The Comedy of Errors

by Kent Cartwright

  Likewise in the first scene, recurrent alliterations and embedded rhymes or near-rhymes create continuity as well as contrast. Alliterations draw attention to phrases – ‘doom of death’ – or link action across a series of lines: ‘Proceed … procure … plead … partial’ (1– 4). Similarly, ‘meaner’ (54) and ‘meanly’ (58) connect aurally but refer differently; ‘bought’ and ‘brought’ (57) catch the ear by their proximity; ‘weepings’ (70) and ‘Weeping’ (71) offer a near-repetition that underlines pathos; and ‘Was carrièd’ (87) and ‘Was carried’ (109) duplicate words but contrast in pronunciation. Even the doubling of a phrase – ‘Corinth, as we thought’ (87, 111) – amplifies its implication. In Egeon’s story of familial joy dashed by shipwreck, a certain syllable, hap, is repeated: in ‘happy’ (37, 138), ‘hap’ (38, 113), ‘mishap[s]’ (120, 141), ‘Hapless’ (140). Those hap- words introduce repetition-with-variation as they register the twists of narrative, and they add an echoing power to their near cousins in Egeon’s closing lines, when his haplessness has left him ‘Hopeless and helpless’ (157). The floating phoneme hap may even hint at a possible alternative, happier narrative.98

  Tonal shifts can arise through incomplete lines, metrical variations and rhymes. In a line early in the first scene, a syllable seems missing after ‘me’: ‘And by me, had not our hap been bad’ (1.1.38). Some editors have inserted a word into that empty space, but the missing syllable creates a rhetorical pause that acknowledges a break in the narration, as Egeon’s haps start to shift from good to bad. Another short line occurs later: ‘We came aboard’ (61).99 Its brevity makes rhetorical sense, for it invites a pause, a sigh, a deep draught of air before Egeon begins to relive the details of his shipwreck and family separation.100 Later in the scene, one more short line occurs after the Duke (in a headless nine-syllable line at 155) instructs the Jailer to take custody of Egeon, and the Jailer responds with only the single line ‘I will, my lord’ (156). It could be prose, but prose occurs nowhere else in the scene; the ‘law of dominant mood’ (n. 2) urges verse, the compactness of which clears room for a disruptive physical action as the Jailer takes forceful control of the merchant. Altered metre or intrusion of rhyme can also shift the tone. Towards the end of the scene, the Duke must proceed dutifully against the prisoner, despite his growing sympathy. He demonstrates his resolve with two assertive trochees: ‘Therefore, merchant’ (150). The scene finishes with its fourth couplet: ‘Hopeless and helpless doth Egeon wend, / But to procrastinate his lifeless end’ (157– 8). Such couplets have power: ‘wend’ captures the sense of wandering inherent in error as errare; ‘end’ cuts short Egeon’s travels and travails in the finality of prospective execution. The two together foreshadow the play’s long day of happenstance and the final convergence of all the lines of action at sundown.

  Stichomythia (single lines alternating between speakers, sometimes also with rhyme in Errors) can enhance the dynamism of an argument, as in the exchanges between the wife Adriana and her sister Luciana in 2.1. They are debating male and female prerogatives in marriage. In the first set of stichomythic lines, 10 –15, in iambic pentameter couplets, Luciana completes Adriana’s rhyme at 15. That topping-off momentarily gives Luciana the upper hand, and launches her into a defence of her views. Although Luciana again bests Adriana by means of stichomythic rhyme at 31, Adriana fights back rhetorically not only with her rebuttal at 32– 41 but with her take-over of the rhyming position at 86 and again at 102, each triumphing rhyme catapulting her into a sustained speech. Notwithstanding, Luciana gets the final rhyme and the final word, ‘jealousy’ (115), defining the scene’s concluding perspective on Adriana. Rhyming stichomythia arbitrates the sisters’ rhetorical contest.

