changed from Plautus
The skeleton is borrowed. Plautus's Menaechmi, written more than seventeen centuries earlier, has one pair of identical twins colliding in Epidamnus on the Adriatic, today's Durrës in Albania. Shakespeare doubled the problem by giving the twin masters twin servants, both called Dromio, and moved the whole thing to the Aegean.
He kept Epidamnum as a memory. It is where Egeon's twin sons were born before the family was wrecked at sea, and a friendly merchant advises the visiting Antipholus to "give out you are of Epidamnum" so that his goods are not seized.
He also added a death sentence: a feud between Syracuse and Ephesus means any Syracusan found in the city dies unless a thousand marks are paid, which is why old Egeon opens the play under arrest.
The frame story of Egeon and his lost wife draws on an older tale, Apollonius of Tyre, which already pointed to Ephesus. In John Gower's English telling, the wife given up for dead washes ashore there and becomes a priestess of Diana. Shakespeare made his lost wife a Christian abbess instead.
Years later, with a collaborator, he used Gower's ending after all. Pericles closes with a family reunion in the temple of Diana at Ephesus.
On our private half-day Ephesus tour a licensed guide takes you through the marble city, the House of the Virgin Mary and the Temple of Artemis, and the conversation can go wherever your curiosity does. Tickets are bought in advance so you skip the line; the ticket cost itself is paid separately.
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The city of magic books
For an Elizabethan audience, Ephesus meant the Bible first. In Acts 19 Paul teaches there for more than two years, and the chapter is full of the supernatural. Seven sons of a priest named Sceva try to cast out an evil spirit in the name of Jesus. The possessed man overpowers them, and they flee the house naked and wounded.
Then comes the bonfire. Converts who had practiced magic burn their books in public, and Luke values them at fifty thousand pieces of silver, each usually taken as a drachma, about a day's pay. Our colleagues cover the passage in burning the magic books of Ephesus.
The reputation was older than Paul. Ancient writers describe the Ephesia grammata, six nonsense words said to be inscribed on the cult statue of Artemis and worn as charms. One story tells of a wrestler at Olympia who kept winning until the Ephesian letters tied to his ankle were found and removed.
Exorcists, an abbess and Paul's letter
Shakespeare leans on that memory all through the play. When the local Antipholus seems to lose his mind, his wife calls in Doctor Pinch, a schoolmaster and conjurer, who tries to cast the devil out: "I charge thee, Satan, housed within this man, to yield possession to my holy prayers." It reads like the Sceva episode played for laughs.
The ending is not at a pagan temple but at a priory, where the long-lost mother, Emilia, has lived for years as abbess. Scholars have also noticed how often the play argues about husbands and wives, masters and servants, the same pairs addressed in the household rules of the letter Paul wrote to the Ephesians.
Luciana even lectures her sister that men "are masters to their females, and their lords," which sounds very like a sermon on Ephesians 5.
A goldsmith's chain and the silversmiths' riot
The other half of the comedy is money. Shakespeare's Ephesus is a trading town: a goldsmith chasing payment for a chain, a merchant impatient to sail for Persia, a courtesan who wants her ring back, and bags of gold handed to the wrong man.
Arthur F. Kinney, writing for the Folger Shakespeare Library, calls it a "bustling Mediterranean seaport" and argues that on a London stage it took on the features of London itself, the city of trade (A Modern Perspective).
The real city was just as commercial. Ephesus was the leading port of Roman Asia, with its Commercial Agora a short walk from the docks, and the riot in Acts 19 was started by Demetrius the silversmith, who made silver shrines of Artemis and feared Paul's preaching was bad for business.
What the real Ephesus was like
Shakespeare never describes a single building, and almost certainly never saw the place. By the 1590s the ancient city lay abandoned, its harbor silted up and its people long since moved to the hill of Ayasuluk, today's Selçuk. Our colleagues trace that retreat from the sea in how the harbor died.
What his audience imagined, a crowded port of traders, preachers and people selling spells, is close to the Roman city at its height. What they could not picture was the scale: the theater where the Acts 19 crowd shouted for two hours held around 25,000 people.
The Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders, was lost for centuries. John Turtle Wood, an English architect, located its remains only in 1869, some 275 years after the play was first staged. Our note on what is actually left of the Temple of Artemis is honest about how little there is to see.
Finding the play's Ephesus on the ground
No spot at Ephesus is tied to the play, and nobody should pretend otherwise. But a reader of the comedy can walk its world in a morning: down the marble street to the Great Theater, then to the head of the paved road that once ran to the harbor.
Sit in the theater and read the "cozenage" speech aloud. It is a warning about sorcerers, written for a London stage, spoken in a city whose real theater once held a crowd roaring for Artemis.
For the route itself, follow our colleagues' eight-stop walk from the gate to the harbor. Our notes on the Ephesus theater cover the seats and acoustics, more background sits under History, and current tickets and opening hours are kept up to date.
Questions readers ask
Where does The Comedy of Errors take place?
Entirely in Ephesus, and within a single day. The action moves between the marketplace, the house of Antipholus of Ephesus and a priory, while the backstory reaches back to Syracuse and Epidamnum.
Which Shakespeare play is set in Ephesus?
The Comedy of Errors is set entirely in Ephesus. Pericles also uses the city for key scenes, including the final reunion in the temple of Diana. Neither play describes the real ruins: Shakespeare's Ephesus comes from books, above all the Bible.
Does Ephesus still exist today?
As a living city, no; as a place to visit, yes. The ruins stand on the Aegean coast of Türkiye beside the town of Selçuk, an open archaeological site and one of the most visited in the country.
When was The Comedy of Errors written?
Sometime between about 1589 and 1594. The earliest recorded performance was on December 28, 1594, at Gray's Inn in London, noted in the Gesta Grayorum as a comedy "like to Plautus his Menechmus." The crowd was so unruly that the evening became known as the Night of Errors. It was first printed in the 1623 First Folio.
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