Read The Comedy of Errors Online
Authors: William Shakespeare
As so often, Shakespeare has it both ways: this is at one and the same time the moving testimony of a neglected wife responding to her husband’s sexual infidelity and the cue for the line that invariably wins the play’s biggest laugh: “Plead you to me, fair dame?” She is, of course, confronting the wrong brother.
Shakespeare translates the location of the action from Plautus’ Edipamnum to Ephesus, a place associated with magic and oriental mystery as well as with Diana, the classical goddess of the night. Hence, perhaps, the accusations of witchcraft and the presence of Pinch, the schoolmaster-exorcist. But the Ephesians were best known as the recipients of one of Saint Paul’s most-studied epistles in the New Testament. It was in Ephesians that Paul exhorted children to obey their parents, servants their masters, and wives their husbands. The action of the play seems to call these demands into question: how can you obey your parents when they are lost or your master when he gives you contradictory orders? And should a woman obey her husband when he is unworthy of her? Classical material and Christian ideas play against each other in a manner typical of Renaissance artfulness.
The Comedy of Errors
may be a short and early Shakespeare play, but with its layers of emotional hunger beneath a dazzling surface of slick plotting, farcical confusion, and witty verbal exchange, onstage it is a highly accessible and rewarding one.
The early critical history of the play was one in which the fact of its being an imitation of a Roman original was held against it. In the Romantic era of the early nineteenth century, Shakespeare was prized as the great original. The idea of him as an
imitator
was displeasing. Thus William Hazlitt:
This comedy is taken very much from the Menæchmi of Plautus, and is not an improvement on it. Shakespear appears to have bestowed no great pains on it, and there are but few passages which bear the decided stamp of his genius. He seems to have relied on his author, and on the interest arising out of the intricacy of the plot.
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And his German contemporary, A. W. Schlegel: “Of all the works of Shakspeare this is the only example of imitation of, or borrowing from, the ancients … if the piece be inferior in worth to other pieces of Shakspeare, it is merely because nothing more could be made of the materials.”
2
The play was regarded as a farce. For many, that meant that it was essentially trivial. But for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, fascinated as he was by questions of aesthetic structure, there was something very satisfying about the strict conventions required by farce’s rigorous form:
The myriad-minded man Shakspere has in this piece presented us with a legitimate farce in exactest consonance with the philosophical principles and character of farce, as distinguished from comedy and from entertainments. A proper farce is mainly distinguished from comedy by the license allowed, and even required, in the fable, in order to produce strange and laughable situations. The story need not be probable, it is enough that it is possible.… Farce dares add the two Dromios, and is justified in so doing by the laws of its end and constitution. In a word, farces commence in a postulate, which must be granted.
3
Hazlitt, Coleridge’s great rival among Romantic readers, was impatient with this kind of formalism. He went to Shakespeare for strong feeling and found it lacking here: “The only passage of a very Shakespearian cast in this comedy is the one in which the Abbess, with admirable characteristic artifice, makes Adriana confess her own misconduct in driving her husband mad.”
4
It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that the play received its due, in both the theater and the study. Directors and readers began to find in it a profound exploration of the phenomenon and psychology of twins, a matter of great personal interest to Shakespeare, whose only son, Hamnet, twin to Judith, was still alive at the time of the play’s writing—which he was not when his father returned to the representation of twins in
Twelfth Night
. Modern criticism—and modern theatrical productions—have also made much of the parallels between the magic and illusions of Ephesus and those of dramatic art itself. “To describe the creation, maintenance, and exploitation of the gaps that separate the participants’ awareness and ours in
The Comedy of Errors,”
wrote Bertrand Evans in a book published in 1960 that was among the first to treat the comedies as seriously as the tragedies and histories, “is almost to describe the entire play, for in his first comedy Shakespeare came nearer than ever afterward to placing his whole reliance upon an arrangement of discrepant awareness.”
5
(
Errors
was certainly one of Shakespeare’s first comedies, but almost certainly not his very first.)
The foundation for the modern reading of Shakespearean comedy was laid by the Canadian critic Northrop Frye in a short essay published soon after the Second World War. Entitled “The Argument of Comedy,” it proposed that the essential structure of Shakespearean comedy was ultimately derived from the “new comedy” of ancient Greece, which was mediated to the Renaissance via its Roman exponents Plautus and Terence. The “new comedy” pattern, described by Frye as “a comic Oedipus situation,” turned on “the successful effort of a young man to outwit an opponent and possess the girl of his choice.” The girl’s father, or some other authority figure of the older generation, resists the match, but is outflanked, often thanks to an ingenious scheme devised by a clever servant, perhaps involving disguise or flight (or both). Frye, writing during Hollywood’s golden age, saw an unbroken line from the classics to Shakespeare to modern romantic comedy: “The average movie of today is a rigidly conventionalized New Comedy proceeding toward an act which, like death in Greek tragedy, takes place offstage, and is symbolized by the final embrace.”
The union of the lovers brings “a renewed sense of social integration,” expressed by some kind of festival at the climax of the play— a marriage, a dance, or a feast. All right-thinking people come over to the side of the lovers, but there are others “who are in some kind of mental bondage, who are helplessly driven by ruling passions, neurotic compulsions, social rituals, and selfishness.” Malvolio in
Twelfth Night
, Don John in
Much Ado About Nothing
, Jaques in
As You Like It
, Shylock in
The Merchant of Venice:
Shakespearean comedy frequently includes a party pooper, a figure who refuses to be assimilated into the harmony.
