THIRD SERIES
General Editors: Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, David Scott Kastan and H.R. Woudhuysen
THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL
edited by G.K. Hunter*
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
edited by John Wilders
AS YOU LIKE IT
edited by Juliet Dusinberre
THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
edited by Kent Cartwright
CORIOLANUS
edited by Peter Holland
CYMBELINE
edited by J.M. Nosworthy*
DOUBLE FALSEHOOD
edited by Brean Hammond
HAMLET, Revised
edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor
HAMLET, The Texts of 1603 and 1623
edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor
JULIUS CAESAR
edited by David Daniell
KING HENRY IV PART 1
edited by David Scott Kastan
KING HENRY IV PART 2
edited by James C. Bulman
KING HENRY V
edited by T.W. Craik
KING HENRY VI PART 1
edited by Edward Burns
KING HENRY VI PART 2
edited by Ronald Knowles
KING HENRY VI PART 3
edited by John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen
KING HENRY VIII
edited by Gordon McMullan
KING JOHN
edited by E.A.J. Honigmann*
KING LEAR
edited by R.A. Foakes
KING RICHARD II
edited by Charles Forker
KING RICHARD III
edited by James R. Siemon
LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST
edited by H.R. Woudhuysen
MACBETH
edited by Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
edited by J.W. Lever*
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
edited by John Drakakis
THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR
edited by Giorgio Melchiori
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
edited by Harold F. Brooks*
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, Revised
edited by Claire McEachern
OTHELLO, Revised
edited by E.A.J. Honigmann, Introduction Ayanna Thompson
PERICLES
edited by Suzanne Gossett
ROMEO AND JULIET
edited by René Weis
SHAKESPEARE’S POEMS
edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones and H.R. Woudhuysen
SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS
edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW
edited by Barbara Hodgdon
THE TEMPEST, Revised
edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan
TIMON OF ATHENS
edited by Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton
TITUS ANDRONICUS
edited by Jonathan Bate
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, Revised
edited by David Bevington
TWELFTH NIGHT
edited by Keir Elam
THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA
edited by William C. Carroll
THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN, Revised
edited by Lois Potter
THE WINTER’S TALE
edited by John Pitcher
* Second series
THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
Edited by
KENT CARTWRIGHT
Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare
An Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
The Editor
Kent Cartwright is Professor of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1999) and Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double: The Rhythms of Audience Response (University Park, Pa., 1991), and of various essays on Shakespeare and sixteenth-century drama. In addition, he has edited A Companion to Tudor Literature (Oxford, 2010) and co-edited Othello: New Perspectives (Rutherford, NJ, 1991). He has served as department chair in the University of Maryland, trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America and, in 2015, president of the Association of Departments of English.
To
Theresa M. Coletti
Theodore B. Leinwand
Maynard Mack, Jr
inspiring colleagues
CONTENTS
General editors’ preface
Preface and acknowledgements
Introduction
Error and identity
The idea of error: ‘What error drives our eyes and ears amiss?’
Dim inwardness: ‘if that I am I’
Deceptive outwardness: ‘reverend reputation’
Metamorphosis: ‘Transform me’
The cultural world
Magic: ‘Dark-working sorcerers’
Language: ‘your words’ deceit’
Objects: ‘The chain, unfinished’
The marketplace and religion: ‘redemption – the money in his desk’
Time and marriage: ‘a time for all things’
Poetic geography, travel, Dark Ephesus
Genre and style
Different generic hats
Verbal shape-shifting
Technicalities in scansion
Sources and influences
Plautus
Italian cinquecento comedy
Apollonius: Gower and Twine
The Bible: Acts and Ephesians
Tudor drama
Allusions: Elizabethan urban writings
Staging
The ‘lock-out’ scene (3.1)
To double actors or not
Pacing
Early performances
Afterlife: image, stage and screen
Image
Stage: the Restoration and the nineteenth century
Stage: four twentieth-century productions and an adaptation
Stage: other modern productions and adaptations
Screen
THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
Scene 1.1
Scene 1.2
Scene 2.1
Scene 2.2
Scene 3.1
Scene 3.2
Scene 4.1
Scene 4.2
Scene 4.3
Scene 4.4
Scene 5.1
Longer notes
Appendices
1 Date of composition
External evidence
Internal evidence
2 The text and editorial procedures
The text
The Comedy of Errors in the First Folio
The printer’s copy: authorial ‘foul papers’? A text suitable for performance?
