The Comedy of Errors

by Kent Cartwright

  GENRE AND STYLE

  Different generic hats

  Errors’s fun comes partly from its different generic hats, doffed or donned with a mime’s ease. Comedy is a capacious genre, and especially so in Errors: Plautine farce, romance of familial separation, even potential tragedy. Some critics have claimed Errors as a ‘problem play’ and a ‘tragi-comedy’.70 Farce dominates the middle sections, framed by the Egeon romance of the first and last scenes, while darker tonalities sift through the entire action. Mode and tone can pivot in a moment: entering at 4.2.28.1 as the servus currens, the conventional running servant of Plautine comedy, Syracusan Dromio suddenly breaks into an Elizabethan-pamphlet fantasia about demonism (32– 40). Errors’s formal register shifts easily, surprising auditors and generating suspense.71

  Coleridge called Errors ‘pure farce’ (1.99). A subgenre of comedy, farce thrives on certain conventions: misinformation and error; complicated plots (the mix-ups arising from two sets of twins); adulterous possibilities (the dinner between Adriana and Syracusan Antipholus); misdirected, circulating objects (the chain, the rope’s end, the purse of coins); comic near-misses (the ‘lock-out’ of 3.1); speed and acceleration (the running Dromios and the increasing momentum of Act 4); violence without injury (the beatings of the Dromios); physical exertion (the binding of the ‘madmen’ and the chase of 4.4); and an absurd world with its own logic (sets of identical twins born in the same night in the same inn). ‘[W]onderfull Intricacie of mistakings’, wrote a seventeenth-century reader in a copy of the First Folio, near the beginning of Act 5 (Yamada, 31). Farce depends on recurrent accidents (an Antipholus encounters the wrong Dromio in the street) that multiply throughout the plot. Its actions are so improbable and fantastical that they force characters into fabricating explanatory narratives that presume disreputable motives or diabolical agents and that generate subsequent actions.72 Over a third of Errors’s lines are taken up with characters’ declaring their versions of prior events:73 such ‘stories about past actions are themselves actions’ that can produce further confusions (Witmore, 73). The narrative has a quality of machine-like repetition, amusing and a little manic.

  From a Freudian perspective, farce offers a fantasy of wish-fulfilling aggression and violence, and it indulges us vicariously in other pleasures that conventional life generally denies.74 Farce lets spectators, for example, ‘savor the adventure of adultery … without taking the responsibility or suffering the guilt’ (Bentley, 229). Conversely, farce typically employs a ‘paranoid’ plot to heighten ‘anxiety and menace’, signified by a convention, the chase, that propels the action towards absurdity, as in Errors.75 The absence of meaning so typically attributed to farce ‘is intrinsic to the genre’ because it privileges ‘the humorous acceptance of normally unacceptable aggression’.76 Farcical laughter can put us in a state of sustained ‘euphoria’ (Bentley, 234). Yet farce’s ‘structure of absurdities’ can also paradoxically reveal complex meanings, for ‘[t]he heaping up of crazy coincidences in farce creates a world in which the happily fortuitous seems inevitable’ (245). In Errors, such farce transforms finally into providentialism, while anger and paranoia yield to communion and wonder.

  Those concluding values evoke the genre of romance. A form difficult to define, romance involves elements such as quests, multiple and interrupting story-lines, marvels, magic and extended time.77 A common activating circumstance of romance is an error that leads to wandering. Romance’s pattern of quest, furthermore, allows for both the seeking of a particular end and its postponement, the purposeful journey whose completion is relentlessly deferred.78 As romance complications widen, the unexpected intervenes, and narrative threads multiply. To such a form, error as wandering and mistaking is fundamental.79 By its very name, then, The Comedy of Errors puts farce’s compactness in tension with romance’s expansiveness.80

