The Comedy of Errors
The RSC Shakespeare
Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen
Chief Associate Editors: Jan Sewell and Will Sharpe
Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro,
Dee Anna Phares, Heloise Senechal
The Comedy of Errors
Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen
Introduction and Shakespeare's Career in the Theater: Jonathan Bate
Commentary: Charlotte Scott and Heloise Senechal
Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Esme Miskimmin
In Performance: Penelope Freedman (RSC stagings) and Jan Sewell (overview)
The Director's Cut (interviews by Jonathan Bate and Kevin Wright):
Paul Hunter, Nancy Meckler, and Tim Supple
Editorial Advisory Board
Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director,
Royal Shakespeare Company
Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK
Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University,
Western Australia
Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature,
Universite de Geneve, Switzerland
Jacqui O'Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company
Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman's Christian University, Japan
Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA
James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
Columbia University, USA
Tiffany Stern, Professor and Tutor in English, University of Oxford, UK
2011 Modern Library Paperback Edition Copyright (c) 2007, 2011 by The Royal Shakespeare Company All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
"Royal Shakespeare Company," "RSC," and the RSC logo are trademarks
or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company.
The version of The Comedy of Errors and the corresponding footnotes that appear in this volume were originally published in William Shakespeare: Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, published in 2007 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-880-5
www.modernlibrary.com
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Plautus Translated
Farce, Comedy, and Identity: The Critics Debate
About the Text
Key Facts
The Comedy of Errors
List of Parts
Act 1
Scene 1
Scene 2
Act 2
Scene 1
Scene 2
Act 3
Scene 1
Scene 2
Act 4
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
Scene 4
Act 5
Scene 1
Textual Notes
Scene-by-Scene Analysis
The Comedy of Errors in Performance:
The RSC and Beyond
Four Centuries of The Comedy of Errors: An Overview
At the RSC
The Director's Cut: Interviews with Paul Hunter, Nancy Meckler, and Tim Supple
Shakespeare's Career in the Theater
Beginnings
Playhouses
The Ensemble at Work
The King's Man
Shakespeare's Works: A Chronology
Further Reading and Viewing
References
Acknowledgments and Picture Credits
INTRODUCTION
PLAUTUS TRANSLATED
A merchant of Syracuse has identical twin sons. One is stolen at the age of seven. The other's name is changed to that of the lost boy, in his memory. When grown up, he wanders the Mediterranean in search of his brother, finally chancing upon the seaport where he lives. The wanderer encounters the mistress, the wife, and other acquaintances of the brother and is inevitably mistaken for him. When he denies all knowledge of the people who greet him, they assume that he is mad and attempt to have him locked up--save that by a further confusion they apprehend the other twin, the one who does know them. The audience awaits the moment of resolution that will come when the twins appear onstage together.
Such is the plot of Plautus' Menaechmi, a Roman comedy familiar to any Elizabethan with a classical education--which is to say any young man who had been to university and many who had reached no further than the upper level of grammar school. When The Comedy of Errors was performed before an audience of London lawyers and their patrons in the Christmas festivities of 1594, it was instantly recognized as being "like to Plautus his Menaechmus." Some years later, a lawyer named John Manningham made the same link, describing Twelfth Night, Shakespeare's later comedy of twins and mistaken identity, as "much like The Comedy of Errors or Menaechmi in Plautus." While we applaud difference, Shakespeare's first audiences favored likeness: a work was good not because it was original, but because it resembled an admired classical exemplar, which in the case of comedy meant a play by Terence or Plautus.
Imitation was at the core of both education and artistic theory in Shakespeare's world. But good imitation was never slavish: it necessitated an overgoing of the original, often achieved by the fusion of different sources or the complicating of an already complicated plotline. Thus Shakespeare proved his cleverness to his audience of clever young lawyers. It is as if he is saying: Plautus presented one pair of identical twins, so I will give you two. The possibilities for confusion are greatly multiplied by this device. As well as the stranger being mistaken for the local man, and the local mistaken for the stranger, we have the servants of each being mistaken by their own master and the other's master and the locals. Not to mention the masters mistaken by their servants. The comedy whereby an unmarried man in an alien environment is told that his wife is expecting him at home for dinner is doubled by the comedy of his slave receiving the unlooked-for attentions of the spherical kitchen maid with whom his twin has been sexually involved.
