The Comedy of Errors

by Kent Cartwright

  3 See, most recently, Whitworth, who argues that the play was composed for performance at Gray’s Inn and that it was too short and insubstantial for the public theatre repertoire of Shakespeare’s company (2 –11); see also Greg, Problem, 140; Folio, 200. For a sustained argument that Errors was written explicitly for the Gray’s Inn performance, see Thomas, ‘Date’; see also, more recently, Clare, 103 –10.

  4 Nelson & Elliott, 2.380; on the revels, see Nelson & Elliott, 2.380 – 435; also Bland.

  5 Gurr, Playgoing, 80; see 80 –2.

  6 Cited in Gurr, Playgoing, 81.

  7 On Errors’s legal interests and their relationship to the Inns of Court, see Kreps.

  8 The war was a proxy battle undertaken by the King of Spain, Philip II, to suppress Protestantism and overthrow the Queen of England, Elizabeth, who was providing financial and military support to the Protestant cause in France and the Netherlands. Following the death in 1584 of the French King Henri III’s brother and heir, François, Duke of Alençon, a Catholic, the claim to succession fell legally to Henri, King of Navarre, a Huguenot. The prospect of a Protestant heir apparent touched off the ‘War of the Three Henries’ (1587 – 9), which involved Henri III and Henri of Guise in an unstable alliance against Henri of Navarre. After Henri III had Guise assassinated in 1588 and, in return, was himself mortally wounded by an assailant’s knife in 1589, he gave his deathbed approval to Navarre as his heir. Nonetheless, further warfare ensued as the Catholic League, assisted by Spain, attempted to prevent the nominal king, now Henri IV, aided by England, from gaining military control of the country and taking full possession of the throne. In 1591 Elizabeth sent 4,000 soldiers to support Navarre. Eventually, in 1593, Navarre renounced Protestantism in order to secure his kingdom; his coronation took place in February 1594, in Navarre. The court of Navarre was to be the setting for one of Shakespeare’s next comedies, Love’s Labour’s Lost (c. 1594 – 5).

  9 See Var., 509; see also Appendix 3.

  10 TxC, 95; see also Var., 283.

  11 In 1980 the German scholar and editor Tetzeli von Rosador drew attention to the time references in Errors and the Lord Chamberlain’s promise to end his plays ‘betwene fower and fiue’; see Var., 283.

  12 The Puritan Marprelate tracts of 1588 and 1589 had assailed the episcopal governance of the Church of England. Harvey’s brother Richard had participated in the defence, and Nashe (like Lyly and Greene) had championed the other side as an anti-Martin pamphleteer. Since Harvey had attacked Greene posthumously, Nashe may have wished to defend the memory of his friend and associate. See Nashe, 5.34 –110.

  13 In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare alludes to Nashe’s later anti-Harvey pamphlet, Have With You to Saffron Walden (1596); see Weis, 39 – 41.

  14 Tobin, ‘Pinch’, 23; see 4.4.43n.

  15 On Harvey, ropes and Saffron Walden, see Nashe, 1.267, 268, 270, 274.

  16 Terrors was probably written in 1592 – 3.

  17 Brooks, ‘Marlowe’, 79; see Edward II, 5.3.30, 5.5.59, and CE 5.1.170 – 3 LN.

  18 See Edward II, 5.3.29; see also Ard2, xix, 4.4.107n.

  19 Greene’s attack is preceded by an equally harsh treatment of a lawyer; see Greene, 11.249 –52. Kinney notes that Greene changed the nature of rogue pamphlets by giving them robust language, irony, satire and wit (Rogues, 54 – 5).

  20 Quip, 11.249, 252–5 (see CE 4.2.32– 40n.); emphasis added here and in the subsequent quotations from CE 4.2, 4.3.

  21 For this argument, see Thomas, ‘Date’, 382.

  22 Thomas argues that the Stationers’ Register entry for Warner’s translation reads as if copied from an already published book title; that is, earlier than 1595 (‘Date’, 381 –2); Foakes contends that the Stationers’ Register title could have been taken from the manuscript and that Warner’s 1595 edition was the only one printed (xxii).

