Mistaken identity

A plot device in which a person is wrongly identified as someone else, creating confusion or conflict that drives the story.

The Comedy of Errors: A Shakespearean comedy in which two sets of identical twins are repeatedly confused with one another. Its twin-based confusion turns mistaken identity into the engine of nearly every scene.
Dramatic irony: A storytelling effect in which an audience knows something that one or more characters do not. The audience’s knowledge of the real identity can make each false assumption suspenseful or comic.
Plautus: A Roman comic playwright whose surviving plays include adaptations of Greek New Comedy. His twin and disguise plots helped establish comic patterns later reused in European theater.
Dramatic disguise: A plot device in which a character conceals their identity through clothing, behavior, or a false persona. Disguise is intentional concealment; mistaken identity is the resulting error by another person.
Twelfth Night: A Shakespearean comedy in which Viola disguises herself as a young man named Cesario. Viola’s disguise produces a chain of mistaken assumptions about identity and desire.
Disguise: A change in appearance or manner intended to conceal a person’s identity. A disguise gives characters a deliberate way to provoke or sustain mistaken identity.
Amphitryon: A Roman comedy by Plautus in which Jupiter impersonates the title character. Divine impersonation makes household members mistake a god for the returning husband.
Impersonation: The act of pretending to be another person by copying their identity or manner. Impersonation is a deliberate performance, while mistaken identity can arise without anyone’s deception.
The Importance of Being Earnest: An 1895 comedy by Oscar Wilde about two men who use the name Ernest to evade social obligations. Its characters mistake names and identities, making social performance the joke.
Doppelgänger: A person’s look-alike, especially one represented as an uncanny double. A convincing double can cause others to assign one person’s actions to another.

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