The Comedy of Errors turns on the essential device of farce: exits and entrances. The wrong person keeps coming out of the door. Classical comedy provided a model in which the action of a drama takes place in a single location during the course of a single day. Errors is one of the few Shakespearean plays to follow this convention. The entire action takes place in the marketplace of Ephesus, its temporal structure framed by the Egeon plot (condemned in the morning, released in the evening). Unusually for Shakespeare, the exit and entrance doors represent specific locations: the Phoenix (Antipholus and Adriana's house), the Porcupine (the Courtesan's house), and the Priory. They may even have been labeled thus in performance. From the point of view of staging, this device was well fitted to indoor academic drama--as the play's brevity was suited to its being but a small part of a longer evening's entertainment at the Inns of Court. Errors is by some margin the shortest of Shakespeare's plays. It has around 1,800 lines; some of the tragedies and histories are more than twice as long. There is no surviving evidence of performance on the public stage, but this is no guarantee that the play was kept in reserve for private performance to elite audiences. The device of the doors could have been adapted for the public theaters, perhaps with the upstage-center "discovery space" serving for the Priory in which the lost mother is found.
Though the Ephesian marke
t economy is brought to life by means of Angelo the goldsmith and various merchants, the largest parts in the play belong to the strangers and the wife. The central comic device of mistaken identity is a means to the discovery of identity. Meeting someone who thinks you are someone you are not is a disturbing but ultimately invaluable way of finding out who you really are. Antipholus of Syracuse has been traveling in search of his family. On arriving in Ephesus and being mistaken for his long-lost brother, he realizes that his own self is not secure:
He that commends me to mine own content
Commends me to the thing I cannot get.
I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth --
Unseen, inquisitive -- confounds himself.
So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.
These lines come to the quick of that experience of wandering and wondering which shapes so many of Shakespeare's comedies. How can we reconcile the self's conflicting need for autonomy (the single drop of water) and community (the ocean)? The sense of loss and confusion prepares us for the imagery of Ephesus as a mad world and the potential nightmare--the reductio ad absurdum of farce-- whereby we are led to imagine what it would be like if everybody else were mad and we alone were sane and therefore taken to be mad.
Comedy's fond conclusion is that by finding the right partner we find ourselves. Antipholus of Syracuse finds not only father, mother, and brother, but also future wife, in the form of Luciana, sister to his brother's wife. As in other early comedies such as The Taming of the Shrew and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, there are two strong roles for the boy actors in Shakespeare's company. Whereas the two pairs of brothers are identical twins, the sisters are of contrasting appearance and character. Their names are indicative: "Adriana" means "of the earth" and "Luciana" "of the light"; the former is brunette and the latter blond; the wife is perceived as shrewish and the sister as divinely beautiful. But in the play's most richly written speeches, Shakespeare goes beyond the cliches of femininity suggested by these dualities.
As Shakespeare's comedies variously suggest, happy endings are all too often mere illusions or at best momentary suspensions of life's messiness. If we may assume that the twins are reasonably alike in nature as well as identical in appearance, then there is a strong possibility that in the imaginary afterlife of the action Antipholus' marriage to Luciana, despite its sparky beginning, will end up all too similar to his brother's marriage to her sister. While unmarried, Luciana speaks in favor of wifely submission and accuses her sister of shrewishness. But her sister has had to put up with a husband who prefers to spend his time about town--not least in the company of a courtesan--rather than at home with his wife. Most of Shakespeare's comedies are celebrations of courtship, but the married couples met along the way are shaky role models. Once Luciana discovers what husbands are really like, her theory will be sorely tested.
Adriana's marriage is patched up at the end of the play, but there is no undoing the pain she has expressed in the lines that turn Antipholus of Syracuse's self-centered image of the drop of water into an account of how every action has consequences for those who love us:
How comes it now, my husband, O, how comes it,
That thou art then estranged from thyself?
Thy self I call it, being strange to me,
That, undividable, incorporate,
Am better than thy dear self's better part.
Ah, do not tear away thyself from me,
For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall
A drop of water in the breaking gulf,
And take unmingled thence that drop again
Without addition or diminishing,
As take from me thyself, and not me too.
As so often, Shakespeare has it both ways: this is at one and the same time the moving testimony of a neglected wife responding to her husband's sexual infidelity and the cue for the line that invariably wins the play's biggest laugh: "Plead you to me, fair dame?" She is, of course, confronting the wrong brother.
Shakespeare translates the location of the action from Plautus' Edipamnum to Ephesus, a place associated with magic and oriental mystery as well as with Diana, the classical goddess of the night. Hence, perhaps, the accusations of witchcraft and the presence of Pinch, the schoolmaster-exorcist. But the Ephesians were best known as the recipients of one of Saint Paul's most-studied epistles in the New Testament. It was in Ephesians that Paul exhorted children to obey their parents, servants their masters, and wives their husbands. The action of the play seems to call these demands into question: how can you obey your parents when they are lost or your master when he gives you contradictory orders? And should a woman obey her husband when he is unworthy of her? Classical material and Christian ideas play against each other in a manner typical of Renaissance artfulness.
