The Comedy of Errors

by Kent Cartwright

  Mentally, wandering indicates a straying from truth that, in Errors, can transform into a causal chain whereby each blunder generates a successor. Two such forms of error are misidentification (as when Adriana mistakes Syracusan Antipholus for her husband) and faulty inference (as when the Courtesan concludes that Ephesian Antipholus is mad). Such errors have a way of making an ‘endlesse traine’. The Courtesan’s inferential error, for example, derives partly from Syracusan Antipholus’ attempt to exorcize her, that error from his own false assumption about witchcraft in Ephesus, and that one from his first misrecognition of Ephesian Dromio. Likewise, the Courtesan’s error arises from Ephesian Antipholus’ tale of being locked out of his house, and that from Adriana’s admitting the wrong Antipholus into it. Error, by nature, multiplies and spreads, such that Syracusan Antipholus feels as if his confused soul ‘wander[s] in an unknown field’ (3.2.38).

  Error is most damaging in the form of self-perpetuating misconceptions and faulty habits of mind. In Errors, such mistakes differ from those deriving from the trickery found in most Roman comedies or in the prototypical Italian comedy, Ariosto’s I Suppositi (1509), where error is induced and sustained by the ruses of conniving servants or desperate lovers. Rather, these errors possess agency. ‘What error drives our eyes and ears amiss?’ (2.2.190), asks Syracusan Antipholus, pondering the claim of Adriana and Luciana to know him. He feels himself ensnared in a dream, perhaps magically transformed. Later, convinced that Luciana must be a goddess or siren, he finds his understanding ‘Smothered in errors, feeble, shallow, weak’ (3.2.35). Antipholus envisions error as a hostile and disabling force, an immaterial version of Spenser’s monster.

  Antipholus may grasp the power of error, but he misrecognizes its origin, for the play’s crucial errors are generated not externally but internally, from a character’s interpretive framework or set of prior assumptions. At its most profound, error is not misidentification but misconception. Errors flow from biases and passions that reflect a particular sense of self or world16 – a territory that Shakespeare will chart in comic characters such as Bottom and Dogberry and in tragi-comic plays such as The Winter’s Tale. Antipholus’ conceptual error is to believe that Ephesus is rife with witchcraft (see 1.2.97–103). He has some biblical warrant for that view, which is abetted by his impressionability and excitability. Once asserted, the misinterpretation becomes entrenched, impervious to mounting evidence that the city might contain exactly the lost twins the Syracusans seek. Every encounter, such as with the Courtesan, reinforces the idée fixe. The counterpart for the Ephesians, befitting their mercantile decorum, is the conviction that the resident Antipholus is mad; it generates knots both of plot errors and of binding rope. Error rises from the psyche, whence it further colonizes the mind and invades Ephesus like a virus, operating beyond the mix-ups typical of farce.17 Error so experienced approximates to Henri Bergson’s sense of the comic as something mechanical encrusted upon the living, here the compulsion ‘to mould things on an idea of one’s own, instead of moulding one’s ideas on things’ (179). As illustration, the play materializes error in the chain, or ‘carcanet’ (see 3.1.4 and n.), which circulates among characters and whose links suggest a potentially ‘endlesse traine’, and again in the knotted ropes, the ‘knot of errors’, that Doctor Pinch tightens around Ephesian Antipholus and Dromio.

  Renaissance writers conceived of error as a dominating idea or paradigm that leaps from a small particular to a vast conclusion and then overwhelms the mind: various of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, such as Othello, suffer from it, as do all of Marlowe’s. It feels involuntary even when fundamentally volitional.18 The origins of such error remain obscure: ‘They say this town is full of cozenage’ (1.2.97), muses Syracusan Antipholus, as he summons forth the false explanation that will drive his actions. That phrase, ‘They say’, hints at the self-perpetuating power of slander (see e.g. 3.1.100 – 6), the very model of error. ‘Inextricabilis error’, reads a Latin emblem-book motto in Claude Paradin’s 1591 Heroical Devices (see Fig. 2). The motto derives from a line in Virgil’s Aeneid, a work that hovers in the background of Errors’s first scene: ‘Error is inextricable’, or, we might say, one cannot extricate oneself from error.19