  23 TxC, 95; see also Duncan-Jones, 19.

  24 See e.g. TxC, 117 –19; also Woudhuysen, 59 – 61; Forker, 112; Weis, 41 – 3.

  25 TxC, 96; see also n. 3. For a recent, detailed study of the stylistic relationships among Love’s Labour’s, Romeo and Juliet and Richard II, see Shurbanov, 56 –163.

  APPENDIX 2

  The text and editorial procedures

  THE TEXT

  The Comedy of Errors in the First Folio

  All editions of The Comedy of Errors derive from the First Folio of Shakespeare’s dramatic works (1623). The First Folio was compiled by John Heminges and Henry Condell, fellow members and leaders of Shakespeare’s former acting company, the King’s Men, seven years after their colleague’s death in 1616. The Comedy of Errors was entered in the Stationers’ Register (the entry establishing claim to the work) on 8 November 1623 by Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount (Arber, 4.69). Of the thirty-six plays in the First Folio, Errors was one of eighteen published for the first time. Given the play’s single source, bibliographical discussions of Errors have focused on understanding the nature of the F text and of the manuscript on which it was based. Errors has attracted special and controversial interest because various scholars have judged that F’s underlying copy was an early draft in Shakespeare’s autograph, one that preceded a tidied-up version used for performance.

  The First Folio was produced by the London printing office of William and Isaac Jaggard.1 The Comedy of Errors – the only Folio play with ‘Comedy’ in its title – is grouped in the first set of plays, the ‘Comedies’, and is the fifth of fourteen in that sequence, coming after Measure for Measure and before Much Ado About Nothing. In contrast to the 1616 Folio edition of Ben Jonson’s works, the volume does not present Shakespeare’s plays in order of composition, even within their groupings as comedies, histories or tragedies. According to the leading hypothesis, the order within genres relates, at least in part, to the nature of the copy with which the publishers were working. Thus, for example, the first four of the Folio’s comedies were all printed from transcripts prepared by the professional scribe Ralph Crane, while the sixth to ninth were of plays that had already appeared in quarto editions (TxC, 39). The Folio’s typesetters, known as compositors, apparently began with those comedies available in the most readable and consistent copy.2

  The Comedy of Errors occupies sigs H1r–I2v of the First Folio. According to the ground-breaking work of Charlton Hinman, quire H (comprising the first four acts of Errors and the opening of Act 5) was typeset by multiple compositors.3 While quire H begins The Comedy of Errors, quire I finishes it, containing most of the last act (three-and-a-third printed pages), before the rest of that quire is given over to Much Ado About Nothing. As Wells and Taylor describe it, the seven comedies typeset immediately after Errors differ from it by being based on copies that all show some degree of annotation for the purposes of theatrical performance; following them are two final comedies again derived from scribal transcripts.4 Although these groupings are subject to debate and lead to no clear conclusions about the nature of the printer’s copy for Errors, they do draw attention to the claim that the play is anomalous for being the only comedy originating from a holograph manuscript. Disagreement has persisted, however, about the nature of that manuscript.

  Refining Hinman’s foundational work, recent scholars have concluded that three compositors – compositors C, D and B (we do not know their names) – were responsible for typesetting The Comedy of Errors. A chart of the compositors and the sections of Errors set by each appears below.5

  CompositorSignature6TLN7Act/scene/line

  C

  H1r–H1va

  1–164

  1.1.1–1.2.2

 
H2rb–H3ra

  289 – 549

  2.1.15 –2.2.160

  H4ra

  743 – 808

  3.1.82– 3.2.22

  H5v (part)

  1235 – 54

  4.3.53 (‘and’) – 74 (‘nail,’)

  D

  H1vb–H2ra

  165 –288

  1.2.3 –2.1.14

  H3rb–H3v

  550 –742

  2.2.161– 3.1.81

  H4rb

  809 –74

  3.2.23 –80

  H5v (part)

  1128 –234

  4.2.22– 4.3.53 (‘dam;’)

