Syracusan Antipholus employs language similar to Adriana’s in wooing Luciana: ‘It is thyself, mine own self’s better part’ (3.2.61). Adriana’s self-as-another imagery has invaded his consciousness. Yet Antipholus evokes neither the poignancy nor the comedy of Adriana: the trope has become the less authentic for being the more used. Antipholus (paralleling Adriana) claims fusion with a beloved who believes that he is someone else. If his importunings move Luciana (as they seem to), with whom is she entertaining mutual selfhood: her brother-in-law, as she presumes, or a complete stranger? For his part, Antipholus thinks that he shares selfhood with someone who might be a ‘mermaid’ or ‘siren’ (45, 47). The idea of oneself-as-another may have become current by the 1590s, but, regarding love and marriage, Errors parodies as much as affirms it.
Identities destabilize further as characters describe each other and then revise their descriptions, as Adriana does in relation to her husband, Ephesian Antipholus. She worries that Antipholus’ attentions are being distracted by another woman, and Ephesian Dromio’s wild story of Antipholus’ ‘mad’ refusal to come home for dinner confirms to her that Antipholus is consorting with alluring ‘minions’ (2.1.56, 86). His behaviour, she claims, has ruined her beauty, discourse and wit. Later, more harshly and extremely, Adriana depicts her husband as ‘estranged’, ‘licentious’, ‘adulter[ous]’ and ‘lust[ful]’ (2.2.126, 137, 146, 147). Next, believing that Antipholus has attempted to seduce her sister, she unleashes a torrent of abuse:
He is deformed, crooked, old and sere,
Ill-faced, worse bodied, shapeless everywhere;
Vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind,
Stigmatical in making, worse in mind.
(4.2.19 –22)
Moments later, however, she equivocates – ‘I think him better than I say’ (25) – leaving her views unfixed.34 Is Ephesian Antipholus an adulterer with the Courtesan? He declares his innocence to Angelo and Balthazar (3.1.111–13), but Adriana’s ever-worsening redescriptions of him are so insistent and cumulative as to make it impossible quite to know the truth. Under pressure, public identity proves a fragile thing, evanescent, a little watery. Other characters suffer redescription, as well, including the innocuous Officer, reimagined as a hellish monster (see e.g. 4.2.32– 40), and Doctor Pinch, reconceived as a villainous and pernicious scoundrel (5.1.238 – 46). No characters endure such vicissitudes more than the Dromios. In 1.2, as Syracusan Antipholus’ anger rises towards Ephesian Dromio, his terms descend: ‘trusty villain’ (19), ‘sir knave’ (72), ‘slave’ (87). We are reminded of the truth-power of slander and the in-betweenness of identity.
Metamorphosis: ‘Transform me’
The extreme version of character-change in Errors is metamorphosis.35 Early in the play, Syracusan Antipholus takes lodging at an inn aptly named the Centaur and expresses fear of Ephesian mind-changing sorcerers and ‘Soul-killing’, body-deforming witches (1.2.100); later, he will imagine Luciana as a supernatural being with the power to ‘Transform’ him (3.2.40); by the end, the Duke will wonder if those around him ‘have drunk of Circe’s cup’ (5.1.271). Characters fear or suspect metamorphosis. It might involve the transformation of the human body into an animal or into a thing while the mind remains human, the effect of Circe’s potion. Such change is epitomized in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a central influence on Shakespeare.36 In Errors, metamorphosis can have different meanings: the body changed or the mind changed instead of the body. (For Bottom in Dream, both effects occur.) The Syracusans continually fear that they are being transformed; certain touches of dialogue indicate that they might even desire it, as when Antipholus imagines himself seeking dissolution of the self into another drop of water or when he invites Luciana to ‘create me new’ (3.2.39). Antipholus’ language sometimes shadows forth a self-negating melancholy, despair’s kinsman (see 1.2.20; 5.1.79 – 80), recalling Egeon’s hopelessness. At such moments, subjectivity weighs like a burden to be escaped through transformation.
The language and imagery of Circean metamorphosis saturate Errors, and its possibility haunts the characters. Behind their fears lies a cultural anxiety about the instability not only of identity but of borders between humans and animals.37 Characters in Errors often imagine themselves as animals. Although Adriana and Luciana compare women to horses and asses (2.1.13 –14), and Adriana speaks of her husband as a ‘too-unruly deer’ (99), only the Dromios suffer persistently the comparison to objects, insects and fauna – footballs, gnats, slugs, snails, apes, dogs, sheep – and to none more than to beasts of burden. ‘I am an ass’, says each Dromio (2.2.207, 3.2.75, 4.4.30). Ephesian Dromio accepts the label of ass because his master calls him one and beats him as if he were; the self-description expresses recrimination towards himself and, more strongly, antagonism towards his oppressor: ‘I should kick, being kicked … beware of an ass’ (3.1.17–18; see also 4.4.30 –3). Asinine metamorphosis might lead to revenge. Syracusan Dromio comes closer to thinking himself an actual ass. Embracing enchantment, he imagines himself ‘transformed’ (2.2.201) by the Ephesian women-fairies into an ape and then an ass: ‘’Tis true: she rides me, and I long for grass. / ’Tis so, I am an ass’ (206 –7). Dromio carries to comic extreme the Syracusans’ fear of being degraded through sorcery. Presiding over this dimension of Errors, Circe stands for the power to change, if not men’s bodies, then their minds.38
If, by the end, the light of empiricism dispels the ‘mist’ of enchantment, so that no one becomes an ape or ass, transformations of some sort nonetheless take place. Syracusan Antipholus enters willingly into the ‘mist’ or ‘fallacy’ or ‘dream’ (2.2.222, 192, 188) proffered by Adriana – this willingness itself constituting a change in him – and it is in that receptive attitude that he discovers Luciana as a goddess or siren whom he can love, another change. Like Dream’s Demetrius, Antipholus remains love-enchanted at the end, even if he hopes that he no longer dreams. By contrast, Ephesian Antipholus acts with a rage and apparent irrationality that convince others that he is mad:
COURTESAN [to Adriana]
ߓߓHow say you now? Is not your husband mad?
