When I began this project, I had the benefit of a year-long National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library. I am indebted to the Endowment, and even more deeply and lastingly to the Folger and its superb Reading Room staff, led by Betsy Walsh, as well as to Caroline Duroselle-Melish, who helped me with illustrations. Most of my research and writing for this edition have been conducted at the Folger, and my thanks to that institution and to the extraordinary people who run it are beyond my capacity to express fully. At an early stage in this project, I also benefited from a semester-long Graduate Research Fellowship from my institution, the University of Maryland. For their support during this project, I am deeply indebted to my medieval, Renaissance and classics colleagues, past and present, as well as to others at the University of Maryland. They include: Sharon Achinstein, Amanda Bailey, Ralph Bauer, Kimberly Coles, Theresa Coletti, Jane Donawerth, Jeanne Fahnestock, the late Marshall Grossman, Judith Hallett, Donna Hamilton, Gary Hamilton, Theodore Leinwand, Maynard Mack, Jr, Thomas Moser, Jr, David Norbrook, Michael Olmert, Gerard Passannante, Kellie Robertson, Adele Seeff, William Sherman, Scott Trudell and Vessela Valiavitcharska.
Early in this project, I had the opportunity to be a Visiting Professor and to present work in the English Department at the University of Szeged, Hungary. I am grateful to György Szönyi for inviting me to teach and lecture at Szeged, to Attila Kiss for offering suggestions and support, and especially to Ágnes Matuska for engaging in a continuing conversation about comedy, which has been a source of illumination and inspiration. Late in the project, I had the privilege of being a Visiting Researcher for a year in the Department of Language Studies and Comparative Cultures at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. One of my best memories is of working in the department’s library in Palazzo Cosulich, scenically sited on the Giudecca Canal. For their hospitality and interest, and for opportunities to present my work, I am thankful to Jeanne Clegg, Valerio de Scarpis di Vianino, Flavio Gregori, Loretta Innocenti, Laura Tosi and especially Shaul Bassi, who invited me to lecture on Errors and who provided myriad forms of help, encouragement and collegiality. Similar thanks are due to Rocco Coronato of the University of Padua and Fernando Cioni of the University of Florence.
Short on space but long on thanks, I would identify a group of individuals who have provided various forms of assistance and support: Charlotte Artese, Kathleen Bossert, Dennis Britton, Katherine Brokaw, James Bulman, Ralph Alan Cohen, John Cox, Alan Dessen, Elizabeth Driver, Charles Edelman, Andrew Fleck, John Ford, Jonathan Gil Harris, Donald Hedrick, Sean Keilen, Erin E. Kelly, Karen Kettnich, M.J. Kidnie, the late Bernice Kliman, Barbara Kreps, Jasmine Lellock, Jeanne McCarthy, Lawrence Manley, Robert Matz, Jean-Christophe Mayer, Kirk Melnikoff, Barbara Mowat, Leanne Palmer, Kaara Peterson, Lois Potter, Maggie Ray, Edward Rocklin, Heidi Scott, James Siemon, Alden and Virginia Vaughan, Melissa Walter, Lawrence Weiss, Sarah Werner, Deanne Williams, Jessica Winston, George T. Wright and Georgianna Ziegler.
Of all debts, my deepest personal one is to my wife, Pam.
Kent Cartwright
University of Maryland, College Park
INTRODUCTION
Audiences and readers have perennially delighted in the knock-about, laughter-inducing antics of The Comedy of Errors. Composed probably close in time to two other comedies rife with foolery, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew,1 Errors has often been taken as the quintessential farce. It stitches together a crazy patchwork of lost family members, identical twins, mixed-up love relationships and seeming enchantments. A director need only add clownish bowler hats or Groucho spectacles with rubber noses and stand back for laughter. Yet for all its zaniness, Errors has structure and depth. Characters and events echo each other with an eerie, mathematical sense of patterning and an equal feeling of spontaneity: the play is a triumph of comic repetition-with-difference. The device of doubleness – two sets of identical twins, a city simultaneously humdrum and magical, incidents that seem recurrent, words layered with multiple meanings – fills Errors’s world with resonance.2 Perhaps in no other comedy did Shakespeare combine compression and expansiveness to so much effect.