  Brief statements can elsewhere function confrontationally. One example occurs when Ephesian Antipholus and Angelo the goldsmith discuss the delivery of the chain intended for Adriana (4.1.40 – 68); each assumes that the other has it. Questions and accusations bounce back and forth in speeches of only one to three lines, with the word ‘chain’ repeated eight times. These speech-volleys function as the rhetorical counterpart to the missing object, tossed like a hot potato between the contestants. The scene’s mounting aggression is defused by Syracusan Dromio at 85 – 92, when he bursts in to notify the wrong Antipholus, in a lyrical speech, that their ‘fraughtage’ (baggage) has been neatly stowed on a trim ship departing for Epidamium that only awaits a merry wind. The lyrical intrusion stops short the tennis match of accusations, the shift in perspective achieved by a shift in poetic form.

  In 2.2, changing aural effects again amplify action. The scene begins in blank verse as Syracusan Antipholus first soliloquizes and then argues heatedly with, and climactically strikes, Syracusan Dromio. From there the agitated Dromio shifts into prose and the tone of the scene moves from physical conflict to a wit-combat, in which the servant, speaking in a form well suited to him, equals, perhaps betters, his master. Prose, Dromio’s idiom, carries the speed of verbal thrust and parry and communicates spontaneity; it facilitates witty puns and comically realistic banter wherein the underclass is allowed to excel. (Later, in 3.2, Syracusan Dromio’s anti-romantic prose will serve as the counteragent to Antipholus’ rhyming love-duet with Luciana.) Amidst this prose, a few lines of verse intrude, 45 – 9: first blank verse from Antipholus and then rhymed tumbling verse from Dromio as a mocking response (47– 8). The tone and action change again after 114.1 with the entrance of the aggrieved Adriana, who addresses Antipholus (mistakenly) with moving earnestness and elevates the tone further (beginning at 177) with the rhymed couplets that will dominate the scene until 194. She even has a dignified hexameter at 124 that summarizes the points of her preceding lines. Adriana’s movement into couplets captivates Antipholus and Dromio, for they adopt couplets, too, as if entranced, the rhyme corresponding verbally to Antipholus’ sense of being enfolded in a strange ‘mist’ cast by the women (222). The verbal forms in this scene shift their shape with the action.

  Errors’s stylistic juxtapositions produce continuing surprise. They complement the juxtapositions of genres – farce, near tragedy, romance – that characterize Errors. Such shifts contribute to the play’s experiential meaning as they evoke the fictive world’s openness to change and possibility. The fatalism of Egeon in the first scene is subtly counterbalanced by hints of a mysterious and unifying order, embedded even in a syllable such as hap, behind the apparently random events that threaten his ruin. Such point and counterpoint have a special force in comedy, where the audience is frequently in a position of knowledge greater than that of the characters and where the playwright may wish to prevent that knowledge from turning into complacency. The sound effects of Errors point to a mysterious dimension of its providentialism – a latent volatility, a receptiveness to newness and possibility, as in a second ‘nativity’ – that may be close to the heart of Shakespeare’s comic vision.

  Technicalities in scansion

  George Gascoigne, in the first treatise on English poetry, ‘Certayne Notes of Instruction’ (1575), identifies the predominance of iambic pentameter in English verse and explores techniques for regularity, concerns echoed by William Webbe in his Discourse of English Poetry (1586) and by other writers. Gascoigne observes that, in a well-conceived iambic line, words should receive their ‘natural emphasis or sound’, yet he also defends ‘poetical licence’, which allows the skilful poet to cover ‘many faults in verse’ by making ‘words longer, shorter, of more syllables, of fewer, newer, older, truer, falser’.101 The poet is granted an arsenal of techniques for compressing or expanding words, including, for compression, elided vowels (‘t’admit’, ‘’tis’), suppressed consonants (‘e’en’) and syncopated unstressed syllables (‘rig’rous’, ‘threat’ning’, ‘nativ’ty’); and, for expansion, contiguous vowels pronounced as disyllables (‘-i-on’, ‘fa-ir’) and -ed suffixes given syllabification (‘sympathizèd’).102 Because actors learned a part overwhelmingly by studying its language, rhythm assist
ed them with memory and embedded hints for performance.103

