It is also sometimes argued that the F text must have been for private performance because of its shortness, which would have perfectly suited an evening at Gray’s Inn or at court, packed with other entertainments. Errors’s shortness, however, does not constitute a liability for the public theatre. At 1,919 lines in the Folio, Errors has the fewest of any Shakespearean play, but there were other such plays of the era: for example, the First Quarto of The Taming of a Shrew, published in 1594 and apparently performed on the public stage by Pembroke’s Men, was only 1,550 lines (TxC, 169). Indeed, in contemporary times, Errors has become a frequently performed Shakespearean comedy, and in modern performances cuts are often made to passages such as Adriana’s ‘jewel best enamelled’ speech in 2.1 and the wit-contest between Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse in 2.2. As Mariko Ichikawa has recently summarized, ‘the F1 text of The Comedy of Errors as a whole is designed to be acted on the stage of a public playhouse’ (‘Staging’, 81).
EDITORIAL PROCEDURES
This edition is based on the 1623 First Folio text of the play. Some fifty subsequent editions of The Comedy of Errors have been collated, up to very recent ones from Oxford, Cambridge and Norton. The commentary notes credit parenthetically many of the contributions of prior editions.
Following Arden guidelines, the text modernizes spelling and punctuation and word-forms (except in a few cases, such as ‘fraughtage’ (4.1.87), where the original was favoured for its sound over the modern ‘freightage’). The text also regularizes and standardizes SPs and generally employs personal names, as is the custom with Arden editions. Thus, F’s ‘Merchant of Syracuse’ becomes ‘Egeon’, the SP adopted by Rowe and by almost all subsequent editors. Emilia, however, remains the ‘Abbess’, as she is traditionally called, for purposes of surprise. Arden guidelines also call for textual distinctions between prose and verse, the former set immediately following a SP, the latter set on the line below. When speakers share a verse line, the second or subsequent speaker’s line is indented in relation to the preceding line (as, for example, at 3.1.15). Alternating rhyme, such as at 3.2.1– 52, is shown graphically by the slight indentation of alternate lines, making the rhymes visible. The First Folio did not distinguish prose and verse to this degree (although Folio verse lines generally begin with capital letters). Thus, when a line in F might be reasonably read as prose or as verse, Arden guidelines nonetheless require editors to decide on one or the other.
Concerning punctuation, the F text lavishes colons and semicolons but spares full stops, more so than in modern writing. Punctuation was changing, as rhetorical (or ‘physiological’) punctuation, attuned to the rhythms of words as spoken, ceded ground to grammatical (or ‘syntactical’) punctuation, attuned to the formal structure of a sentence.23 Rhetorically, certain marks – comma, colon, semicolon, full stop – might represent pauses of different lengths. Grammatically, however, such marks signify relationships between clauses or phrases. Thus, punctuation can indicate both oral rhythm and flow of logic. Sometimes in F, the grounds on which a punctuation mark is used are unclear, and an editor must decide on a mark by interpreting the sentence. Likewise, a compositor’s choice of punctuation marks can be influenced by what pieces of type are available in the type-case at any given moment: perhaps all the colons are busy but not the semicolons. Additionally, some punctuation in F may derive from compositors or from editor(s) who prepared the text underlying F, rather than from Shakespeare.
The procedure here has been generally to follow F’s punctuation, although sometimes clauses have been shortened with the insertions of full stops, semicolons have been substituted for colons, and the like. I have avoided the practice of frequent editorial end-stopping, which might help the novice reader but which makes speeches sound choppy. Generally, I have preferred to allow the shifting rhythms and subtle grammatical relationships of long clauses to show through, such as in Egeon’s several sustained speeches in 1.1. Retaining long sentences allows the reader and the performer to observe the nuances and potentialities of the lines as they might be spoken. Readers will also find some attention paid to punctuation in textual notes. Relevant features of Elizabethan English also receive mention, for sometimes what looks to the modern eye like sloppy grammar, such as a singular subject acting as a plural (e.g. ‘man’ at 2.1.7 and 20), can conform to Elizabethan usage and, even more, can reveal sudden, energizing Shakespearean shifts in thought.24
Following Arden practice, I have silently introduced dashes to indicate a break in a train of thought, a noticeable shift in grammatical construction, the interruption of a speech or the redirection of a speech to a different hearer. Where the editorial dash deserves a comment, as when Adriana turns away from Luciana at 2.1.32 and addresses the audience, I have added a textual note on the punctuation’s source and a note of explanation. Unfortunately, series protocols leave dashes unavailable for other occasions, such as when a tertiary phrase or clause is enclosed, as it were, in a secondary one, as in the difficult sentence at 1.1.5 –10; in such cases, commas must suffice. Sometimes, of course, an editor must struggle to make sense out of a passage that is manifestly corrupt, such as Adriana’s speech at 2.1.108 –12, and must balance the desire to make as few changes as possible with the wish to make as much sense as possible through emendation. Readers will find discussions of departures from F’s wording in the commentary notes and longer notes.