Errors brims with surprises. As farce, it resembles what aficionados call a ‘door play’, full of near-miss exits and entrances, with the greatest near-miss involving an actual door in 3.1. The audience, generally one step ahead of the protagonists, gets the pleasure of watching other people’s befuddlements. But not always, because at times it will probably be as confused as the characters about who is who; indeed, in the last act the spectators, like their stage counterparts, enjoy a shocking, rabbit-in-the-hat revelation. The proverbial rug keeps slipping from under our feet. The play delights in change: shifts in tone, in genre convention, in poetic or prose form. The effect can even become disconcerting, for poking through the surface of the buffoonery are intimations of sorrow, embarrassment, anxiety and suffered abuse – cries of the heart from the other side of farce. Audiences might find themselves experiencing a character’s tribulations with unexpected empathy. A once-prosperous merchant, now destitute, falls into the clutches of the police in an enemy country and, because of his nationality, faces death. (The story already feels close to today’s headlines.) Suddenly he sees his son in a crowd and calls out in desperate hope of rescue – but the son spurns him as a stranger. Errors exposes the audience to just such a moment of helplessness, the doppelgänger of delight. The play revels in contraries; it offers the grace of sadness turned to reconciliation and rings with laughter at the things that frighten us the most.
Although Renaissance thinkers understood the complexity of comedy, they also embraced its mirthful tone, with large-scale societal problems not so much solved in the ending as deferred by means of local accommodation. Comedy’s gleeful business is to expose incongruities, yet also to release and exhaust inhibitions and to dissolve our misperceptions and fears into the elixir of hilarity. As Charles Armitage Brown observed, Errors’s ‘action is serious’, even though, oxymoronically, its ‘mistakes … are ludicrous’.3 Laughter at the ludicrous requires an act of sudden mental apprehension and thus expresses the ‘instinct of reason’ (Heller, 20). Not emotional in essence, laughter generates a shift in outlook and rational perspective that brings pleasure, such that getting the joke revitalizes. Thus, we make temporary peace with ourselves and others and find our way through the maze of the world by laughing. Even more, comedy looks hopefully towards the future. Marriage in comedy stands for the possibility, if not always the fact, of happy outcomes; it constitutes the social symbol for joy in the gift of life.
As Errors’s performance history indicates, the play delivers such comedy at high-octane levels. It scrutinizes broken families and identity-troubled characters, while generating the kind of hilarious predicaments and slapstick that Abbott and Costello or Monty Python would appreciate. In 1838, for example, Brown remarked of a recent London production that ‘the audience in their laughter rolled about like waves’, as playgoers revelled in Errors’s ‘unabated’ ‘drollery’ (272 – 3). At the Folger Theater in staid Washington, DC, 166 years later, spectators, including sombre government officials and hard-nosed television journalists, doubled over in laughter and rose in standing ovation at the witty ribaldry of an Errors production (directed by Joe Banno). Laughter, anxiety, romance, perspicacity and sex folded into a madcap tour de force: you may never have more fun in the theatre.
Errors proceeds from an arresting premise: the shock of incomprehensibly losing one’s identity to an unknown double – as if the play gathered up our primal intuitions about a charmed world of alter egos; as if we and our loved ones were not quite real or were suddenly under the influence of forces beyond our control. Errors’s uncanny underside can be glimpsed in the figure of Doctor Pinch.4 This tawdry conjuror stands for the apprehensions of magic that trouble Syracusan Antipholus, and he likewise invades the memory of the twin brother, Ephesian Antipholus. The latter will torment
Pinch vilely and then pillory him with equal passion (see 5.1.238 – 46), to such a degree that the exorcist comes to suggest some unspeakable fear buried in the psyche. A scapegoat, yet one so disgusting and abused as to be slightly pathetic, Doctor Pinch represents a quality of experience both laughable and a bit unnerving.