Frye’s “The Argument of Comedy” pinpoints a pervasive structure: “the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal world.” But for Shakespeare, the green world, the forest and its fairies, is no less real than the court. Frye, again, sums it up brilliantly:
This world of fairies, dreams, disembodied souls, and pastoral lovers may not be a “real” world, but, if not, there is something equally illusory in the stumbling and blinded follies of the “normal” world, of Theseus’ Athens with its idiotic marriage law, of Duke Frederick and his melancholy tyranny [in
As You Like It
], of Leontes and his mad jealousy [in
The Winter’s Tale
], of the Court Party with their plots and intrigues. The famous speech of Prospero about the dream nature of reality applies equally to Milan and the enchanted island. We spend our lives partly in a waking world we call normal and partly in a dream world which we create out of our own desires. Shakespeare endows both worlds with equal imaginative power, brings them opposite one another, and makes each world seem unreal when seen by the light of the other.
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The distinctiveness of
The Comedy of Errors
is that the entire action takes place in a version of the “second” or “green” or “magical” world: the city of Ephesus, long associated with divinity and necromancy, with chaos and desire, fulfills the role of the pastoral setting that is found in other Shakespearean comedies:
The main plot’s nightmarish Ephesus corresponds to the improbable, fantastic, dreamlike realm of the imagination, familiar to us as a second stage in Shakespearean comedy.… The functional relationship of the second world to first world is the relationship of the imagination, whether in the form of dream, drama, or play, to reality. The second world is an adaptive mechanism through which problematical situations can be submitted to personal, creative re-enactment, control, and mastery.… The play’s conclusion, in which Egeon’s problems are astonishingly solved, corresponds to the customary third phase resolution: a return to a world of law now tempered by mercy, a world of reality enriched by imaginative insight.
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In Ephesus, as in the pastoral world, the regular movement of time that characterizes the workaday world is out of joint: “Not only does public time seem to have gone awry, but the inner time-sense of the protagonists, their notion of ‘before,’ ‘after’ and ‘now,’ has become seriously deranged … no one in the play is able to give a reliable account of the present or the immediate past.”
8
The brilliance of the twinning device is that the workaday world of one Antipholus can be transposed with the dreamlike adventures of the other: “The prosaic, day-to-day business of a commercial town becomes something strange and dreamlike, because it is all happening to the wrong man.”
9
Through the genre of farce, Shakespeare transformed a private nightmare of self-punishment into a public vehicle for the pleasurable release and gratification of aggressive impulses. Equally important, farce provided an acceptable means of confronting wrongs and a pattern in which forgiveness could be won: a way of mastering, as well as releasing, feelings of guilt and aggression.
10
Critics since Frye have been especially attuned to the presence of Egeon, which ensures that the play is not
only a farce
. The framing narrative of the father’s death sentence profoundly affects our view of the farcical scenes: “In the opening scene, with Egeon’s speech and the dialogue that immediately follows it, the dramatist strikes a tragic note—indeed, strikes it very hard, as though he meant the tones to vibrate in our memories during the succession of explosions that make the hilarity of all the middle scenes.”
11
For Frye, comedy always contains a potential tragedy within itself—“the dramatist usually tries to bring his action as close to a tragic overthrow of the hero as he can get it, and reverses this movement as suddenly as possible”
12
—which is why “when Shakespeare began to study Plautus and Terence, his dramatic instinct, stimulated by his predecessors, divined that there was a profounder pattern in the argument of comedy than appears in either of them … he started groping toward that profounder pattern, the ritual of death and revival that also underlies Aristophanes.”
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So it is that Antipholus of Syracuse’s journey becomes an inner quest for the true self. “Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind, / Soul-killing witches that deform the body”: these lines “seize the imagination of the audience at the deep level where the ancient dread of losing the self or the soul is very much alive. They are highly characteristic of the imaginative Antipholus, develop the idea in his first soliloquy that his self is at hazard, and set the pattern for his interpretations of the strange experiences that befall him henceforward.”
14
For post-Freudian critics, Antipholus’ interior voyage can be interpreted psychoanalytically:
The storm which has separated the whole family from each other, sets up a desire for reintegration, which is
partly
gratified at the level of family and state, by the end of the play. But if we focus on Antipholus of Syracuse, who is in search of his brother and mother, the storm at sea which separated him from both his mirror image (his twin) and his nurturing mother, is also what has constituted him as a desiring subject, precisely through that primal separation.
15
However, identity is shaped not only from within but also externally, through social relations. Individuals develop their sense of self through comparison with others and we all rely for self-validation upon the recognition of others:
The twins appear the same, but in reality are different; those who meet them are led by appearance into illusion. Repeatedly one of the persons assumes that he has shared an experience with another, when in reality he shared it with a different one. In consequence, the persons cease to be able to follow each other’s assumptions, and become isolated in more or less private worlds.
16
The loss of both family and public recognition of self is ultimately resolved as true identities are recognized and the divided family reunited: “the final image of security is not a wedding dance but a christening feast,
a family
celebration. This may be because of the play’s concern with identity: identity is surrendered in love and marriage, but when the original family is recreated, the characters join a comforting social group which asks only that they be their old selves.”
17
The play works out the marital debt in its progression from Egeon’s separation from his wife, through his son’s confrontation of marital debts, to his final release from bondage and reunion with his wife. This pattern is paralleled as Antipholus of Syracuse and Luciana move from a state of aversion to marriage.… Finally, there is a corresponding assumption of guilt for marital mishap on the wives’ parts, as both Adriana and Emilia learn to accept, or at least confront, the separation of husband and wife.
18
As always in Shakespearean comedy, there is an element of discomfort, which should not be forgotten even as the action moves toward harmonious resolution. This is particularly focused on Adriana. As one recent critic has noted, her “desperate seeking after secure identity is a domestic and quotidian version of the universal serious note in the play”: