The Comedy of Errors (21 page)

9.
In 1996, Tim Supple set the play “in a small square in front of a large and elegant building with a heavy wooden door”; “law and the authority that comes with it was simply an expression of the social context of Ephesus.”

NM:
Shakespeare’s audience would have had strong associations with the use of Ephesus as the place for the story. The Ephesians were notoriously difficult when it came to converting them to Christianity. Saint Paul’s letter to the Ephesians was addressed to a rowdy, amoral, lawless lot. And a helpful source brought in by one actor explained that when a community is being converted to Christianity, there is an attempt to banish the witch doctors, conjurors, and magicians who people have previously depended on, especially for curing ills. But the public are not quick to give up these influences in their lives. It seemed that Shakespeare was depicting a society in which that confusion was very present.

PH:
When the play opens there is a man about to be put to death, and I thought we’ve got to absolutely believe in this. Even though our world was stylistically influenced by this Eastern European, slightly carnivalesque world of the Kusturica films, I felt it was very important that we all committed to the idea that someone is about to lose his life, because this is a world where one man has power over life and
death—the duke. So we found our own way of reflecting that, but it was something that I felt was very important, because the whole story comes out of this. I suppose the biggest thing that we did in that opening section was related to the fact that I felt it was very important that you
saw
this backstory, rather than it just being related by Egeon in a big speech. For me it needed to feel more cinematic, that as he started to speak we then
saw
this story unfold. Not just because it was a young audience, but also it’s a great big long speech at the beginning of a play, and I know myself sometimes that if a play starts with a long speech I can easily go, “What’s happening? What’s he talking about? What’s that?” And I didn’t want to lose the audience at the beginning at all.

And what about the repeated mentions of the supernatural? Was this mysticism an intrinsic part of your world of Ephesus or simply a turn of phrase to explain away disorder?

TS:
The supernatural was ever present as a possibility in our production in the music, in the mystery, and in the air. But it is far less explored than in later works so it felt wrong to make too much of it. I don’t feel that the supernatural is actual, as it is in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
or
Macbeth
or
The Tempest
. In this play the supernatural is, in fact, the inexplicable miracle of the human story. So many lives and family histories involve remarkable narratives and coincidences such as this play exploits. The explicit references to the supernatural are both an attempt by the characters to explain what is happening and also Shakespeare playing with the legends that surrounded the Middle Eastern world. He is plugging into the pervasive belief in the supernatural that would have been shared with his audience and perhaps he was also warming up to a greater role for the spiritual world in later works.

NM:
Antipholus of Syracuse suddenly remembers and shares with the audience the reputation of Ephesus as a town full of “sorcerers that change the mind, Soul-killing witches that deform the body, Disguisèd cheaters,” etc. Our production brought these elements out by introducing Doctor Pinch initially as a quack and including street gambling, pickpocketing, stealing, cheating as a norm. Also, Shakespeare’s
audience would associate Ephesus with witches and demons. This serves the comedy well, because the mistaken identity becomes a fear that one is being bewitched or the victim of some demon.

PH:
When we looked at the script I kept saying to the actors, “I think where possible, unless we have very good reason, we should take
everything
that people say
absolutely
literally.” So when Dromio of Syracuse is talking about this place which is full of witches— “witches do inhabit here”—the characters absolutely have to believe that. So in a sense, even though we possibly could have pushed that further, again it’s a bit like the law and order question, for me it has to be tangible, it has to be something credible. So the visual world we created had to be a world where you can believe that people buy into the supernatural, and that it is not strange. We talked about when Antipholus of Syracuse and Dromio of Syracuse arrive, they have obviously been told in their country that this is a dangerous, magical, strange place, and like everything in the play I think it’s very important to commit to that.

Antipholus of Syracuse describes himself at the beginning of the play as “like a drop of water / That in the ocean seeks another drop.” Did your production seek to resolve this sense of isolation in the familial reconciliation at the end of the play?

TS:
For us the reconciliation was a rich, long, and detailed wordless event that was played out freely by the actors each time. The events that have gone before are so extraordinary and the relationships so complex and fraught with uncertainty, we wanted to give it time and balance both the genuine wonder of finding each other with the fears or questions that remain. As they went into the house, invited by the Abbess, each character had to find their connection with others involved in their situation. The questions for us were multiple: How would it be for Egeon and the Abbess? How does Antipholus of Ephesus encounter his wife and the Courtesan at the same time? Even Angelo and the Executioner have had some role and their stories need to end too. So, yes, we certainly took the characters from isolation to a very public situation of reconciliation. But the fabric of that reconciliation was as rich and complex and far from a simple resolution. In
fact so many things are
not
resolved. As so often with Shakespeare, another set of questions and possibilities is just beginning.

NM:
It was a challenge in the production to bring out the full comedy and still be able to express the deep seriousness in the play and the desperation underlying Antipholus’ sense of isolation. For this reason I was keen to have two actors play the twins, rather than go with the current popularity of one actor playing both twins. This meant the family finding each other in the final scene could be played to the full. And it is a very moving moment indeed when brother finds brother, Dromio finds Dromio, wife finds husband, and parents find children. In fact the whole cast was so moved in that scene that genuine tears often flowed.

