The Comedy of Errors Read online

  Though Burbage was admired above all others, praise was also heaped upon the apprentice players whose alto voices fitted them for the parts of women. A spectator at Oxford in 1610 records how the audience was reduced to tears by the pathos of Desdemona's death. The Puritans who fumed about the biblical prohibition upon cross-dressing and the encouragement to sodomy constituted by the sight of an adult male kissing a teenage boy onstage were a small minority. Little is known, however, about the characteristics of the leading apprentices in Shakespeare's company. It may perhaps be inferred that one was a lot taller than the other, since Shakespeare often wrote for a pair of female friends, one tall and fair, the other short and dark (Helena and Hermia, Rosalind and Celia, Beatrice and Hero).

  We know little about Shakespeare's own acting roles--an early allusion indicates that he often took royal parts, and a venerable tradition gives him old Adam in As You Like It and the ghost of old King Hamlet. Save for Burbage's lead roles and the generic part of the clown, all such castings are mere speculation. We do not even know for sure whether the original Falstaff was Will Kempe or another actor who specialized in comic roles, Thomas Pope.

  Kempe left the company in early 1599. Tradition has it that he fell out with Shakespeare over the matter of excessive improvisation. He was replaced by Robert Armin, who was less of a clown and more of a cerebral wit: this explains the difference between such parts as Lancelet Gobbo and Dogberry, which were written for Kempe, and the more verbally sophisticated Feste and Lear's Fool, which were written for Armin.

  One thing that is clear from surviving "plots" or storyboards of plays from the period is that a degree of doubling was necessary. 2 Henry VI has over sixty speaking parts, but more than half of the characters appear only in a single scene and most scenes have only six to eight speakers. At a stretch, the play could be performed by thirteen actors. When Thomas Platter saw Julius Caesar at the Globe in 1599, he noted that there were about fifteen. Why doesn't Paris go to the Capulet ball in Romeo and Juliet? Perhaps because he was doubled with Mercutio, who does. In The Winter's Tale, Mamillius might have come back as Perdita and Antigonus been doubled by Camillo, making the partnership with Paulina at the end a very neat touch. Titania and Oberon are often played by the same pair as Hippolyta and Theseus, suggesting a symbolic matching of the rulers of the worlds of night and day, but it is questionable whether there would have been time for the necessary costume changes. As so often, one is left in a realm of tantalizing speculation.

  THE KING'S MAN

  On Queen Elizabeth's death in 1603, the new king, James I, who had held the Scottish throne as James VI since he had been an infant, immediately took the Lord Chamberlain's Men under his direct patronage. Henceforth they would be the King's Men, and for the rest of Shakespeare's career they were favored with far more court performances than any of their rivals. There even seem to have been rumors early in the reign that Shakespeare and Burbage were being considered for knighthoods, an unprecedented honor for mere actors--and one that in the event was not accorded to a member of the profession for nearly three hundred years, when the title was bestowed upon Henry Irving, the leading Shakespearean actor of Queen Victoria's reign.

  Shakespeare's productivity rate slowed in the Jacobean years, not because of age or some personal trauma, but because there were frequent outbreaks of plague, causing the theaters to be closed for long periods. The King's Men were forced to spend many months on the road. Between November 1603 and 1608, they were to be found at various towns in the south and Midlands, though Shakespeare probably did not tour with them by this time. He had bought a large house back home in Stratford and was accumulating other property. He may indeed have stopped acting soon after the new king took the throne. With the London theaters closed so much of the time and a large repertoire on the stocks, Shakespeare seems to have focused his energies on writing a few long and complex tragedies that could have been played on demand at court: Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline are among his longest and poetically grandest plays. Macbeth only survives in a shorter text, which shows signs of adaptation after Shakespeare's death. The bitterly satirical Timon of Athens, apparently a collaboration with Thomas Middleton that may have failed on the stage, also belongs to this period. In comedy, too, he wrote longer and morally darker works than in the Elizabethan period, pushing at the very bounds of the form in Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well.