The printer’s copy: the question of performance venue
Editorial procedures
3 Casting and doubling
Doubling
Abbreviations and references
Abbreviations used in the notes, introduction and appendices
Works by and partly by Shakespeare
Editions of Shakespeare collated
Other works cited
GENERAL EDITORS’ PREFACE
The earliest volume in the first Arden series, Edward Dowden’s Hamlet, was published in 1899. Since then the Arden Shakespeare has been widely acknowledged as the pre-eminent Shakespeare edition, valued by scholars, students, actors and ‘the great variety of readers’ alike for its clearly presented and reliable texts, its full annotation and its richly informative intro
ductions.
In the third Arden series we seek to maintain these well-established qualities and general characteristics, preserving our predecessors’ commitment to presenting the play as it has been shaped in history. Each volume necessarily has its own particular emphasis which reflects the unique possibilities and problems posed by the work in question, and the series as a whole seeks to maintain the highest standards of scholarship, combined with attractive and accessible presentation.
Newly edited from the original documents, texts are presented in fully modernized form, with a textual apparatus that records all substantial divergences from those early printings. The notes and introductions focus on the conditions and possibilities of meaning that editors, critics and performers (on stage and screen) have discovered in the play. While building upon the rich history of scholarly activity that has long shaped our understanding of Shakespeare’s works, this third series of the Arden Shakespeare is enlivened by a new generation’s encounter with Shakespeare.
THE TEXT
On each page of the play itself, readers will find a passage of text supported by commentary and textual notes. Act and scene divisions (seldom present in the early editions and often the product of eighteenth-century or later scholarship) have been retained for ease of reference, but have been given less prominence than in previous series. Editorial indications of location of the action have been removed to the textual notes or commentary.
In the text itself, elided forms in the early texts are spelt out in full in verse lines wherever they indicate a usual late twentieth-century pronunciation that requires no special indication and wherever they occur in prose (except where they indicate non-standard pronunciation). In verse speeches, marks of elision are retained where they are necessary guides to the scansion and pronunciation of the line. Final -ed in past tense and participial forms of verbs is always printed as -ed, without accent, never as -’d, but wherever the required pronunciation diverges from modern usage a note in the commentary draws attention to the fact. Where the final -ed should be given syllabic value contrary to modern usage, e.g.
Doth Silvia know that I am banished?
(TGV 3.1.214)
the note will take the form
214 banished banishèd
Conventional lineation of divided verse lines shared by two or more speakers has been reconsidered and sometimes rearranged. Except for the familiar Exit and Exeunt, Latin forms in stage directions and speech prefixes have been translated into English and the original Latin forms recorded in the textual notes.
COMMENTARY AND TEXTUAL NOTES
Notes in the commentary, for which a major source will be the Oxford English Dictionary, offer glossarial and other explication of verbal difficulties; they may also include discussion of points of interpretation and, in relevant cases, substantial extracts from Shakespeare’s source material. Editors will not usually offer glossarial notes for words adequately defined in the latest edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary or Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, but in cases of doubt they will include notes. Attention, however, will be drawn to places where more than one likely interpretation can be proposed and to significant verbal and syntactic complexity. Notes preceded by *discuss editorial emendations or variant readings.
Headnotes to acts or scenes discuss, where appropriate, questions of scene location, the play’s treatment of source materials, and major difficulties of staging. The list of roles (so headed to emphasize the play’s status as a text for performance) is also considered in the commentary notes. These may include comment on plausible patterns of casting with the resources of an Elizabethan or Jacobean acting company and also on any variation in the description of roles in their speech prefixes in the early editions.
The textual notes are designed to let readers know when the edited text diverges from the early edition(s) or manuscript sources on which it is based. Wherever this happens the note will record the rejected reading of the early edition(s) or manuscript, in original spelling, and the source of the reading adopted in this edition. Other forms from the early edition(s) or manuscript recorded in these notes will include some spellings of particular interest or significance and original forms of translated stage directions. Where two or more early editions are involved, for instance with Othello, the notes also record all important differences between them. The textual notes take a form that has been in use since the nineteenth century. This comprises, first: line reference, reading adopted in the text and closing square bracket; then: abbreviated reference, in italic, to the earliest edition to adopt the accepted reading, italic semicolon and noteworthy alternative reading(s), each with abbreviated italic reference to its source.