  Within iambic pentameter, certain metrical variations or substitutions were conventional, including the trochaic foot, feminine ending, epic caesura, headless foot (missing its initial unstressed syllable), double onset (two unstressed syllables preceding a stressed one) and the like.104 Essentially, the iambic line integrated systematic non-iambic substitutions that allowed the poet flexibility and that served for variety or emphasis. In Errors, lines generally conform to iambic pentameter and its recognized variations. Of course, no actor in the theatre is required to sound an -ed, elide a vowel or employ other compensations in the service of an abstract metrical exactitude; the demands of expression and action necessarily take precedence. The Folio text, however, offers enough examples of verbal compression or expansion in verse lines to indicate that metre was a consideration. Numerous irregular lines occur – Shakespeare’s dramatic verse is always more open in form than his lyric or narrative poetry – but they often serve a dramatic purpose, such as creating a breach in the dialogue for pauses or stage actions. Elizabethan verse theatre assumes a poetical contract with the audience and makes a metrical tool-box available to performers, always keeping as its primary consideration the drama of character, action, emotion and thought.

  SOURCES AND INFLUENCES

  Since The Comedy of Errors ranks among Shakespeare’s most derivative works, it invites specific attention to its sources, the understanding of which can affect how we experience the play. Shakespeare sometimes worked close to a prior text, as with Plautus’ Menaechmi, adapting, cutting, altering or expanding it, whether for local incidents or the play’s overall plan. Errors also expresses more broadly generic influences, such as the traditions and conventions of comic writing, as are found in sixteenth-century Italian drama. It draws, too, on narrowly specific and local sources, such as earlier English comedies or the Elizabethan pamphlet literature of Nashe and Greene prominent in Act 4. Sources range eclectically: Shakespeare is like a juggler tossing up both footballs and teacups. The play’s richness reflects the sources’ variety and the directness or indirectness of their use; sensing them in the background brings shadows and echoes to the reading or spectating experience.

  Plautus

  For The Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night and pre-eminently The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare drew liberally on the comedies of the classical Roman playwright Plautus.105 He found his main source for Errors in Menaechmi, with which he amalgamated elements from Plautus’ Amphitruo – a process that Renaissance rhetoricians called contaminatio, the combining of multiple sources.106 The Latin plays of Plautus and his successor Terence were widely taught in Elizabethan grammar schools for their linguistic richness, eloquence and moral examples, and Shakespeare undoubtedly studied them.107 Elizabethan schoolboys performed Roman drama for training in elocution and self-presentation, and universities frequently staged Terence and especially Plautus. Annotated editions of their works were widely available in the sixteenth century, and those of Terence typically included commentaries by the medieval writers Donatus, Evanthius and others.108 The first English translation of Menaechmi, by William Warner, was published in 1595, although the manuscript, the printer’s letter tells us, had previously been in circulation (it was entered into the Stationers’ Register on 10 June 1594). Shakespeare could have seen Warner’s manuscript, especially since Warner’s patron was Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain, whose theatre company Shakespeare had joined in 1594. Warner’s ‘Argument’ refers to Menaechmi’s ‘Much pleasant error’ (13), a phrase that could have influenced Shakespeare’s title (Bullough, 1.4). Warner, like Shakespeare, turns Menaechmi’s bracelet (‘spinter’) into a ‘chain’ (see CE 2.1.105 and n.), has Erotium accused of being a witch (absent in Plautus), as is Shakespeare’s Courtesan, and resembles Errors in certain words and phrases.109 Shakespeare may have read Warner, though no evidence exists of significant reliance.110 One striking difference is that Warner omits Menaechmi’s prologue, while Shakespeare adapts details from it. Likewise, certain name-forms in F, especially ‘Antipholus Sereptus’ and ‘Antipholus Erotis’ (or ‘Errotis’), prove Shakespeare’s acquaintance with the Latin version (see List of Roles, 3n. and 4n.). If Shakespeare used Warner’s version, he probably kept it side by side with a Latin edition of Menaechmi, upon which he clearly drew.111