  Romance motifs colour Egeon’s opening narrative of the shipwreck at sea that splits the family and leads to the father’s and son’s arduous searchings for reunion. Such is the stuff of the genre from the Apollonius of Tyre legend to Sidney’s Arcadia, both of which, along with the Aeneid, the first scene evokes. The play’s beginning not only retells the merchant’s mishaps and wanderings but opens up another romance-like space of roaming and deferred resolution, as Egeon is allotted a day to enquire throughout Ephesus for the ransom to redeem his life.81 It is inside this space of delay that the rest of the play unfolds. As it proceeds, Errors continues to employ romance themes: the intention of the traveller Antipholus to ‘wander’ (1.2.31) through the city, as his father is doing; the correspondence between the money needed for Egeon’s ransom and the amount in Antipholus’ possession; the sea motif echoed in a variety of images; the metaphorical ‘divorce’ of the Egeon family replayed in the estrangement of the Ephesian husband and wife; the emphasis on encroaching time; and the final convergence of manifold story-lines.82 The romance elements of Errors largely contain its tragic potential, but that potential also reaches rather beyond them, as in the apocalyptic strains of the middle section. Likewise, the bleakness of Gower’s Apollonius of Tyre story occasionally breaks through, as in Egeon’s humiliated and pathetic self-descriptions in 5.1 (298 –301, 307–16).

  As a comedy as well as a romance, Errors makes particular structural use of a term derived from errare: ‘errand’. The plot of Errors stays in motion partly because the Antipholus brothers and Adriana keep sending the Dromios on errands. Those errands, although intended as missions, often turn into wanderings, as the agent reaches the wrong destination. Other characters pursue ineffectual missions, too. In 1.2, for example. Syracusan Antipholus sends his Dromio with a cache of money to an inn. The First Merchant then chats with Antipholus and departs on an errand. Moments later, Ephesian Dromio enters, having been sent by Adriana, whose household now springs into imaginative life. Antipholus, his temper rising with his confusion, strikes Dromio, who runs away, back to Adriana’s house (subsequently, Adriana will chase him forth again). Antipholus worries that Dromio has been enchanted and sets off himself to find Dromio and his own money: the action has become self-perpetuating. From here forward, the Dromios will continue to criss-cross and interweave the story-lines. The device of errant errands creates not only continuation in the action but structure in the scene. In 1.2, the early departure of one Dromio and the later entrance of the other provide symmetry and contrast. Twice the stage is partially cleared, allowing Syracusan Antipholus to soliloquize alone, the first time about his desire to discover family and identity, the second about his fear of losing identity. In such manner, errant entrances and exits will continue to produce internally balanced scenes of parallels and oppositions.

  Comedy, like romance, has a generic association with error. The well-known essay De fabula (often appended to Renaissance editions of Terence), attributed to the fourth-century AD grammarian Aelius Donatus but probably written by Evanthius of Constantinople, lays out the three major parts of comedy: protasis, epitasis and catastrophe.83 The epitasis, or middle section, involves ‘the increase and progression of the turbulations, and the whole, as I might say, knot of error’ (Evanthius, in Baldwin, Structure, 33). Schoolboys were undoubtedly familiar with the theories of Evanthius and Donatus and are likely to have known the Donatian analysis of Terence’s Andria in terms of error, with the tightening ‘knot of error’ signifying rising confusion, tumult and comic peril.84 In Errors, Shakespeare virtually allegorizes that theory by writing a cleverly paradigmatic comedy driven by self-compounding errors that are materialized in the knotted ropes that bind Ephesian Antipholus and Dromio. More broadly, knotting different modes and tones together constitutes a characteristic of comedy. Errors’s metadramatic self-awareness makes the play a celebration of comic form itself.

  Farce and romance conjoin in the comic wonder of the close. To be sure, the denouement leaves relationships precariously open.85 Although Ephesian Antipholus volunteers ransom for his father and expresses ‘much thanks’ to
the Courtesan for her ‘good cheer’ (5.1.392), he remains verbally reticent, even silent, towards his wife and brother, while Adriana must attempt to be patient when confronted with the news that her husband accepted a ring from the Courtesan.86 Perhaps, too, Egeon will never fully recover from his world-weariness. Yet the ending’s dominant emotions are the joy of reunion (and prospective marriage) and the wonder of the impossible truth of twinness. Phenomenologically, wonder constitutes a state of suspension, the simultaneous experience of what is and what is not, a liminal ground between empirical materialism and continuity, on the one hand, and sceptical faith and discontinuity, on the other.87 Rationality supports both. While the empirical facts have been sorted out, the mystery of the day’s ‘sympathized’ events remains beyond the power of explanation. In the reknitting of the family, time has miraculously ‘turn[ed] back’ (see 4.2.55). We sometimes associate wonder with the reunions in which romance specializes, but in Errors it also asserts the climactic possibilities of farce. The ending’s wonder reformulates the expectation of closure into the discovery of new beginning, wherein the secular goes hand in hand with the sacramental.88 ‘Such nativity’: that definitive exclamation comes from a character, the Abbess, who stands for rebirth, who herself has been reborn into the narrative and who joins together the lay and the holy.89 A final, surprising congruity emerges between loose ends and revealed bonds, deferred reconciliations and new relationships, and wanderings and wonderings.