  B

  H4v–H5r

  875 –1127

  3.2.81 – 4.2.21

  H6r–I2v

  1255 – 919

  4.3.74 (‘a rush’) –5.1.426

  This chart, though useful for easily identifying the work of a compositor, can be misleading, for Folio typesetting did not start with the first act, scene and line of a play and then advance progressively through the text. Rather, the process began in the middle of the six-leaf quire and moved simultaneously backwards and forwards in the play, with compositors, as they proceeded, estimating the amount of the manuscript that could be fitted into each column and page.8 They used large sheets of paper, each leaf of which could accommodate a page of print on either side, making a total of four folio pages. Three of these sheets laid on top of one another amounted to the standard quire of twelve printed pages. Thus, in the case of quire H, the top sheet in the quire had on one side the facing pages 90 and 91, constituting a forme,9 while the other side of the sheet contained non-adjacent pages, 89 and 92, with the pages of text becoming farther apart as the compositors worked through the quire. A new quire might have been needed part-way through the setting of a play; conversely, a play might have been fully set before a quire was used up, in which case the compositor applied the remainder to the next play. As the typesetting progressed, different compositors might have worked at the same time on different columns or on different pages of the same forme. In the case of Errors, compositor D began work on page 90 (sig. H3va), while the facing page, 91 (sig. H4ra), was started by compositor C and completed (sig. H4rb) by compositor D (Werstine, ‘Copy’, 234). Those pages include Errors 3.1 and part of 3.2. The conditions of typesetting – the multiple compositors, their sometimes backwards movement through a play – meant that compositors could not easily resort to the narrative to clarify a confusion in the manuscript.

  Although the F text of Errors has fewer textual anomalies than many other plays, it still suffers from typical problems that arise in early printed books. Variations in spelling and typesetting habits of individual compositors can create uncertainty for a modern editor. Such problems sometimes arise in Errors when considering whether a passage is meant to be verse or prose. For example, when compositor D sets a line of verse that is too long for the width of the column, so that the ‘flow-over’ words need to be set on the line below, he typically indents the flow-over text to signal that it is a continuation of verse (as, for example, at TLN 575 – 6, 2.2.187), a practice helpful for the reader.10 By contrast, compositor B does not necessarily indent verse flow-overs, so that when a character speaks a single such line, the page will offer no signal that confirms the speech as verse (as at TLN 1023 – 8, 4.1.40 –2).11 In those cases, an editor must decide whether the speech is verse or prose on the basis of context, scansion and style. Such choices can be especially tricky regarding the Dromios, who might speak either prose or verse, including sometimes a verse-like rhythmic prose and sometimes a prose-like ‘tumbling verse’ (see Introduction). Busy compositors probably did not worry greatly about distinctions such as those between prose and tumbling verse. The protocols of Arden and other modern editions call for making them, however, so that editors must proceed at times by conjecture. In a variation of these problems, on sig. H5vb, compositor C takes over from compositor D (at TLN 1235, 4.3.53, ‘and’) after the first line of a speech by Syracusan Dromio – a somewhat unusual event, since compositors more commonly set at least to the foot of a column; perhaps compositor D was confronted with an emergency. The end-spacing of the first line of Dromio’s speech (TLN 1234, 4.3.53, ‘dam;’) gives the appearance of verse, and the line scans as iambic pentameter, while the rest of the speech is set as prose: did one compositor see the speech as verse, the other not? But end-spacing practices could vary, and in this case the whole speech is probably prose.