This edition intrudes upon F in several ways. It introduces quotation marks inside speeches to indicate when a speaker self-consciously repeats the words of another back to the speaker, such as at 1.2.87, where Syracusan Antipholus repeats Ephesian Dromio’s phrase, ‘mistress’ marks’, which asserts, surprisingly to Antipholus, that he has a wife. Such commandeering of words and phrases is so recurrent a linguistic feature of Errors and so much of a piece with the play’s larger patterns of repetition and doubling that this edition calls attention to the practice by enclosing overtly borrowed language in quotation marks not found in F. That ‘connective repetition’ constitutes a time-honoured device of improvisation (see Introduction), as when a clown appropriates another speaker’s phrase to launch a comic riff. Readers will also find editorially introduced SDs that mark certain actions, especially the passing of an object – a purse, a key, a chain – from one character to another (as at 1.2.7 SD) or the striking of one character by another, such as a servant by a master (as at 1.2.92 SD). Such emendations contravene the call from some editorial scholars for an ‘open text’ (see Kidnie). Farcical plays, however, trade in displaced objects and harmless beatings, and drawing attention to them helps readers to grasp both the business of the stage and the qualities of the play’s generic world. Indeed, to emphasize the circulation of objects, such as a chain, in a play of interlinking errors, is to underscore the way that farce can make visual the symbolic action of the play. On several occasions, I have also repositioned SDs to suit the stage business and to reflect the practicalities of exiting and entering, with explanations in the commentary notes. In particular, several entrance directions have been moved to precede an onstage speaker’s announcement of that entrance (see 2.1.42.1 LN). In general, my editing has assumed that the public theatre constitutes the performance venue imagined in F.
Arden editions are known for their attention to language and nuances of meaning, a tradition followed here. Furthermore, linking a particular word or phrase to its usage elsewhere by Shakespeare or another Elizabethan writer can illuminate the play’s internal verbal structure and evoke the rich and rapidly developing linguistic landscape of Shakespeare’s world. Likewise, following Arden practice, proverbial phrases and biblical allusions are glossed.25 Commentary notes can lead in almost any direction, depending on the needs of the occasion; the present ones have been written with the goal of opening the text as much as possible to the reader. I have occasionally identified rhetorical devices in the commentary notes, in order to draw attention to the sophistication and even self-consciousness of Errors’s rhetoric.26
This edition, in its introduction and commentary notes, also pays much more attention to versification than do most modern editions. I do so on the principle that how a line or a word is actually pronounced (or silently heard) makes an enormous difference to how dramatic meaning and experience are created.
Finally, a note on ‘first occurrences’ in Errors of certain words as recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. In this edition I have used the online OED, and have continuously checked and rechecked various words. Some readers might notice that fewer ‘first occurrences’ are recorded here than in Henning’s Variorum edition. The reasons are twofold. (1) Henning worked from a printed copy of the second edition of the OED; however, as the OED project has continued online, entries have been steadily updated (and renumbered) and examples added, so that some ‘first occurrences’ are no longer so. (2) Henning generally applied his 1594 dating of Errors in determining a ‘first occurrence’, so that he claims more such instances in Errors than does the OED, which typically (and confusingly) employs either 1616 (Shakespeare’s death) or 1623 (the year of the First Folio’s publication) to date an Errors entry. There is something to be said for Henning’s use of 1594, yet we cannot say exactly what words were spoken on the public stage in the autumn of 1594, whereas we can be certain what was printed in 1623 (using the OED 1616 date assumes that no word of a Shakespearean play had been changed between then and 1623). The present edition thus records a ‘first occurrence’ only when there is no citation prior to 1623.
* * *
1 For introductions to the Folio and its history, see Hinman, First Folio, ix–xxxvii; also TxC, 1– 52. For textual analysis of F Errors, see Var., 262– 80.
2 On Crane, see Howard-Hill, Crane.
3 See Hinman, Printing, 2.388 – 97. A quire in the Folio consists of three sheets making up six leaves, or twelve printed pages. A folio sheet is a large sheet of paper folded in half so that each winged half, or leaf, can accommodate two pages of text.
4 See TxC, 145 –7. Complicating this picture, Wells and Taylor consider the underlying copy for The Winter’s Tale (the last of the ‘Comedies’) to be another Crane transcript, ‘possibly’ of an authorial copy and ‘probably’ of a promptbook (TxC, 147).
5 This chart is drawn from TxC, 152. It follows the distribution laid out by Werstine in ‘Copy’, 234, and agrees with that offered by Var., 264. The key contributions that have refined Hinman’s analysis include Howard-Hill, ‘Compositors’; O’Connor; and Werstine, ‘Cases’.
6 The capital letter refers to the signature (an identifying letter placed at the foot of a leaf), with the number after the letter indicating position in the sequence within the signature; the superscript r or v identifies recto or verso, the recto page facing the reader in the way that p. 1 of a book would, with the verso being its other (reverse) side; a and b indicate the first and second columns on a folio page.
7 A system for giving a through-line number (TLN) to each printed line of each play was established in Hinman’s edition of the First Folio and has been universally adopted.
8 For a related chart showing ‘the order in which the pages were printed and the stints of the three typesetters’, see Werstine, ‘Copy’, 234. The one below, adapted from the chart, shows the compositors in order of act, scene and line:
Act/scene/line
TLN
Signature
Compositor
1.1.1–1.2.2
1–164
H1r– H1va
C
1.2.3 –2.1.14
165 –288
H1vb – H2ra
D
2.1.15 –2.2.160
289 – 549
H2rb – H3ra
C
2.2.161– 3.1.81
550 –742
H3rb – H3v
D
3.1.82– 3.2.22
743 – 808
H4ra
C
3.2.23 –80
809 –74
H4rb
D
3.2.81– 4.2.21
875 –1127
H4v– H5r
B
4.2.22– 4.3.53 (‘dam;’)
1128 –234
H5v (part)
D
4.3.53 (‘and’) – 74 (‘nail,’)
1235 – 54
H5v (part)
C
4.3.74 (‘a rush’) –5.1.426
1255 – 919
H6r– I2v
B
9 A forme is the type as set and locked in place for printing on one face of a folio sheet.
10 On flow-overs, see O’Connor, 89 – 91.
11 Compositor D practises another variation: at TLN 258 – 9 (1.2.93) he prints a verse-line flow-over (‘hands:’) below the end part of the line, justified right and given an initial parenthesis, even though doing so means setting it on the same line as the succeeding line of text.
12 Werstine, ‘Copy’, 240. Some scholars have considered this naming error an uncorrected trace of an earlier draft of the play; see Var., 123, 269, 275.
13 ‘Manet’ is the third-person singular present indicative form of the Latin verb manere, ‘to remain’, used where manent, the third-person plural, might be expected. Similarly, the singular exit often takes the place of the plural exeunt.
14 Such a line at the foot of a column, called the ‘direction line’, was typically left blank of text and used, in Errors, for a catchword and sometimes a signature number. Werstine notes that none of the other Folio comedies puts an SD in this line, and wonders whether compositor B ‘was ready to take extraordinary measures to avoid setting a marginal stage direction at the top of a column’ (‘Copy’, 244; see 243 – 4).
15 See Foakes, xiii–xv; 86, 144n.
16 Werstine cautions that, ‘[c]ontrary to Greg’s assumption, foul papers need not refer exclusively to authorial drafts, whether these are messy or not; the term simply describes papers that, for whatever, reason, are to be or have already been transcribed’ (‘Method’, 44). On critical debates over the nature of Shakespeare’s drafts, or foul papers, see Werstine, ‘Narratives’, and esp. Werstine, Manuscripts.
17 See List of Roles, 1n.; van Elke, ‘Genre’, 53.
18 Signs might have been hung over stage doors to identify certain houses, such as the Phoenix, the Centaur or the Porpentine, but less probably to indicate the bay.
19 See McKerrow; Chambers, WS, 1.305 –12; Greg, Problem, 140 –1; Greg, Folio, 200 –2; TxC, 266. Werstine favours the term ‘playbook’ over Greg’s ‘prompt-book’ in part because the latter came into use for ‘a highly regularized and tho
roughly annotated theatrical manuscript quite different from those that survive from Shakespeare’s time’ (‘Copy’, 245, n. 5); see also Werstine, Manuscripts, esp. 107– 41.
20 See Long, ‘Directions’; Long, ‘Dulwich’; Long, ‘Playbook’. For a further argument against the presumed dichotomy between messy authorial papers and clean promptbooks, first articulated by McKerrow, see Werstine, ‘McKerrow’. See also Werstine, Manuscripts, esp. 116 –18, which demonstrates that many of the presumed confusions in F were perpetuated, even worsened, in seventeenth-century promptbooks of Errors.
21 For his extended discussion of this matter, see Werstine, Manuscripts.
22 See Var., 29 – 80.
23 See Parkes; also Crewe.
24 See Davis, esp. 75 –7.
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