  Verbal shape-shifting

  Besides varying generically, The Comedy of Errors also shifts verbal styles as it alters in tone and action, to the increase of the play’s dramatic energy. From rhymed pentameters to ‘tumbling verse’ to prose, from soliloquies to duelling stichomythia, from blank verse to couplets to quatrains, from Egeon’s epic tone to the Dromios’ domestic colouration, the play’s stylistic modes succeed each other in tune with changing events, conflicts and personalities. Shakespeare’s theatre-goers appreciated such orchestration of sound and rhythm, since many of them were schooled in the rhetorical principles of Quintilian and Cicero, and shared in a tradition of verse drama. ‘[H]ighly patterned speech was congenial’ to Shakespeare’s audience, and Elizabethans customarily encountered ‘[r]hyme and meter’ and other ‘rhetorical devices … in public places’.90 Accordingly, early treatises on English poetry coach would-be poets in metrical virtuosity to enable them to move their hearers. As George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy (1589) explains, ‘the heart by the impressions of the ear shall be most affectionately bent and directed’ (98): or, as Puttenham’s editors put it, ‘the ear is the essential gateway to the mind’ (44). Shakespeare’s playhouse emphasized that aural experience: the resonant, voice-amplifying, cylindrical wooden Elizabethan playhouse offered ‘the largest, airiest, loudest, subtlest sound-making device fabricated by the culture of early modern England’.91

  The play proceeds overwhelmingly in verse. Of its 1,787 lines of dialogue, 13% are prose and 87% verse, with some 25% of those verse lines rhyming.92 In a predominantly verse play, rhyme becomes a key tool for differentiation. Errors’s default verse form is iambic pentameter. Its first scene begins almost perfectly in that form (except for the trochaic ‘Merchant’, 3), with the first two lines end-rhymed and those ensuing in blank verse:93

  EGEON

  ߓߓProceed, Solinus, to procure my fall,

  ߓߓAnd by the doom of death end woes and all.

  DUKE

  ߓߓMerchant of Syracusa, plead no more:

  ߓߓI am not partial to infringe our laws.

  (1.1.1– 4)

  That opening establishes the work’s dominant verse form (and initiates what John Hollander calls the ‘metrical contract’ with the audience about what style to expect (181)). From here on, Errors presupposes a play-listener’s discerning ear for aural shifts, as it ranges through blank verse, heroic couplets, quatrains of alternating rhyme, tumbling verse (containing a fairly regular number of stressed syllables, most commonly 4 – 6, and an irregular number of unstressed ones), hexameters, short lines, stichomythia and shared lines (i.e. lines divided between two or more speakers) – with occasional passages of prose interspersed. Movement among verbal forms illuminates differences. Lower-status figures such as servants (the Dromios) gravitate towards tumbling verse (associated with popular forms) or prose, while higher-status speakers express themselves in blank verse, heroic couplets and quatrains, although servants may also employ blank verse in talking to those above them in station, and masters and mistresses can use prose according to the situation and the addressee. Sometimes a speaker will adapt his or her style tellingly to the tone of a scene in a way that diverges from his or her normal form.94 Rhymed couplets can elevate the tone, encapsulate an idea memorably or mark the beginning or ending of an argument, episode or scene. Alternating rhyme is associated with wooing and expressions of romantic love (as at 3.2.1–52); its quatrains replicate the pattern of the Shakespearean sonnet. Tumbling verse shows a shift into colloquialism, while prose, the next step towards informality, facilitates fast-paced punning, double entendres and verbal momentum. Tumbling verse derives from an older tradition of farcical drama typified in plays such as Gammer Gurton’s Needle (c. 1553). It appears especially in the topsy-turvy ‘lockout’ scene (see 3.1.11– 85 and n.), where the Dromios and others engage in mirror-like tumbling exchanges. Here the equality of stresses and the steady cadence of unstressed syllables lend all the speeches a frenzied speed and rhythmic sameness, submerging the characters’ individual identities in ‘acoustic anarchy’.95 Shakespeare orchestrates an antiphonal mob scene that displays the characters’ bewitchment by errors and that marks a climax in the play – accomplished through tumbling verse. Yet in that scene, as elsewhere, one form gives way to another: 3.1 begins in, and returns to, iambic pentameter and ends in a couplet. Errors progresses by means of rhythmic metamorphosis.