Antipholus of Ephesus’s denunciation of Pinch was memorable enough that Thomas Heywood apparently imitated it in a 1602 play: ‘When didst thou see the starueling Schoole-maister? / That Rat, that shrimp, that spindleshanck, that Wren, that sheep-biter, that leane chittiface, that famine, that leane Enuy, that all bones, that bare Anatomy, that Iack a Lent, that ghost, that shadow, that Moone in the waine’ (sig. E1v).5 Other audiences remembered Pinch, too. When Errors was performed on 28 December 1594 during the Gray’s Inn Christmas revels, it was probably intended as late-night relaxation for the brilliant ladies and lawyers who by then would have tired themselves in masquing and dancing. If an afterthought that night, Errors became the main topic the next day, when the previous evening’s unexpected confusions were attributed to a conjuror (Doctor Pinch?) and the débâcle renamed ‘The Night of Errors’. The play made an impression – perhaps so much so that one of the Gray’s Inn attendees may have recommended Errors for performance before King James twenty years to the day later. Since that time, the phrase, ‘comedy of errors’, promising both laughter and a touch of hysteria, has come down to us as the byword and matrix of all comedies.6
Yet The Comedy of Errors had a progenitor, for it adapts a famous comedy of ancient Rome, Plautus’ Menaechmi, also about a twin in search of his lost, identical brother. Menaechmi was perhaps the most read, performed and imitated Roman comedy in Italy and England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In England, the influence of Plautus and his successor, the more decorous and less madcap Terence, generated sparkling, often biting comic successors such as Gammer Gurton’s Needle, Ralph Roister Doister and Jack Juggler, all created as English school plays in the mid-sixteenth century; some of Shakespeare’s spectators would have known them. Roman farce continued to influence English comedy through the late 1580s (and beyond), as exemplified by John Lyly’s Mother Bombie (Scragg, 10 –11). Errors, then, builds upon a living classical tradition – and manages in its inventiveness to outdo its ancestor.
In Errors, numerous of Shakespeare’s formal strategies and pervasive thematic concerns intersect. In its prosody, the play shares its high percentage of verse with Richard II and Love’s Labour’s Lost and its verse experimentalism with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Structurally, Errors’s framing device (the Syracusan family tragedy enclosing the Ephesian farce) has counterparts in the Induction of The Taming of the Shrew, in the contrasting locales of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It and even in the low humour set within high of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Other Shakespearean comedies employ farcical elements, such as Petruchio’s wooing of Kate in Shrew or Falstaff’s gulling by the merry wives; conversely, Portia and Belmont in The Merchant of Venice hail, like the Egeon family, from the generic world of romance. Shakespeare, that is, persists in exploring comic contrasts, especially those between farce and romance.
Errors’s issues and geographic milieu anticipate much in Shakespeare’s canon. Although Errors lacks the Italian setting of some of Shakespeare’s comedies, its Ephesus resides in the same Mediterranean world (see Fig. 1). Errors also glances at the exotic east, as does A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The sea figures in Errors and in many other plays, including Merchant, Twelfth Night and Pericles, while separation of twins by shipwreck drives Errors as it later will Twelfth Night. The abstract problem of law versus mercy, introduced in the Duke’s behaviour towards Egeon, becomes a feature of Dream and especially Merchant. The theme of magic will recur variously – in, for example, 1 Henry VI, 2 Henry VI, Dream and The Tempest – just as madness does in Shrew and Twelfth Night. Errors’s twin fascinations with the possibility of metamorphosis and the motif of oneself-as-another find expression in Two Gentlemen, Dream and Twelfth Night and return throughout the comic canon. Together with magic and madness, they show Shakespeare’s interest in the potential instability of reality and the fluidity of personhood.
1 The north-eastern Mediterranean. Map from Cornelis de Bruyn, A Voyage to the Levant (London, 1702), with names of cities mentioned in the play added
Shakespeare wrote Errors at a time when his thoughts were crystallizing around the problem of human identity – how do we know the self and others? – explored repeatedly from Richard III to Hamlet to Antony and Cleopatra. Identity issues are a common property of comedy, although here Errors assumes a special affinity with Shrew, where characters are so often not who we think they are. Errors ignores, however, the clash between love and friendship that features in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Dream and Merchant, and it attends less to premarital love relationships than do Two Gentlemen, Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Much Ado About Nothing and most other comedies, while instead it scrutinizes marriage (as do Shrew, Hamlet and Macbeth). Finally, Errors’s climactic recognition of ‘sympathy’ (see 5.1.397 and n., on symapthized) – of occurrences so reciprocal and co-ordinated as to suggest a mysterious order – echoes throughout Shakespeare’s comic and romantic oeuvre. In Errors, Shakespeare is formulating matters that will occupy him for the rest of his career.