  Besides confusions caused by differences in compositorial styles, plain mistakes also happen. Compositors discover that they have too much or too little space for text; misread words and phrases in the manuscript; transpose lines or SDs out of position; accidentally repeat a word from a previous or subsequent line in another line; or even leave out a line (or parts of lines), often because of eye-skip as the compositor’s head turns back and forth from manuscript to composing stick. Sometimes a compositor may be confused by handwriting. For instance, the character Luciana is misnamed ‘Iuliana’ in the entrance direction to 3.2 (TLN 786, 3.2.0.1) and ‘Iulia.’ in her subsequent SP (TLN 787, 3.2.1). According to Werstine, the two errors derive from compositor C’s difficulty in reading the manuscript on his first typesetting of the name.12 Sometimes a compositor will run out of room at the foot of a column and, to accommodate all the text that must be set, will string verse lines together as prose. Compositor C encountered just that problem at the foot of H2rb (TLN 347– 50, 2.1.69 –73) where five and a half lines of verse are compacted into four lines of prose. The same compositor ran into a related difficulty at the foot of the next column, H2va (TLN 418, 2.2.23), where, in order to make room for a SD at the end of a line, he set ‘thou’ as the abbreviation ‘yu’ and ‘and’ as an ampersand. After TLN 693 (3.1.54), at least one line of speech (perhaps more) by Luce or Dromio is lost, as is made clear by the absence of an end-word to rhyme with ‘hope’ in a series of couplets. In that same scene, TLN 683 –701 (the lines from the second part of 3.1.49, and continuing to 58) illustrate another kind of problem, the absence of early modern typesetting protocols for indicating that lines of verse are divided among different speakers. Thus, in a series of stichomythic speeches with rhymed couplets, an end-rhyming word, ‘laugh’ (3.1.50) (which pairs with ‘staff’), appears in the middle of a line (TLN 685) rather than at the end.

  Although Errors has only a few textual cruxes (i.e. significantly garbled passages), one of the most notorious and intractable comes in an important speech of six lines in couplets spoken by Adriana towards the end of her first scene (TLN 385 – 9, 2.1.108 –12), set by compositor C. Adriana has just been thinking about a necklace that her husband has promised her, and now her imagination leads to the metaphor of an enamelled jewel, which she compares implicitly to her own beauty. But after the first line F’s grammar and syntax turn so convoluted that for centuries editors have been left struggling to clarify the speech’s meaning (see 2.1.108 –12 LN). Compositorial misreading seems to be the problem. The confusion is especially unfortunate, because, in a sustained speech at the culmination of Adriana’s first, vexed scene, the planting of the jewellery metaphor prepares spectators for the later appearance of an actual piece of jewellery, the necklace, or chain, procured by Adriana’s husband as a love-offering to appease his wife. Thoughts of jewels beget the later appearance of the real jewellery, but we will never b
e quite sure what Adriana meant to express in this proleptic passage. Compositors influenced the text more subtly, too, for they were probably responsible for much of the punctuation (some scholars argue that Shakespeare himself punctuated lightly). Likewise, the absence in the compositor’s case of type-pieces (or ‘sorts’) for certain punctuation marks and the presence of sorts for other marks can make a difference to how a passage is understood (question marks were frequently used in the printing office in place of exclamation marks, for example).

  For a glimpse of some of these textual problems, one can turn to sig. H6v (TLN 1382–1503, 4.4.95 – 5.1.37.1), set by compositor B (see Fig. 23). Visible here are several features, including the ‘permissive’ or ‘indefinite’ SD ‘Enter three or foure …’ (TLN 1394) – so called because of its unfixed number of performers – and the prose-like flow-over of verse lines (TLN 1419 –23). Stage directions pose interesting problems on this page. The first (‘permissive’) SD in column a, for example, requires several characters to enter even before Adriana calls out for their help: perhaps the direction was written in the margin of the manuscript, forcing the compositor to make a decision about where to place it among the lines. The next SD, two-thirds of the way down column a, ‘Exeunt. Manet Offic. Adri. Luci.Courtizan’ (TLN 1426), offers a general ‘Exeunt’ immediately corrected by the character-specified ‘Manet’13 (for a close-up, see Fig. 24). (The end of Act 5 contains a similar SD.) This SD, like the previous one, also appears to be slightly out of place, for it makes better sense coming immediately after Adriana’s preceding line (TLN 1424), in which she orders her husband to be carried off and asks her sister to stay. Perhaps the compositor was confused by the SD’s ambiguous placing in the margin of the manuscript, or perhaps the order of SDs in the text somehow reflects the flow of Shakespeare’s writing. In the third SD of column a, ‘Enter Antipholus Siracusia with his Rapier drawne, / and Dromio Sirac.’ (TLN 1440 –1), Antipholus is given a drawn rapier, but Dromio nothing, even though Adriana thereafter says that both ‘come with naked swords’ (TLN 1443); it is as if the writing hand had forgotten (or ignored) what Dromio’s sword hand was doing.