  Yet perhaps one can. Errors must be addressed empirically, of course, and in the denouement the Duke functions as a rational, proto-scientific investigator. Syracusan Antipholus attempts to bring the Duke’s sorting out of misidentifications to a conclusion: ‘And thereupon these errors are arose’ (5.1.388). But, in a memorable phrase, the Abbess insists upon error’s weird, communicative power: ‘this sympathized one-day’s error’ (397), the adjective suggesting both the day’s uncanny sharing of experiences and the working of mysterious agency (5.1.397n, on sympathized). Characters have lived out each other’s lives, commanded each other’s servants and suffered for, or profited by, each other’s deeds. The Abbess speaks from levels of knowledge different from her son’s, those of a mother impossibly reunited with her fractured family and of a nun intuiting the miracles of Christian providence. In Renaissance magic, sympathy indicates a psychic ability to work material effects at a distance; the Abbess’s sympathized error bespeaks a harmonizing of happenstance that looks very much like the action of grace. The ‘endlesse traine’ becomes the golden chain, and wandering turns out to be the way home.

  Dim inwardness: ‘if that I am I’

  Likeness and doubleness of character attracted Shakespeare, in Errors as in Dream and Twelfth Night (he was himself the father of twins).20 Errors questions whether the self should be understood as a presumably authentic yet only dimly knowable inwardness or instead as a recognizable but potentially deceptive outwardness.21 The play ultimately takes a mediating position, that character ‘is not co-extensive with its outward marks, but neither is it ‘ “that within that passes show” ’:22 it is something of both, in-betweenness.

  Syracusan Antipholus establishes the paradoxical instability of identity:

  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.

  (1.2.33 – 40)

  That is, as Antipholus seeks wholeness in reunion with his lost mother and brother, he forfeits his selfhood; the family both gives and denies. Further, Antipholus imagines himself as without the ‘content’ of a stable identity, liable to lose form, ‘confound[ed]’, no more than a mirror-effect. Given his sense of precarious selfhood, Antipholus will necessarily dread Ephesian necromancers: ‘Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind, / Soul-killing witches that deform the body’ (1.2.99 –100). From a psychoanalytic perspective, Antipholus represents ‘identity confusion and ego loss in adolescence, attendant on a break away from filial identifications and into adult identity’ (Kahn, 201–2). He must give up his ‘narcissistic mirroring’ of family and seek fulfilment in a separate other – his future mate, Luciana (Kahn, 202). Conceived differently, Antipholus’ frightening ocean image may signify the threat of ‘overwhelming’ maternal ‘reabsorption’, against which Antipholus will seek union with his twin brother as ‘alter ego’ (MacCary, 530, 528). Filial identification can be threatening; fraternal identification, possibly salvific. Yet Antipholus embodies qualities at odds with those of his brother (and others): he is the unstable and transformable Syracusan, difficult to reconcile with the hierarchical and proprietary Ephesian.23 Antipholus experiences a shifting, contrary pull of outward and inward forces: his attraction to the rather straight-laced Luciana may promise a clash of those incompatible sensibilities, or it may hint at their reconciliation.24

  The experience of identity in Errors diverges from that of the so-call
ed ‘humanist subject’, who perceives himself as autonomous, self-unified and coherent. Many Renaissance humanists, such as Montaigne, recognized the variableness of the self. Inwardness in Errors takes a particular form, for characters regularly sense that they are somehow each also a second person, someone other.25 If, in the classical ideal, male friendship consists of two bodies but one mind, as in Two Gentlemen,26 the reverse occurs in Errors, where the brothers constitute, in effect, one body but two minds. Twinness confuses autonomous identity, and the play’s events cause each Antipholus to experience aspects of the life of the other, the Syracusan progressively enjoying his brother’s home and objects, the Ephesian enduring their loss. Sometimes one doppelgänger-brother even seems psychically immanent in the other. Adriana can exert an imaginative pull on Syracusan Antipholus partly because he wonders if he has been ‘married to her in [his] dream’ (2.2.188), her ‘mist’ manifesting in him an anterior self, the genius-presence of his brother. Likewise, the marked antagonism that the exorcist Doctor Pinch evokes in Ephesian Antipholus provides a displaced outlet for the fear and anxiety that his Syracusan twin feels about demonic possession.

  Yet other moments of being beside oneself are more blurry and less referential than those just mentioned and do not always seem confined to the effects of having a sibling twin:

  how comes it,

  That thou art then estranged from thyself?

  (2.2.125 – 6)

  I am transformed, master, am I not?

  I think thou art in mind, and so am I.

  (2.2.201–2)

  Known unto these, and to myself disguised?

  (2.2.220)

  if that I am I

  (3.2.41)

  Call thyself ‘sister’, sweet, for I am thee.

  (3.2.66)

  I am an ass, I am a woman’s man, and besides myself.

  (3.2.75 – 6)

  Hath almost made me traitor to myself.

  But lest myself be guilty to self-wrong

  (3.2.167– 8)

  The fellow is distract, and so am I

  (4.3.43)

  To make of him a formal man again.

  (5.1.105)

  In these statements, the vague possibility of otherness – a self disguised to the self, or become animalistic or inchoate – intrudes in interrogatives, hypotheticals, speculations and surprised declarations. Notions of self-loss and self-estrangement can yield to the idea of a second self, standing, as it were, beside the speaking self, differently constituted or unrecognizable, possibly traitorous to the first. The threat to identity occurs here as the self’s displacement by a mysterious other, a secret sharer. That dimly intuited, penumbral self registers in the alienated identity that characters experience when they fear that they are enchanted. When the Courtesan sees Ephesian Antipholus trembling in his ‘ecstasy’ (4.4.52), she identifies precisely that sense of being ‘beside oneself’ (OED ecstasy n. 1).

  Although G.R. Elliott observes that ‘Real horror attaches to the notion of the complete identity of two human beings’ (57), the two Antipholuses differ in character. The fact of twinness will later prove more uncanny in Twelfth Night, where Viola’s insistence on keeping the image of her drowned brother alive through her disguise in effect calls him back from the sea. But Errors has its own unsettling mysteriousness, for the language of multiple selves reaches out subtly but suggestively. In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates tells Callicles that he would prefer to be at odds with others ‘rather than that I myself, who am but one man, should be out of tune with myself and contradict myself’ – a moral idea of unified self-identity (Gorgias, 265, par. 482c). In phenomenological terms, however, the very fact of self-consciousness implies a double self, the ‘I’ who is the object of self-commentary and the ‘I’ who comments. Beyond that, Errors hints at one’s possession of another, opaque self, intuited from outward encounters yet deeply within and barely knowable, potentially engulfing, dangerous.

  Deceptive outwardness: ‘reverend reputation’

  The second self is hinted but not fully realized; more straightforward is the concept that identity derives from social relations.27 As Ephesian Antipholus loses the evidence of his social standing – he is locked out of his home by his wife and servants, arrested for debt and finally captured, bound and imprisoned as a lunatic – he becomes enraged, almost mad with fury (see 5.1.169 –77), suggesting the contingency of material status-markers and the anxiety of owning them.28 Similarly, her husband’s neglect makes Adriana feel degraded in selfhood (see 2.1.86 –100). To a considerable degree, characters know themselves in the mirroring that others give them. In this proto-capitalist, credit-dependent economy, a stable public image of oneself and others acquires economic value.29 When Ephesian Antipholus denies his debt to Angelo, the goldsmith responds, ‘Consider how it stands upon my credit’ (4.1.68). Angelo will later describe Antipholus as

  Of very reverend reputation, sir,

  Of credit infinite, highly beloved,

  Second to none that lives here in the city;

  His word might bear my wealth at any time.