Until Errors won redemption in the mid-twentieth century, however, critics shunned it as an aberration.7 In 1709, Shakespeare’s first great editor, Nicholas Rowe, called Errors ‘pure [i.e. simple] Comedy’, faulted its ‘Dogrel Rhymes’ and dismissed the playwright’s Latin competency – taking his cue from Ben Jonson’s famous claim that Shakespeare had ‘small Latine, and lesse Greeke’8 – as if he lacked sufficient learning to read Menaechmi in the original. Later editors disputed over Shakespeare’s Latin skills while concurring that Errors amounts to little more than high-spirited farce. So unimpressed was Alexander Pope that he judged (in his 1728 edition) that ‘only some characters, single scenes, or perhaps a few particular passages, were of his hand’ (a description that Pope also applied to several other of Shakespeare’s plays).9 Thirty-five years later, George Steevens found in Errors ‘more intricacy of plot than distinction of character’, along with a banal predictability (Steevens, 221). In the early 1800s, Samuel Taylor Coleridge condemned Errors with quaint praise as ‘the only specimen of poetical farce in our language’ (1.213), while William Hazlitt equivocated that the ‘curiosity excited’ by the play ‘is certainly very considerable, though not of the most pleasing kind’ (331).
When in the 1940s T.W. Baldwin put paid to the allegation that Shakespeare possessed little Latin,10 he opened the door for criticism to explore various new directions, as are discussed in the sections that follow below: the nature of error, the obscurity of human identity, the residual force of magic, the wayward energies of language, the uncanny power of objects, the tension between religion and the marketplace and the experiences of time and of marriage. Criticism has taken an interest, too, in Errors’s comic world, its juxtaposing of genres and styles and its disparateness of sources and analogues. In this early play, Shakespeare investigates the range and nature of comic drama. The very locale, magical Ephesus, makes ‘an obvious metaphor for the theatre’ as ‘a place of transformation where people lose their sense of self’.11 Errors has come not only to presage Shakespeare’s subsequent interests and achievements but to suggest the possibilities of theatrical comedy.
ERROR AND IDENTITY
The idea of error: ‘What error drives our eyes and ears amiss?’
The idea of error fascinated Renaissance thinkers.12 The humanist movement attacked what it perceived as empirical, philological and epistemological errors, from Lorenzo Valla’s debunking of the forged Donation of Constantine and Erasmus’s corrections of medieval translations of the Bible to Francis Bacon’s critique of erroneous methods of proof. Accusations of heretical errors typified the raging Protestant–Roman Catholic controver
sies of the sixteenth century. No wonder that The Faerie Queene’s definitive monster, lodged deep in the ‘wandring wood’, is Errour (Spenser, FQ, 1.1.13). It takes the emblematic shape of half loathsome woman and half horrible serpent, with a vast, knotty tail – ‘Errours endlesse traine’ (1.1.18) – and it spews forth papers and books of false Roman Catholic doctrine. (For one image of Error, see Fig. 2.) Redcrosse, the knight errant (‘wandering’), finds himself afflicted by error (‘deception’, ‘misconception’) in the maze of fairy land. Error helps to drive romance, as in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso or Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and it frequently drives dramatic comedy. Renaissance humanists embraced the medieval commentary of Evanthius (or Donatus) on Plautus and Terence that made error central to comic plot.13 Thus, comic characters traditionally become entwined in Evanthius’ ‘knot of errors’, with mistakes compounded on each other – the kind of bind that makes Viola throw up her hands: ‘too hard a knot for me t’ untie’ (TN 2.2.41).
2 Error. From Claude Paradin, Heroical Devices (1591)
Of the various definitions of the noun ‘error’, three pertain especially to The Comedy of Errors: (1) ‘The action of … wandering’ (OED n. 1); (2) ‘Something incorrectly done through ignorance’ (OED 4a); and (3) ‘the holding of mistaken notions or beliefs’ (OED 3a).14 In Errors, wandering applies to both the physical and the mental domains. Physically, it refers to the movements of characters, pre-eminently Syracusan Antipholus, the comic version of the knight errant, who scours the Mediterranean world for his lost brother. His role is reprised in a potentially tragic key by his wandering father (whose threatened execution poses an alternative ending to both his adventure and his son’s).15 Father, son and others circulate in a world of restless human displacement and travel. These wanderers are at loose ends in the world, essentially lost, homeless.
The Comedy of Errors Page 2