  From 1608 onward, when the King's Men began occupying the indoor Blackfriars playhouse (as a winter house, meaning that they used the outdoor Globe only in summer?), Shakespeare turned to a more romantic style. His company had a great success with a revived and altered version of an old pastoral play called Mucedorus. It even featured a bear. The younger dramatist John Fletcher, meanwhile, sometimes working in collaboration with Francis Beaumont, was pioneering a new style of tragicomedy, a mix of romance and royalism laced with intrigue and pastoral excursions. Shakespeare experimented with this idiom in Cymbeline and it was presumably with his blessing that Fletcher eventually took over as the King's Men's company dramatist. The two writers apparently collaborated on three plays in the years 1612 through 1614: a lost romance called Cardenio (based on the love-madness of a character in Cervantes' Don Quixote), Henry VIII (originally staged with the title "All Is True"), and The Two Noble Kinsmen, a dramatization of Chaucer's "Knight's Tale." These were written after Shakespeare's two final solo-authored plays, The Winter's Tale, a self-consciously old-fashioned work dramatizing the pastoral romance of his old enemy Robert Greene, and The Tempest, which at one and the same time drew together multiple theatrical traditions, diverse reading, and contemporary interest in the fate of a ship that had been wrecked on the way to the New World.

  The collaborations with Fletcher suggest that Shakespeare's career ended with a slow fade rather than the sudden retirement supposed by the nineteenth-century Romantic critics who read Prospero's epilogue to The Tempest as Shakespeare's personal farewell to his art. In the last few years of his life Shakespeare certainly spent more of his time in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he became further involved in property dealing and litigation. But his London life also continued. In 1613 he made his first major London property purchase: a freehold house in the Blackfriars district, close to his company's indoor theater. The Two Noble Kinsmen may have been written as late as 1614, and Shakespeare was in London on business a little over a year before he died of an unknown cause at home in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1616, probably on his fifty-second birthday.

  About half the sum of his works were published in his lifetime, in texts of variable quality. A few years after his death, his fellow actors began putting together an authorized edition of his complete Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. It appeared in 1623, in large "Folio" format. This collection of thirty-six plays gave Shakespeare his immortality. In the words of his fellow dramatist Ben Jonson, who contributed two poems of praise at the start of the Folio, the body of his work made him "a monument without a tomb":

  And art alive still while thy book doth live

  And we have wits to read and praise to give ...

  He was not of an age, but for all time!

  SHAKESPEARE'S WORKS:

  A CHRONOLOGY

  1589-91

  ? Arden of Faversham (possible part authorship) 1589-92

  The Taming of the Shrew

  1589-92

  ? Edward the Third (possible part authorship) 1591

  The Second Part of Henry the Sixth, originally called The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (element of coauthorship possible) 1591

  The Third Part of Henry the Sixth, originally called The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (element of coauthorship probable) 1591-92

  The Two Gentlemen of Verona

  1591-92; perhaps revised 1594

  The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus (probably cowritten with, or revising an earlier version by George Peele) 1592

 
; The First Part of Henry the Sixth, probably with Thomas Nashe and others 1592/94

  King Richard the Third

  1593

  Venus and Adonis (poem) 1593-94

  The Rape of Lucrece (poem) 1593-1608

  Sonnets (154 poems, published 1609 with A Lover's Complaint, a poem of disputed authorship) 1592-94/1600-03

  Sir Thomas More (a single scene for a play originally by Anthony Munday, with other revisions by Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Heywood) 1594

  The Comedy of Errors

  1595

  Love's Labour's Lost

  1595-97

  Love's Labour's Won (a lost play, unless the original title for another comedy) 1595-96

  A Midsummer Night's Dream

  1595-96

  The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet

  1595-96

  King Richard the Second

  1595-97

  The Life and Death of King John (possibly earlier) 1596-97

  The Merchant of Venice

  1596-97

  The First Part of Henry the Fourth

  1597-98

  The Second Part of Henry the Fourth

  1598

  Much Ado About Nothing

  1598-99

  The Passionate Pilgrim (20 poems, some not by Shakespeare) 1599

  The Life of Henry the Fifth

  1599

  "To the Queen" (epilogue for a court performance) 1599

  As You Like It

  1599

  The Tragedy of Julius Caesar

  1600-01

  The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (perhaps revising an earlier version) 1600-01