  A word or phrase may alter in meaning and import by being reiterated: repetition-with-variation. During Errors’s denouement, the Abbess wraps up much of the action with a key speech. Within the space of three iambic pentameter lines, she twice uses the term ‘nativity’ (5.1.404, 406); the second occurrence constitutes her climactic last word in the play. Some editors have judged the duplication of ‘nativity’ to be a compositorial error and have emended the second instance to ‘felicity’ or ‘festivity’. But the two occurrences entail different pronunciations, initially as three syllables, ‘na-tiv’-ty’, and then more fully and emphatically as four, ‘na-tiv-i-ty’, with a secondary stress on the last syllable (see 5.1.404, 406n.).96 The same word pronounced differently: scansion suggests not erroneous typesetting but doubling and varying in a way that initially acknowledges specific births but then celebrates the ending’s inclusive sense of rebirth. Another kind of repetition-with-variation occurs when Ephesian Dromio insists that his master has beaten him, despite Antipholus’ denial. Dromio’s line scans thus: ‘Say what / you will, sir, // but I / know what / I know’ (3.1.11). This two-clause line is iambic pentameter, with an epic caesura (a foot, typically the second, containing three syllables – unstressed, stressed, unstressed – before a pause). The line repeats Dromio’s assertive ‘I know’, but the iambic stress moves, the second time, from ‘I’ to ‘know’ so as to elevate Dromio’s outraged certainty.97 Even a name can change meaning through repetition, as evidenced by Luciana’s ‘Dromio, thou Dromio, thou snail, thou slug, thou sot’ (2.2.200), where the second iteration turns Dromio’s name into an epithet. (Petruchio likewise reformulates Kate’s name in The Taming of the Shrew (see 2.1.185 – 90).) Adriana repeats words and phrases to build pathos: ‘How comes it now, my husband, O, how comes it’ (2.2.125). As that scene progresses the word ‘come’ is reiterated, with different meanings and increasing urgency as the women attempt to force the action to their will: ‘Come, come, no longer will I be a fool’ (209); ‘Come, sir, to dinner’ (212); ‘Come, sister’ (217); ‘Come, come, Antipholus, we dine too late’
(225). A question, a declaration, an enticement, a command, an exhortation: doubling a term registers the unfolding emotional drama. Repetition-with-variation, however subtle, contributes to Errors’s crispness and dynamism.

  In long speeches, sound devices can organize the narrative and also open it to changing meanings. Shakespeare’s early dramatic verse is sometimes faulted for too frequently using end-stopped lines, as in the blank verse of the first scene:

  At length another ship had seized on us,

  And, knowing whom it was their hap to save,

  Gave healthful welcome to their shipwrecked guests,

  And would have reft the fishers of their prey

  Had not their bark been very slow of sail;

  And therefore homeward did they bend their course.

  (1.1.112–17)

  When employed as units of thought, such end-stopped lines can manage lengthy and complicated sentences, here a six-line, fifty-word sentence with two main clauses (one with three co-ordinate verbs, a modifying participial phrase and a subordinate clause). Despite that syntactical complexity, each line plants in the final iambic foot a stressed verb, noun or pronoun – ‘us’, ‘save’, ‘guests’, ‘prey’, ‘sail’, ‘course’ – that delivers narrative content emphatically. Shakespeare uses the end-position to make meaning and to register effect; in Puttenham’s terms, ‘the cadence which falleth upon the last syllable of a verse is sweetest and most commendable’ (169).