PH:
I think there’s a certain moment, particularly in plays like this, where characters end up telling other characters things that we already know as an audience. Because of the way the plot works, you reach a point two thirds of the way through where things are being retold. Part of our challenge was to be as witty and inventive about how we retold that information, so the audience aren’t going, “Yes we know that, we know that …” Then you get to the final sequence where everyone comes on, and the audience of course already know what’s happening, so in the last third of the play we
really
challenged ourselves. Wherever there was repetition of information we almost said to ourselves “Let’s try and do each one of these things in a different style.” So when the Courtesan recounts what’s happened to her it became a very bluesy, box-office number with the whole company, and a puppet show played out when Adriana tells the duke what’s happened. But when it came to that final moment of reconciliation, again I felt it was very important, even though it had been a mad, mad world, that there was genuine
heart
in all of these reconciliations: when the Abbess meets her husband, and the reunion of the twins. For me it was committing to that and building toward the final reconciliation, which I found very touching, when the two Dromios are left alone and everyone else has gone in to dinner. I suppose in one sense we tried to be very simple with that, but very honest about it, without trying to change the play into something else. What’s there in the play
is
a story of reconciliation and people coming together again.

William Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He lived an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove-maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young William was educated at the local grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric, and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday: an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.

Like many clever country boys, he moved to the city in order to make his way in the world. Like many creative people, he found a career in the entertainment business. Public playhouses and professional full-time acting companies reliant on the market for their income were born in Shakespeare’s childhood. When he arrived in London as a man, sometime in the late 1580s, a new phenomenon was in the making: the actor who is so successful that he becomes a “star.” The word did not exist in its modern sense, but the pattern is recognizable: audiences went to the theater not so much to see a particular show as to witness the comedian Richard Tarlton or the dramatic actor Edward Alleyn.

Shakespeare was an actor before he was a writer. It appears not to have been long before he realized that he was never going to grow into a great comedian like Tarlton or a great tragedian like Alleyn. Instead, he found a role within his company as the man who patched up old plays, breathing new life, new dramatic twists, into tired repertory
pieces. He paid close attention to the work of the university-educated dramatists who were writing history plays and tragedies for the public stage in a style more ambitious, sweeping, and poetically grand than anything which had been seen before. But he may also have noted that what his friend and rival Ben Jonson would call “Marlowe’s mighty line” sometimes faltered in the mode of comedy. Going to university, as Christopher Marlowe did, was all well and good for honing the arts of rhetorical elaboration and classical allusion, but it could lead to a loss of the common touch. To stay close to a large segment of the potential audience for public theater, it was necessary to write for clowns as well as kings and to intersperse the flights of poetry with the humor of the tavern, the privy, and the brothel: Shakespeare was the first to establish himself early in his career as an equal master of tragedy, comedy, and history. He realized that theater could be the medium to make the national past available to a wider audience than the elite who could afford to read large history books: his signature early works include not only the classical tragedy
Titus Andronicus
but also the sequence of English historical plays on the Wars of the Roses.

He also invented a new role for himself, that of in-house company dramatist. Where his peers and predecessors had to sell their plays to the theater managers on a poorly paid piecework basis, Shakespeare took a percentage of the box-office income. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men constituted themselves in 1594 as a joint stock company, with the profits being distributed among the core actors who had invested as sharers. Shakespeare acted himself—he appears in the cast lists of some of Ben Jonson’s plays as well as the list of actors’ names at the beginning of his own collected works—but his principal duty was to write two or three plays a year for the company. By holding shares, he was effectively earning himself a royalty on his work, something no author had ever done before in England. When the Lord Chamberlain’s Men collected their fee for performance at court in the Christmas season of 1594, three of them went along to the Treasurer of the Chamber: not just Richard Burbage the tragedian and Will Kempe the clown, but also Shakespeare the scriptwriter. That was something new.

The next four years were the golden period in Shakespeare’s career, though overshadowed by the death of his only son, Hamnet,
aged eleven, in 1596. In his early thirties and in full command of both his poetic and his theatrical medium, he perfected his art of comedy, while also developing his tragic and historical writing in new ways. In 1598, Francis Meres, a Cambridge University graduate with his finger on the pulse of the London literary world, praised Shakespeare for his excellence across the genres:

For Meres, as for the many writers who praised the “honey-flowing vein” of
Venus and Adonis
and
Lucrece
, narrative poems written when the theaters were closed due to plague in 1593–94, Shakespeare was marked above all by his linguistic skill, by the gift of turning elegant poetic phrases.

Elizabethan playhouses were “thrust” or “one-room” theaters. To understand Shakespeare’s original theatrical life, we have to forget about the indoor theater of later times, with its proscenium arch and curtain that would be opened at the beginning and closed at the end of each act. In the proscenium arch theater, stage and auditorium are effectively two separate rooms: the audience looks from one world into another as if through the imaginary “fourth wall” framed by the proscenium. The picture-frame stage, together with the elaborate scenic effects and backdrops beyond it, created the illusion of a self-contained world—especially once nineteenth-century developments in the control of artificial lighting meant that the auditorium could be darkened and the spectators made to focus on the lighted stage. Shakespeare, by contrast, wrote for a bare platform stage with
a standing audience gathered around it in a courtyard in full daylight. The audience were always conscious of themselves and their fellow spectators, and they shared the same “room” as the actors. A sense of immediate presence and the creation of rapport with the audience were all-important. The actor could not afford to imagine he was in a closed world, with silent witnesses dutifully observing him from the darkness.