  The Merry Wives of Windsor (perhaps revising version of 1597-99) 1601

  "Let the Bird of Loudest Lay" (poem, known since 1807 as "The Phoenix and Turtle" [turtledove]) 1601

  Twelfth Night, or What You Will

  1601-02

  The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida

  1604

  The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice

  1604

  Measure for Measure

  1605

  All's Well That Ends Well

  1605

  The Life of Timon of Athens, with Thomas Middleton 1605-06

  The Tragedy of King Lear

  1605-08

  ? contribution to The Four Plays in One (lost, except for A Yorkshire Tragedy, mostly by Thomas Middleton) 1606

  The Tragedy of Macbeth (surviving text has additional scenes by Thomas Middleton) 1606-07

  The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra

  1608

  The Tragedy of Coriolanus

  1608

  Pericles, Prince of Tyre, with George Wilkins 1610

  The Tragedy of Cymbeline

  1611

  The Winter's Tale

  1611

  The Tempest

  1612-13

  Cardenio, with John Fletcher (survives only in later adaptation called Double Falsehood by Lewis Theobald) 1613

  Henry VIII (All Is True), with John Fletcher 1613-14

  The Two Noble Kinsmen, with John Fletcher

  FURTHER READING

  AND VIEWING

  CRITICAL APPROACHES

  Baldwin, T. W., On the Compositorial Genetics of The Comedy of Errors (1965). Magisterial study in which Shakespeare's use of sources is explored in order to throw light on his methods of composition and body of work generally.

  Bryant, J. A., Jr., Shakespeare and the Uses of Comedy (1986). First chapter on The Comedy of Errors provides a good basic introduction to the play.

  Charney, Maurice, ed., Shakespearean Comedy (1980). Contains useful discussion of Roman comedy in Chapter 1 and an analysis of The Comedy of Errors in Chapter 2.

  Collins, Michael J., ed., Shakespeare's Sweet Thunder: Essays on the Early Comedies (1997). Varied collection that includes three essays on The Comedy of Errors: Robert S. Miola, "The Influence of New Comedy on The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew," pp. 21-34; Ann Thompson, " 'Errors' and 'Labors': Feminism and Early Shakespearean Comedy," pp. 90-101; Bruce R. Smith, "A Night of Errors and the Dawn of Empire: Male Enterprise in The Comedy of Errors," pp. 102-25.

  Frye, Northrop, "The Argument of Comedy" (1949), in Comedy: Developments in Criticism, ed. D. J. Palmer (1984), pp. 74-84. A classic, essential essay.

  Greenberg, Marissa, "Crossing from Scaffold to Stage: Execution Processions and Generic Conventions in The Comedy of Errors and Measure for Measure," in Shakespeare and Historical Formalism (2007), pp. 127-46. Historicist reading which takes the play's opening execution procession as its starting point.

  Mason, Pamela, ed., Shakespeare: Early Comedies, Casebook Series (1995). Part 1 on The Comedy of Errors includes important early criticism, later twentieth-century criticism, and a short section on late twentieth-century productions, pp. 31-85.

  Miola, Robert S., ed., The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays (1997). Excellent collection; Part I, "The Critical History"; Part II, "Different Voices," significant essays on all aspects of the play; Part III, "In Performance," discusses major productions to 1990.

  Parker, Patricia, "Shakespeare and the Bible: The Comedy of Errors," in Shakespeare and the Literary Tradition, ed. Stephen Orgel and Sean Keifer (1999). Argues for the importance of biblical allusions as a way of understanding the play.

  THE PLAY IN PERFORMANCE

  Magoulios, Michael, ed., Shakespearean Criticism, Vol. 26 (1995). Includes stage history, reviews, and retrospective accounts of selected productions.

  Miola, Robert S., ed., The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays (1997). Part III, "In Performance," discusses major productions to 1990.

  Smallwood, Robert, ed., Players of Shakespeare 5 (2003). Ian Hughes discusses playing Dromio of Syracuse in Lynne Parker's 2000 RSC production, pp. 29-42.