  (5.1.5 – 8)

  Financial credit itself stands upon reputation, the avatar of identity (see 3.1.86, 100 – 6). When a character’s behaviour deviates from reputation, others respond either by denying the anomaly (e.g. by labelling odd actions as ‘merry’ or mad) or by redescribing the character in question (as we shall see). Both misconceived responses expose the difficulty that society faces in analysing idiosyncratic behaviour. When someone acts ‘out of character’, the observer can be left grasping after lame explanations in a momentary crisis of identity about others and the self. 30 The conundrum derives from the characters’ need to have their expectations reflected back to them in the responses of their intimates and acquaintances; otherwise, the world turns whimsical or lunatic.

  The social and economic entrenchment of identity shows in the close relationship of selfhood to property. If we know Egeon as a pauper, we know Ephesian Antipholus as a wealthy member (apparently a merchant) of the bourgeoisie. Antipholus will suffer subtraction of property and its rights until he finds himself dispossessed and confined rather than playing the expansive host among the luxury goods in his impressive home. If identity is attached tightly to one’s property, then being severed incomprehensibly from it can bring rage and near-madness. Thus, Antipholus’ reported fiery attack on Doctor Pinch expresses not only his brother’s fear of sorcery but his own displaced violence against whatever force has conjured away the evidence of who he is (see 5.1.238 – 46).31 His twin enjoys the opposite, of course, an influx of wealth that leaves him wondering if he knows himself. By the play’s end, social identities and bonds will be re-established only when debts are paid and possessions returned to their owners (see 5.1.377– 92).

  Bacon expresses a Renaissance notion of the communal dimension of the self when he writes, ‘There is formed in every thing a double nature of good: the one, as every thing is a total or substantive in itself; the other, as it is a part or member of a greater body’ (246). Shakespeare puts to the test that matter of public identity, or what Nancy Selleck calls ‘interpersonal’ identity.32 The Ciceronian, humanist trope of a friend as ‘another self’ became ‘ubiquitous’ in literary works of the 1590s (Selleck, 35), as in Two Gentlemen, and it expanded from friendship to include love and marriage. The trope occurs twice in Errors, the first time enunciated by Adriana, the second by Syracusan Antipholus. Adriana’s speech to Antipholus about love and marriage (2.2.116 –52) constitutes the most emotionally authentic, intellectually probing and affecting speech in Errors. In it, she employs the same drop of water image used by Antipholus in 1.2.35 – 9 – by him for sibling and filial, by her for marital, shared selfhood:

  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.

  (2.2.131–5)

  Adriana pushes this image to an extreme so literal that it challenges credibility, for she argues that when her husband commits adultery, she herself is thereby ‘possessed with an adulterate blot’ (146), that her blood is mingled with lust, her flesh poisoned and herself ‘strumpeted by [his] contagion’ (150) (with ‘blot’ and ‘contagion’ probably alluding to venereal disease). Adriana claims an instant, mystical transference of physical elements and moral qualities between partners. Her passionate sincerity is moving but her proposition dubious. She has driven her argument beyond the figurative level of mutuality33 and down to the concrete level of bodily fluids and moral attributes communicated magically, where it collapses. That problem is aggravated when, imagining her husband as the sturdy elm and herself as the winding vine (180 – 6), Adriana fastens on his sleeve and apparently attempts to wrap her arms (or more) around him. The incident is often acted with such exaggeration (as by Judi Dench in the Nunn production) that it provokes audience laughter, as if earnestness had morphed into its parody. ‘Oneself-as-another’ compells as a trope, but, when pushed towards literalism, risks becoming ridiculous. Even worse, Adriana rhapsodizes about inalienable, mutual identification to the wrong person (Syracusan rather than Ephesian Antipholus). At Antipholus’ response, ‘Plead you to me, fair dame?’ (153), spectators chuckle. Her claim to an inward physical union (and her hope for a spiritual one) is belied by the fact that she knows her husband only via the system of observable markers – physical characteristics, clothes, companions – that she shares with everyone else.