The Comedy of Errors

by Kent Cartwright

  (Meres, 282)

  Meres, with BA and MA degrees from Cambridge University, arrived in London in the early 1590s and became active in literary circles; he probably knew the plays cited from having seen them in person.2

  Because its first recorded performance was at Gray’s Inn, The Comedy of Errors has been strongly associated with the Inn’s 1594 Christmas revels (described in the Gesta Grayorum, first published in 1688), and some scholars argue that Errors was created for that event.3 Standish Henning, however, has raised doubts – decisively, I think – that Errors could have been composed explicitly for the Gray’s Inn revels. According to the Gesta, the Inns-men resolved to mount the revels (which had not been undertaken in three or four years) because of the great number of their members present in November and December 1594. Thus, ‘about the 12th. of December, with the Consent and Assistance of the Readers and Ancients’, the members decided to elect a ‘Prince of Purpoole’ to govern the revels, and they set in motion plans for appointing the prince’s mock court, for raising funds to underwrite the proceedings and for requiring attendance.4 As Henning points out, a decision made ‘on or about December 12’ to hold the revels would leave only sixteen days ‘to compose, learn, and rehearse The Comedy of Errors’ if it were a play specially written for the revels (Var., 281) – and that number of days also requires the improbable assumption that someone from Gray’s Inn would have commissioned a new play immediately following the 12 December decision. There is no reason to reject the Gesta’s account of timing, and on those grounds it is unimaginable that a new play could have been conceived, drafted and mounted in the time available. Furthermore, the plans for the 28 December Grand Night were themselves somewhat makeshift. The success of the first event on 20 December emboldened the members of Gray’s Inn to enlarge their undertaking for 28 December, making even less certain the date on which the decision to hire a play was made. We must conclude that The Comedy of Errors was already in existence when the Gray’s Inn men solicited a theatre-piece and that it may well have been performed before then on the public stage. For the Gray’s Inn revels, Shakespeare could have introduced into Errors some especially prepared material: for example, the joking between Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse in 2.2 that plays on the legal terms ‘fine’ and ‘recovery’ (see 2.2.76 –7 and n.). Likewise, Dromio of Syracuse’s agitated descriptions of the judicial Officer in 4.2 and 4.3 might contain embellishments meant for the Gray’s Inn audience. Yet the play’s legal language is woven deeply into the dialogue, just as the framing issue of a criminal prosecution is fundamental to its structure, the arrest for debt key to its crisis and resolution and the question of justice pertinent to its start and finish: such matters are part of the play’s conception and could not have been inserted belatedly for the amusement of Gray’s Inn spectators. Indeed, Shakespeare would already have been fully aware of Inns students as ‘regular playgoers from the start, and a conspicuous presence at the amphitheatres from early on’.5 John Davies remarked, circa 1593, on the numerous and ‘clamorous fry of the Innes of court’ at the Theatre,6 and there are various other contemporary references to the Inns members’ haunting of the playhouses. The commissioning of a piece for an Inns performance does not need to be hypothesized in order to account for Errors’s legal language, interest in legal issues, use of legal situations and jokes upon legal personnel, although such matters might have made the play attractive for the Gray’s Inn revels.7 While some legal references might have been added for the Inns performance, Errors was probably written with the public theatre in mind.

  Scholars agree that the earliest possible date for Errors’s composition, the terminus a quo, is 1589. That date has been inferred from a line spoken by Dromio of Syracuse as he lampoons Nell’s features in geographical terms: ‘Where France?’, asks Antipholus of Syracuse, and Dromio responds, ‘In her forehead, armed and reverted, making war against her hair’ (3.2.125 –7). Besides alluding to syphilis, Dromio’s speech refers obliquely to the contemporaneous war in France over the prospective succession to the kingship of the Protestant Henri of Navarre, designated as heir in 1589 but, because of the hostilities, unable to take the throne until 1594.8 In Dromio’s comment, ‘hair’ is taken as a pun for ‘heir’, so that the line apparently glances at the French internal wars. Since Henri of Navarre’s succession was confirmed by Henri III in 1589, Dromio’s speech would probably have been composed after the events of that year. Although Navarre’s coronation took place early in 1594, the French tribulations would still have been fresh enough in English minds to merit a gibe even if the scene were written after Henri’s ascent to the throne.