  AVAILABLE ON DVD

  The Comedy of Errors, directed by Simon Cellan Jones, BBC Shakespeare Series (1983, DVD 2006). Stars Cyril Cusack, Simon Gray, and Wendy Hiller, employs split-screen technique to double twins, with Michael Kitchen as both Antipholuses and Roger Daltrey (of the Who) as the Dromios.

  The Comedy of Errors, directed by Richard Monette (1989, DVD 2008). Filmed version of Festival Theatre, Stratford, Ontario, production with twins' roles doubled, played by Geordie Johnson and Keith Dinicol.

  Do Dooni Char, directed by Debu Sen (1968, DVD 2007). Bollywood version, loosely based on Shakespeare's play, starring Kishore Kumar, Tanuja, and Asit Sen.

  Angoor, directed by Gulzar (1982, DVD 2002). Highly acclaimed Bollywood version with Sanjeev Kumar and Deven Verma doubling roles as twins.

  Big Business, directed by Jim Abrahams (1988, DVD 2004). Loosely based, updated version set in twentieth-century America with female twins played by Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin.

  The Boys from Syracuse, directed by Edward Sutherland (1940, DVD 2006). Disappointing film of Rodgers and Hart musical adaptation starring Allan Jones, Joe Penner, Irene Hervey, Martha Raye, and Charles Butterworth.

  REFERENCES

  1. William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817, repr. 1870), p. 232.

  2. A. W. Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1808-11) in The Romantics on Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate (1992), pp. 278-79.

  3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures and Notes on Shakspere and Other English Poets (1811-1818), ed. T. Ashe (1900), pp. 292-93.

  4. Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear's Plays, p. 233.

  5. Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (1960), p. 1.

  6. "The Argument of Comedy" originally appeared in English Institute Essays 1948, ed. D. A. Robertson (1949), and has often been reprinted in critical anthologies. Frye himself adapted it for inclusion in his classic study, Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Quoted here from Comedy: Developments in Criticism, ed. D. J. Palmer (1984), pp. 74-84.

  7. Barbara Freedman, "Egeon's Debt: Self-Division and Self-Redemption in The Comedy of Errors," English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980), pp. 360-83 (pp. 363-64).


  8. Gamini Salgado, " 'Time's Deformed Hand': Sequence, Consequence, and Inconsequence in The Comedy of Errors," Shakespeare Survey 25 (1972), pp. 81-91 (p. 82).

  9. Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (1974), p. 10.

  10. Freedman, "Egeon's Debt," p. 375.

  11. Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies, p. 7.

  12. Frye, "The Argument of Comedy," p. 79.

  13. Frye, "The Argument of Comedy," p. 80.

  14. Harold Brooks, "Themes and Structure in The Comedy of Errors," in Early Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (1961), pp. 55-72, (p. 60).

  15. Jonathan Hall, Anxious Pleasures: Shakespearean Comedy and the Nation-State (1995), p. 47.

  16. Brooks, "Themes and Structure in The Comedy of Errors," p. 66.

  17. Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love, p. 17.

  18. Freedman, "Egeon's Debt," pp. 375-76.

  19. Amanda Piesse, "Space for the Self: Place, Persona and Self-Projection in The Comedy of Errors and Pericles," in Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces, 1580-1690, ed. Gordon McMullan (1998), pp. 151-70, (p. 157).

  20. Henry Helmes, Gesta Grayorum, ed. W. W. Greg, 1914, quoted in F. E. Halliday, "Gray's Inn Record," Shakespeare and His Critics (1949), p. 351.

  21. The Shakspere Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions to Shakspere from 1591 to 1700, originally compiled by C. M. Ingleby, Miss L. Toulmin Smith, and Dr. F. J. Furnivall, with the assistance of the New Shakspere Society (1909, reissued 1932).

  22. The Times, London, 27 February 1905.

  23. Lionel Hale, News Chronicle, 13 April 1938.

  24. Alan Pryce-Jones, Theater Arts, Vol. XLVII, Nos. 8-9 (August-September, 1963), pp. 14, 68.