The Comedy of Errors may be a short and early Shakespeare play, but with its layers of emotional hunger beneath a dazzling surface of slick plotting, farcical confusion, and witty verbal exchange, onstage it is a highly accessible and rewarding one.
FARCE, COMEDY, AND IDENTITY: THE CRITICS DEBATE
The early critical history of the play was one in which the fact of its being an imitation of a Roman original was held against it. In the Romantic era of the early nineteenth century, Shakespeare was prized as the great original. The idea of him as an imitator was displeasing. Thus William Hazlitt:
This comedy is taken very much from the Menaechmi of Plautus, and is not an improvement on it. Shakespear appears to have bestowed no great pains on it, and there are but few passages which bear the decided stamp of his genius. He seems to have relied on his author, and on the interest arising out of the intricacy of the plot.1
And his German contemporary, A. W. Schlegel: "Of all the works of Shakspeare this is the only example of imitation of, or borrowing from, the ancients ... if the piece be inferior in worth to other pieces of Shakspeare, it is merely because nothing more could be made of the materials."2
The play was regarded as a farce. For many, that meant that it was essentially trivial. But for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, fascinated as he was by questions of aesthetic structure, there was something very satisfying about the strict conventions required by farce's rigorous form:
The myriad-minded man Shakspere has in this piece presented us with a legitimate farce in exactest consonance with the philosophical principles and character of farce, as distinguished from comedy and from entertainments. A proper farce is mainly distinguished from comedy by the license allowed, and even required, in the fable, in order to produce strange and laughable situations. The story need not be probable, it is enough that it is possible.... Farce dares add the two Dromios, and is justified in so doing by the laws of its end and constitution. In a word, farces commence in a postulate, which must be granted.3
Hazlitt, Coleridge's great rival among Romantic readers, was impatient with this kind of formalism. He went to Shakespeare for strong feeling and found it lacking here: "The only passage of a very Shakespearian cast in this comedy is the one in which the Abbess, with admirable characteristic artifice, makes Adriana confess her own misconduct in driving her husband mad."4
It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that the play received its due, in both the theater and the study. Directors and readers began to find in it a profound exploration of the phenomenon and psychology of twins, a matter of great personal interest to Shakespeare, whose only son, Hamnet, twin to Judith, was still alive at the time of the play's writing--which he was not when his father returned to the representation of twins in Twelfth Night. Modern criticism--and modern theatrical productions--have also made much of the parallels between the magic and illusions of Ephesus and those of dramatic art itself. "To describe the creation, maintenance, and exploitation of the gaps that separate the participants' awareness and ours in The Comedy of E
rrors," wrote Bertrand Evans in a book published in 1960 that was among the first to treat the comedies as seriously as the tragedies and histories, "is almost to describe the entire play, for in his first comedy Shakespeare came nearer than ever afterward to placing his whole reliance upon an arrangement of discrepant awareness."5 (Errors was certainly one of Shakespeare's first comedies, but almost certainly not his very first.)
The foundation for the modern reading of Shakespearean comedy was laid by the Canadian critic Northrop Frye in a short essay published soon after the Second World War. Entitled "The Argument of Comedy," it proposed that the essential structure of Shakespearean comedy was ultimately derived from the "new comedy" of ancient Greece, which was mediated to the Renaissance via its Roman exponents Plautus and Terence. The "new comedy" pattern, described by Frye as "a comic Oedipus situation," turned on "the successful effort of a young man to outwit an opponent and possess the girl of his choice." The girl's father, or some other authority figure of the older generation, resists the match, but is outflanked, often thanks to an ingenious scheme devised by a clever servant, perhaps involving disguise or flight (or both). Frye, writing during Hollywood's golden age, saw an unbroken line from the classics to Shakespeare to modern romantic comedy: "The average movie of today is a rigidly conventionalized New Comedy proceeding toward an act which, like death in Greek tragedy, takes place offstage, and is symbolized by the final embrace."
The union of the lovers brings "a renewed sense of social integration," expressed by some kind of festival at the climax of the play-- a marriage, a dance, or a feast. All right-thinking people come over to the side of the lovers, but there are others "who are in some kind of mental bondage, who are helplessly driven by ruling passions, neurotic compulsions, social rituals, and selfishness." Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Don John in Much Ado About Nothing, Jaques in As You Like It, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice: Shakespearean comedy frequently includes a party pooper, a figure who refuses to be assimilated into the harmony.
Frye's "The Argument of Comedy" pinpoints a pervasive structure: "the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal world." But for Shakespeare, the green world, the forest and its fairies, is no less real than the court. Frye, again, sums it up brilliantly: