The Comedy of Errors

by William Shakespeare

  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.6

  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.7

  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."13

  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":

  When Adriana is disowned by the man she believes to be her husband, she expresses her hurt in terms of a dissolution of identity [Act 2 Scene 2].... Antipholus' response, or lack of it, is all the more alarming for Adriana since it takes place in the home, at table, the locus which should be the safe haven of domestic hierarchy and conjugal identity, the place where her function, as much as anything, defines her identity. The person who defines her denies her in the very place whence her conjugal identity takes its meaning.19

  Tragedies traditionally end in death and comedies in marriage. But Shakespeare was a supreme realist. When all the "errors" are undone, death is averted and brothers are reunited. Yet the play's representation of a far from perfect marriage remains as a reminder that the happy ending of comedy can only ever be provisional.

  ABOUT THE TEXT

  Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date--modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare'
s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can't).

  Because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, with some plays there are major editorial difficulties. Decisions have to be made as to the relative authority of the early printed editions, the pocket format "quartos" published in Shakespeare's lifetime and the elaborately produced "First Folio" text of 1623, the original "Complete Works" prepared for the press after his death by Shakespeare's fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. The Comedy of Errors, however, exists only in a Folio text that is reasonably well printed.

  The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:

  Lists of Parts are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, not including The Comedy of Errors, so the list here is editorially supplied. Capitals indicate that part of the name used for speech headings in the script (thus "Solinus DUKE of Ephesus").

  Locations are provided by the Folio for only two plays, of which The Comedy of Errors is not one. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations ("another part of the city"). Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before. In the case of The Comedy of Errors, the whole action takes place in and around the city of Ephesus.

  Act and Scene Divisions were provided in the Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division is based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse, which the King's Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. The Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty. Nowadays, partly under the influence of film, we tend to consider a scene to be a dramatic unit that ends with either a change of imaginary location or a significant passage of time within the narrative. Shakespeare's fluidity of composition accords well with this convention, so in addition to act and scene numbers we provide a running scene count in the right margin at the beginning of each new scene, in the typeface used for editorial directions. Where there is a scene break caused by a momentary bare stage, but the location does not change and extra time does not pass, we use the convention running scene continues. There is inevitably a degree of editorial judgment in making such calls, but the system is very valuable in suggesting the pace of the plays.

  Speakers' Names are often inconsistent in Folio. We have regularized speech headings, but retained an element of deliberate inconsistency in entry directions, in order to give the flavor of Folio. Thus EGEON is always so called in his speech headings, but "the merchant of Syracuse" in entry directions.

  Verse is indicated by lines that do not run to the right margin and by capitalization of each line. The Folio printers sometimes set verse as prose, and vice versa (either out of misunderstanding or for reasons of space). We have silently corrected in such cases, although in some instances there is ambiguity, in which case we have leaned toward the preservation of Folio layout. Folio sometimes uses contraction ("turnd" rather than "turned") to indicate whether or not the final "-ed" of a past participle is sounded, an area where there is variation for the sake of the five-beat iambic pentameter rhythm. We use the convention of a grave accent to indicate sounding (thus "turned" would be two syllables), but would urge actors not to overstress. In cases where one speaker ends with a verse half line and the next begins with the other half of the pentameter, editors since the late eighteenth century have indented the second line. We have abandoned this convention, since the Folio does not use it, and nor did actors' cues in the Shakespearean theater. An exception is made when the second speaker actively interrupts or completes the first speaker's sentence.

  Spelling is modernized, but older forms are very occasionally maintained where necessary for rhythm or aural effect.

  Punctuation in Shakespeare's time was as much rhetorical as grammatical. "Colon" was originally a term for a unit of thought in an argument. The semicolon was a new unit of punctuation (some of the Quartos lack them altogether). We have modernized punctuation throughout, but have given more weight to Folio punctuation than many editors, since, though not Shakespearean, it reflects the usage of his period. In particular, we have used the colon far more than many editors: it is exceptionally useful as a way of indicating how many Shakespearean speeches unfold clause by clause in a developing argument that gives the illusion of enacting the process of thinking in the moment. We have also kept in mind the origin of punctuation in classical times as a way of assisting the actor and orator: the comma suggests the briefest of pauses for breath, the colon a middling one, and a full stop or period a longer pause. Semicolons, by contrast, belong to an era of punctuation that was only just coming in during Shakespeare's time and that is coming to an end now: we have accordingly used them only where they occur in our copy texts (and not always then). Dashes are sometimes used for parenthetical interjections where the Folio has brackets. They are also used for interruptions and changes in train of thought. Where a change of addressee occurs within a speech, we have used a dash preceded by a full stop (or occasionally another form of punctuation). Often the identity of the respective addressees is obvious from the context. When it is not, this has been indicated in a marginal stage direction.

  Entrances and Exits are fairly thorough in Folio, which has accordingly been followed as faithfully as possible. Where characters are omitted or corrections are necessary, this is indicated by square brackets (e.g. "[and Attendants]"). Exit is sometimes silently normalized to Exeunt and Manet anglicized to "remains." We trust Folio positioning of entrances and exits to a greater degree than most editors.

  Editorial Stage Directions, such as stage business, asides, and indications of addressee and of characters' position on the gallery stage, are used only sparingly in Folio. Other editions mingle directions of this kind with original Folio and Quarto directions, sometimes marking them by means of square brackets. We have sought to distinguish what could be described as directorial interventions of this kind from Folio-style directions (either original or supplied) by placing them in the right margin in a smaller typeface. There is a degree of subjectivity about which directions are of which kind, but the procedure is intended as a reminder to the reader and the actor that Shakespearean stage directions are often dependent upon editorial inference alone and are not set in stone. We also depart from editorial tradition in sometimes admitting uncertainty and thus printing permissive stage directions, such as an Aside? (often a line may be equally effective as an aside or a direct address--it is for each production or reading to make its own decision) or a may exit or a piece of business placed between arrows to indicate that it may occur at various different moments within a scene.

  Line Numbers are editorial, for reference and to key the explanatory and textual notes.

  Explanatory Notes explain allusions and gloss obsolete and difficult words, confusing phraseology, occasional major textual cruces, and so on. Particular attention is given to non-standard usage, bawdy innuendo, and technical terms (e.g. legal and military language). Where more than one sense is given, commas indicate shades of related meaning, slashes alternative or double meanings.

  Textual Notes at the end of the play indicate major departures from the Folio. They take the following form: the reading of our text is given in bold and its source given after an equals sign, with "F2" indicating a correction that derives from the Second Folio of 1632 and "Ed" one that derives from the subsequent editorial tradition. The rejected Folio ("F") reading is then given. Thus for Act
3 Scene 2 line 26: "3.2.26 wife = F2. F = wise." This means that the Folio compositor erroneously printed the word "wise" and the Second Folio corrected it to "wife": confusion between "f" and the long scribal "s" was a common problem.

  KEY FACTS

  MAJOR PARTS: (with percentage of lines/number of speeches/scenes on stage) ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE (15%/103/6), Adriana (15%/79/6), Dromio of Syracuse (14%/99/9), Antipholus of Ephesus (12%/ 76/4), Dromio of Ephesus (9%/63/6), Egeon (8%/17/2), Luciana (5%/43/4), Duke Solinus (5%/22/2), Angelo (4%/31/4), Emilia (4%/16/1).

  LINGUISTIC MEDIUM: 85% verse, 15% prose. Fairly high incidence of rhyme.

  DATE: Performed at Gray's Inn Christmas festivities for the legal profession, 28 December 1594. Possibly written for this occasion, though may have earlier date. Remained well known in legal circles and was performed at court 28 December 1604.

  SOURCES: The main plot of Syracusan merchant, lost twins, and mistaken identity is taken from Plautus' Menaechmi (Roman, c. 200 BC), known in either Latin original or a manuscript translation by William Warner (not published until 1595). The marital misunderstanding induced by the mistaken identity of a slave, resulting in the master being shut out from his own house, is taken from another Plautus play, Amphitruo. The combination of two sets of identical twins is uniquely Shakespearean. The shipwreck and lost/found parent motif may derive from the romance tradition that dates back to the story of Apollonius of Tyre, which was the main source for Shakespeare's later (co-written) play Pericles.

  TEXT: The 1623 Folio is the only early text. It is generally thought to have been set from Shakespeare's original manuscript, but there is no firm evidence for this--a transcript or (less likely) theatrical promptbook is also possible. Generally good quality of printing.