  Shakespeare was attracted to a Latin comedy that many in his audience would have known (perhaps even acted in), and whose presence in the public imagination would add a layer of intertextual enjoyment to Errors.112 Both Everard Guilpin and John Manningham, apparently referring to Errors, identified it by its resemblance to Plautus. Renaissance commentators generally praised Plautus’ theatrical sense above Terence’s (Terence was admired for moralism and elegant Latin): Plautine comedy’s knowing playfulness would have attracted Shakespeare.113 Menaechmi delights in alliterations, assonances, rhymes, puns and colloquialisms, as does Errors. In Menaechmi, Plautus also ‘marr[ies] the personae and story-lines of New Comedy directly to familiar Italian traditions of autoschediastic [i.e. extemporaneous, improvisational] entertainment’ (Gratwick, 14 –15), an influential characteristic of his drama. Shakespeare, too, cultivates the impression of spontaneity, as characters in wit-games snatch up each other’s words and hurl them back with new inflections (as at 2.2.47–114). In Plautus, improvisational moments point towards the play’s self-consciousness of its own theatricality (metatheatre), which might be manifested variously, as in metaphors of life as theatre, or in addresses to the audience that allude to the play’s fictional status.114 In Errors, the Syracusans turn to the audience to wonder what kind of world they are in, and riffs such as Syracusan Dromio’s on Nell’s body (3.2.85 –151) constitute overt bids to amuse spectators. Shakespeare also borrowed from Menaechmi’s comic dialectic: in Erich Segal’s famous argument, Menaechmi ‘presents the conflict of industria and voluptas, holiday versus everyday, … the reality principle versus the pleasure principle’ (44). That contrast is represented on Plautus’ stage by the two opposed houses: the wife’s, or matrona’s, standing for domestic, social and legal obligations; and the prostitute’s, or meretrix’s, betokening pleasure and escape from daily responsibilities. Menaechmi’s action ‘takes place in a magnetic field between personifications of restraint and release’ (Segal, 43). Shakespeare echoes that dialectic in Adriana’s and the Courtesan’s residences. A related polarity, bewildering dispossession versus carnivalesque bounty, further structures Menaechmi and Errors.

  Menaechmi’s contrasts play out in the unwitting collision of the twin Menaechmus brothers, separated in childhood by abduction. The play opens in Epidamnus, where the comfortable citizen Menaechmus, at odds with his overbearing wife, seeks relief at the house of the prostitute Erotium. Attached to Menaechmus is Peniculus, his ever-peckish parasite, while Erotium’s household contains a cook and a maid – all typical residents of ‘Plautopolis’. When the Syracusan brother (Sosicles Menaechmus) arrives, with his loyal slave Messenio, in search of his lost twin, the delightful chaos of mistaken identity breaks loose. Sosicles Menaechmus is mistakenly ‘wined, dined, and concubined’ by Erotium; citizen Menaechmus is called to account by his wife for stealing her possessions and giving them to Erotium; and the husband (or rather his twin) is taken for mad by two other Plautopolisians, the senex father-in-law and the medicus, or doctor. Eventually Messenio (smarter than his master) grasps the mix-up and manages the reunion in exchange for his freedom from bondage. The embattled wife is divorced, and the reunited brothers sail off happily for Syracuse. One impecunious brother wins the lottery – food, sex, money – while the bourgeois other watches himself being nightmarishly divested.115

  Shakespeare adapts ambitiously. Errors recirculates Menaechmi’s protagonist twins and its basic situation and thematic structure, and likewise observes the classical unities of place and time (i.e. one day). But Shakespeare also strives to trump his celebrated
predecessor, in the emulative manner of Renaissance authors, by appropriating one of the ancients’ best plays and multiplying its effects. Enter a second slave, or ‘servant’, Ephesian Dromio, twin to Syracusan Dromio, escalating the possibilities for errors of misrecognition. Exit the senex, parasitus and coquos, and enter the sister Luciana, who takes over the father-in-law’s patriarchal sentiments and serves as Adriana’s sounding-board, only to turn into a romantic love-interest herself. The wife becomes the normative centre of the play. Exit the prologue and enter the affecting, aged Egeon (also a father-in-law), who narrates the backstory; enter, too, his wife, for one more marital couple at the play’s end. (Egeon’s sadness may be influenced by Menaechmi’s prologue, which mentions the grief-induced death of the twins’ father.) Exposition now occurs through dramatic dialogue. Exit the reasonable, if overconfident, medicus and enter the dubious exorcist Doctor Pinch, along with the Duke, a new locus of rationality, and, for colour, assorted merchants, a goldsmith and the fantastical maid Luce/Nell (who displaces Erotium’s ancilla). Tensions are heightened by the addition of a trade war between city-states and a new setting in Ephesus, evocative of mercantilism, magic and religion, to replace Plautus’ Epidamnus. With these, the possibilities for mayhem skyrocket.116