  In narrowing the five-year period, two kinds of evidence are helpful: (1) evidence outside the play, as well as allusions in the play to real-world events, people or writings, as exemplified by Dromio’s pun about French wars; and (2) aspects within the play that suggest temporal affinities to other of Shakespeare’s works. Although all such evidence remains partial and circumstantial, cumulatively it indicates a date of composition somewhat before, but not far removed from, the first recorded production of Errors in 1594.

  EXTERNAL EVIDENCE

  In Henning’s calculation, the cast of Errors calls for a total of twelve male actors and four boy actors,9 a smaller cast size than typical of Shakespeare’s plays before the closing of the theatres in mid-1592. That difference, according to Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, argues that Errors was composed later.10 In the same vein, the time markers in Errors parallel new hours of performance for the public theatre. On 8 October 1594, the Lord Chamberlain, the patron of Shakespeare’s company, assured the Lord Mayor of London that his actors, who used to begin their plays ‘towardes fower a clock, … will now begin at two, & haue don betwene fower and fiue’ (quoted from Chambers, ES, 4.316). This promise was meant to ease complaints about plays interfering with evening prayer and, in winter-time, concluding after sunset (Var., 283). If Errors was written in the autumn of 1594, then its announcing of 5 p.m. as the time for the execution of Egeon (when all the story-lines intersect) might allude to the promised time when a Lord Chamberlain’s play in the public theatre would ‘haue don’, as if narrative time and real time were converging upon each other. Such a connection remains conjectural but attractive.11

  Errors may refer to other outside events. Dromio of Syracuse’s tour de force comic fantasia about Nell the globular kitchen wench (3.2.116 – 44) arguably reflects an increased public interest in cartographic globes prompted by the new English manufacture of them, begun by Emery Molyneux in 1592 (see 3.2.116n.). In the same scene, Dromio also uses the phrase ‘armadas of carracks’ (140) in reference to Spain, alluding presumably to the Spanish Armada’s 1588 attempt to invade England (see 3.2.140n., on armadas of carracks), although the reference does little to resolve the date of Errors’s composition. In the prospective beheading in Act 5, T.W. Baldwin saw an allusion to the 1588 execution for treason of a Catholic priest behind the Holywell Priory ditches in Finsbury Field, near the Theatre and the Curtain, where Shakespeare’s company performed (Hanging). But the conjecture has limited value, since public executions were a fact of life in Elizabethan England, and can contribute little towards fixing the play’s date.

  Doctor Pinch figures in a possible echo of Arden of Feversham (published 1592) suggested by E.K. Chambers (WS, 1.310 –11). A felonious character in Arden is described as ‘lean-faced’ and ‘hollow-eyed’ (2.48, 49), terms that appear in Ephesian Antipholus’ memorable description of Pinch as a ‘hollow-eyed’, ‘lean-faced villain’ (5.1.241, 238). The same time period offers other possible allusions. According to J. Dover Wilson, Dromio of Ephesus’s ‘Heart and good will you might, / But surely, master, not a rag of money’ (4.4.86 –7) reflects almost identical language found in Nashe’s Strange News (Stationers’ Register, January 1593): ‘heart and good will, but neuer a ragge of money’ (see 4.4.86 –76n.). (The phrase ‘rag of money’ also occurs in Thomas Lodge’s Deaf Man’s Dialogue, 1592.)
Nashe’s pamphlet was an attack on the university academic Gabriel Harvey, prompted by the complicated ‘Martin Marprelate’ controversy and perhaps by earlier events.12 According to J.J.M. Tobin, Errors echoes further terms and phrases from Nashe; the character of Doctor Pinch in particular may allude satirically to Nashe’s antagonist Gabriel Harvey (‘Pinch’).13 Ephesian Dromio’s lines, ‘Mistress, respice finem, “respect your end”; or rather, to prophesy like the parrot, “beware the rope’s end” ’ (4.4.42 – 4), presumably refer to the same controversy (Tobin, ‘Pinch’, 23). With an implied pun on the Latin accusatives finem (end) and funem (rope), Dromio is recalling Nashe’s ‘respice funem’ in Strange News, that phrase pointing to Harvey’s lineage as the son of a rope-maker.14 Doctor Pinch’s complexion is also described as ‘saffron’ (4.4.62), a word that occurs nowhere else in Shakespeare. Harvey was from Saffron Walden, another fact to which Nashe refers in Strange News.15 One might add that, in The Terrors of the Night,16 Nashe mocks conjurors of the sort satirized in the figure of Doctor Pinch. These and other apparent scattered allusions or borrowings of specific terms (e.g. ‘mountebank’) convince Tobin that Shakespeare draws from Nashe rather than the other way around.

  Tobin’s conjectures about Errors’s allusions to Nashe and to the Harvey–Nashe quarrel are compelling, although they invite further questions. Why was Shakespeare inserting into Errors references to the controversy along with an apparent parody of Harvey in the figure of Doctor Pinch? And what might that material tell us about dating? For the first question, only a general answer is available. Shakespeare was an associate of Nashe and was closer to the Nashe/Lyly/Greene side than to that of the Harveys. The satirical allusion in support of his colleagues would have added topical interest to his play. For the second question, the Harvey reference suggests a composition date for Errors in 1593 – 4, after the publication of Nashe’s Strange News. The Harvey reference also squares with the argument that Errors was conceived for the public theatre, which featured topical satire. Conversely, it is less obvious why Shakespeare would have introduced this specific material if the play had been commissioned for an Inns of Court revel. Other references in relation to Doctor Pinch add modest probability to a 1593 – 4 dating. Pinch’s burning beard doused with ‘puddled mire’ (5.1.173) may recall the ‘puddle water’ in Marlowe’s Edward II (Stationers’ Register, 1593) with which the murderers wash the king’s face.17 Edward II may also be reflected in Antipholus of Ephesus’s ‘What, will you murder me?’ (4.4.110),18 although the phrase is not sufficiently unusual to warrant much of a claim.

  As further support for the dating of Errors in 1593 – 4, Dromio of Syracuse’s wildly agitated descriptions to Adriana and subsequently to Syracusan Antipholus of the sergeant who has arrested Ephesian Antipholus bear similarity to a description of such a figure in Greene’s A Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592). Although matter-of-fact references in Elizabethan writing to arresting sergeants are common, Greene employed a new and different style in offering the first sustained satirical description of a sergeant as venal and cruel, with his corruption manifested in his appearance and behaviour.19 Nothing comparable precedes it. Greene depicts his officer as wearing ‘a buffe leather ierkin’ and carrying a mace for ‘clapping it on [one’s] shoulder’ so as to convey his victim ‘to Limbo’, ‘to the counter’; as behaving as ‘eager … as a dog’ or ‘a butcher’s cur’, ‘his hart … robd of al remorse & pity’; and as being ‘framd by the Diuell, of the rotten carion of a woolfe, and his soule of an vsurers damned ghost turned out of hell into his body’ (italics added here and subsequently).20 By comparison, the Officer in Dromio’s description dresses ‘all in buff’, in ‘calf’s skin’, ‘a case of leather’ (4.2.36, 4.3.18, 23); he is a ‘shoulder-clapper’ doing ‘exploits with his mace’ (4.2.37, 4.3.27); he imprisons debtors in ‘Tartar limbo’ (4.2.32); his commandings of his arrestees to the Counter constitute ‘countermands’, and thus he ‘runs counter’ (4.2.37, 39); he is a ‘wolf’, a hunting ‘hound’, ‘pitiless’ and with ‘hard heart’ (4.2.36, 39, 35, 34); he is likewise a ‘devil’, a ‘fiend, a fairy’ and an ‘evil angel’ who ‘carries poor souls to hell’ (4.2.33, 35, 4.3.19, 4.2.40). Although the passages by Greene and Shakespeare sometimes deploy terms differently and although Greene stresses the officer’s corruption while Dromio emphasizes demonism, they share an intensity and a resemblance in tone and diction that suggest kinship. It seems more likely that Shakespeare would have imported images from Greene’s trend-setting two-page treatment of the sergeant-figure than that a few words from a speech by Dromio would have been parlayed by Greene into his own longer passage, so that influence, if operating, probably flows from Greene’s Quip to Shakespeare’s Errors. For a different allusion to Greene, Dromio of Ephesus’s phrase ‘A crow without feather’ (3.1.81; see n.) might be a comic reference to ‘an upstart Crow, beautified with our Feathers’ from Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit (1592).

  To the inferential evidence for a 1593 – 4 date of composition can be added Shakespeare’s use of the name Dromio, which occurs in John Lyly’s Mother Bombie (c. 1590; Stationers’ Register, 1594), where a witty and conniving servant with a prominent role bears that name. There are no apparent verbal parallels between Lyly’s Dromio and Shakespeare’s twin servants, but, like Errors, Mother Bombie is both modelled on Roman comedy and aimed at a popular audience. Likewise, if Shakespeare used Twine’s Pattern of Painful Adventures as one of his sources for the Apollonius story, and if the edition he used was published in 1594,21 then there is further reason to accept a contemporaneous date for Errors (see Introduction). Additionally, if Shakespeare had been familiar with Warner’s English translation of Plautus’ Menaechmi before it was entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1595, then a date of composition not long before the Gray’s Inn performance would again have been probable;22 most scholars now agree, however, that despite some resemblances between Errors and Warner’s translation, the evidence that Shakespeare was borrowing from Warner proves thin. Given the proximate timing of Warner’s translation with Shakespeare’s play, perhaps their interests ran concurrently.

  INTERNAL EVIDENCE

  Errors’s affinities with other Shakespearean works also throw light on its probable time of composition. Such evidence, although conjectural, tends to support the case for a late date. With Errors, critics have looked to its verse and rhyme to locate it chronologically in relationship to other of Shakespeare’s works. According to Sidney Thomas, in a judgement widely shared, Shakespeare’s verse in Errors is ‘of a piece with the verse of such works of 1593 and 1594 as Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece’ (‘Date’, 383). Shakespeare wrote those long narrative poems during the period from mid-1592 to mid-1594 when the theatres were closed, an interval that gave him the opportunity to develop his skill at rhyme. More specifically, as Malone noted long ago, the alternating rhyme of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece resembles that of Errors (see 3.2.1 – 52 and 4.2.1 – 4); indeed, the first six lines of 4.2 employ the same rhyme scheme, ABABCC, used throughout Venus and Adonis and are not far removed from that of Lucrece (ABABBCC). Wells and Taylor argue that Shakespeare’s experiments with rhyme in these narrative poems, and also in his contemporaneous early sonnets, greatly encouraged his use of rhyme in the comedies that followed soon after.23

  Errors might also be considered a precursor to a set of plays known as the ‘lyrical group’, originally identified and so described by Walter Pater, that includes Love’s Labour’s Lost, Richard II, Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, all typically dated within the period 1594 – 5.24 Although probably composed earlier than those plays, Errors shares with them a metrical regularity and a high proportion of verse lines (87%) and of rhymed lines within its verse (25%). By comparison, the percentages of verse and of rhyme-within-verse for Love’s Labour’s are 68% and 66%; Richard II, 100% and 19%; Romeo and Juliet, 87% and 18%; and Dream, 80% and 52%.25 Drawing upon Wells and Taylor, Charles Whitworth argues for designating Erro
rs as part of a ‘rhyme group’, composed of the plays of the lyrical group with the addition of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis (7 – 9). The term ‘rhyme group’ redescribes those works in a way that draws attention to their common prosodic features, and thus makes a case for their composition within a few years of each other. Of course, stylistic arguments are based on the premise that Shakespeare produced certain kinds of works at certain times, and they step over the difficulties in dating many of the works that would be associated with Errors; nonetheless, the comparisons carry force and support other evidence for a late date. Finally, Henning summarizes a range of vocabulary tests – especially rare words and specific word-forms – that give some credence to a dating of Errors prior to Love’s Labour’s Lost and its related plays (Var., 294 – 6).

  The overwhelming probability is that Shakespeare wrote The Comedy of Errors in 1593 – 4. To narrow that period further, much of the evidence – including the name Dromio, the play’s stylistic similarities to works of 1594 – 5, the matter of cast size and the possible connections to Warner and Twine – point towards the middle or latter half of 1594. Wells and Taylor date the play to 1594 (TxC, 95) and Henning, in the most exhaustive study, concludes, ‘I believe that Sh. wrote the play after he joined the Chamberlain’s men in mid-1594, but well before December’, when the Gray’s Inn performance occurred (Var., 394). The case for such dating is convincing.

  * * *

  1 Henning notes the universal consensus on this dating (Var., 280).

  2 Since Meres mentions several works that were not yet in print, Gurr speculates that he copied their titles from playbills (Companies, 281).