Conventions used in these textual notes include the following. The solidus / is used, in notes quoting verse or discussing verse lining, to indicate line endings. Distinctive spellings of the base text follow the square bracket without indication of source and are enclosed in italic brackets. Names enclosed in italic brackets indicate originators of conjectural emendations when these did not originate in an edition of the text, or when the named edition records a conjecture not accepted into its text. Stage directions (SDs) are referred to by the number of the line within or immediately after which they are placed. Line numbers with a decimal point relate to centred entry SDs not falling within a verse line and to SDs more than one line long, with the number after the point indicating the line within the SD: e.g. 78.4 refers to the fourth line of the SD following line 78. Lines of SDs at the start of a scene are numbered 0.1, 0.2, etc. Where only a line number precedes a square bracket, e.g. 128], the note relates to the whole line; where SD is added to the number, it relates to the whole of a SD within or immediately following the line. Speech prefixes (SPs) follow similar conventions, 203 SP] referring to the speaker’s name for line 203. Where a SP reference takes the form, e.g. 38+ SP, it relates to all subsequent speeches assigned to that speaker in the scene in question.
Where, as with King Henry V, one of the early editions is a so-called ‘bad quarto’ (that is, a text either heavily adapted, or reconstructed from memory, or both), the divergences from the present edition are too great to be recorded in full in the notes. In these cases, with the exception of Hamlet, which prints an edited text of the Quarto of 1603, the editions will include a reduced photographic facsimile of the ‘bad quarto’ in an appendix.
INTRODUCTION
Both the introduction and the commentary are designed to present the plays as texts for performance, and make appropriate reference to stage, film and television versions, as well as introducing the reader to the range of critical approaches to the plays. They discuss the history of the reception of the texts within the theatre and scholarship and beyond, investigating the interdependency of the literary text and the surrounding ‘cultural text’ both at the time of the original production of Shakespeare’s works and during their long and rich afterlife.
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This edition fell to me upon the untimely death of its initial editor, the distinguished scholar Gareth Roberts. Although it made sense to me to restart the project from scratch, I have consulted Professor Roberts’s work with profit, especially his draft of commentary notes for the first three acts, and I have shared his interest in magic in the play. I am also indebted to the remarkable editorial work on The Comedy of Errors by ancients such as Pope, Theobald and Capell and by contemporaries such as Charles Whitworth, Standish Henning (who made his pre-publication work on the Variorum available to me) and the late R.A. Foakes. Foakes’s edition for the Second Series of The Arden Shakespeare remains a classic. In addition, I owe much to the scholarship of Robert Miola on Errors and related subjects, and to him personally for his interest and help.
At Arden, the indefatigable publisher, Margaret Bartley, has overseen this project with a helpful sense of both urgency and camaraderie. Copy-editor Jane Armstrong’s sense of exactitude improved the edit
ion invaluably. To Henry Woudhuysen, the series general editor with whom I have worked most closely, I owe my greatest debt. He responded to my arguments and conjectures with a rigorous sense of evidence and logic, and offered sound advice on a host of matters, from the typographical to the conceptual. Any muddles that remain are of my own doing. I am thankful to David Scott Kastan for approaching me about undertaking this project. Richard Proudfoot provided important editorial feedback and insight in the edition’s early stages, as did George Walton Williams, in conversation and with notes and postcards. Ann Thompson made helpful comments as the edition reached the stage of a completed draft. Emily Hockley assisted efficiently with illustrations and permissions.
I am especially indebted to William Carroll for ongoing discussions of Shakespeare and all aspects of early comedy and for his counsel, encouragement and friendship. I have turned to his scholarly work and his model editing again and again. Bill kindly commented on an early, long version of the Introduction, as did my colleague Karen Nelson on a later one. Paul Werstine graciously reviewed Appendix 2: The text and editorial procedures. Paul’s remarkable bibliographical work, buoyed by that of the helpful William Long, has significantly influenced my understanding of the text of The Comedy of Errors.
I have discussed Errors with numerous colleagues; regrettably, only a few can be mentioned here. During a year of residency at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Patricia Parker generously shared with me ideas about the play and about editing. In that period, Mariko Ichikawa likewise shared her vast knowledge of staging issues. Valerie Wayne has been a regular source of editorial fellowship and encouragement. Robert Hornback, in numerous conversations over many years, has inspired me with his fertile ideas about Errors and comedy in general. Stuart Sillars and his Bergen Shakespeare and Drama Network have provided multiple occasions for me to present work. Stuart himself has repeatedly shared his insight about paintings and illustrations of Shakespeare’s works, along with his invaluable friendship and good humour. Fernando Cioni has listened to my travails, worked with me on various aspects of Shakespearean comedy, provided scholarly assistance and extended his warm friendship.
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