ADRIANA
ߓߓHis incivility confirms no less.
ߓߓ…
LUCIANA
ߓߓAlas, how fiery and how sharp he looks!
COURTESAN
ߓߓMark how he trembles in his ecstasy.
(4.4.46 –7, 51–2)
After Antipholus and Dromio are captured and bound, Dromio recommends that they might go mad in earnest: ‘Will you be bound for nothing? Be mad, good master: cry “The devil!”’ (128 – 9; see Figs 3 and 4). Later, Antipholus’ reportedly murderous attack on Pinch (5.1.168 –77) and his threat to disfigure Adriana (182–3) argue that the Ephesian has undergone moments of transformation indistinguishable from madness and possession.
Other transformations, deep if muted, also occur. Some characters learn adaptability, despite their reliance on fixed explanations for aberrant events. Adriana, at first jealous, then clingy, finally turns self-critical (although some commentators consider her change a surrender to patriarchal values). By the end, transformation shades into rebirth. Adriana finds herself able to move beyond jealousy; Egeon recovers his family and presumably his hope; Luciana and Syracusan Antipholus appear bound for the altar; Ephesian Antipholus and Adriana gain the possibility of reconciliation; and two pairs of twins recognize that they look like each other but may differ, too.39 As the Abbess says, applying the Pauline image that replaces enchantment, ‘such nativity!’ (5.1.406). While the conclusion is not exactly tidy and the future not exactly clear, the ending yet embraces the possibility of transformation.
THE CULTURAL WORLD
Magic: ‘Dark-working sorcerers’
The two Syracusans attribute the errancy they experience to black magic, a motif launched early by Antipholus:
They say this town is full of cozenage –
As, nimble
jugglers that deceive the eye,
Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,
Soul-killing witches that deform the body,
Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,
And many such – like liberties of sin.
(1.2.97–102)
What the Syracusans ascribe to magic, the Ephesians blame on madness, conceived as demonic possession. Magic becomes the presumed nexus generating all the misadventures. On the level of plot, the denouement would seem to untie the knots of error and dispel misapprehensions. Satan may be the author of confusions, but reason and material evidence are the harbingers of truth. Yet the play concedes residual power to the idea of magic. Magic saturated biblical Ephesus (on this town), and Errors brims with related imagery: sorcerers, jugglers, fairies, fairy land, goblins, sprites, mermaids, sirens, enchanting mists, misleading illusions, devils and totems, Circe, genius-spirits and, pre-eminently, witches. Characters experience magic with an emotional intensity that makes it difficult entirely to dismiss. Individuals testify, in effect, to an enormous human susceptibility to possession by occult or demonic forces. When it apparently happens, they express outsized responses – trepidation, certitude, anger – and understandably so, since bewitchment and possession were feared in the early modern world as capable of spreading contagiously. The imaginative and psychological power of magic exceeds the ending’s explanatory reach.
The play itself creates uncanny effects, in the form of words, thoughts or experiences that drift from one character to another. An example occurs in Syracusan Antipholus’ use of the famous ‘drop of water’ image to describe his unformed selfhood (1.2.35 – 8) and Adriana’s subsequent application of exactly the same image to marriage (2.2.131–5). That convergence may encourage Antipholus in wondering whether a ‘mist’ of enchantment swirls about him (222). Likewise, certain echoes carry from Errors’s first scene, in which Egeon receives a sentence of death, to the second, in which his peripatetic son arrives in Ephesus.40 Those echoes work at the level of language, with the repetition of words and phrases (‘mart[s]’, ‘goods’, ‘confiscate’, ‘dispose[d]’, ‘thousand’, ‘too soon’, ‘five’, ‘inquisitive’, ‘quest’, ‘travel[s]’),41 topics (risk, wealth, time) and tonalities (melancholy, weariness).42 The third scene, in which Adriana frets over her husband’s tardiness, also echoes the first, here in its topics and images (weeping, liberty or its loss, time as men’s master, the sea) and diction (‘woe[s]’, ‘adverse’/‘adversity’, ‘bound[s]’, ‘burden[ed]’, ‘helpless’43). A general wash of words, feelings and images from character to character and from scene to scene typifies Errors. Words are repeated in other plays, of course, but the phenomenon differs here by happening in an aura of magic and in a plot-structure of mysterious repetitions and displacements. From outside the play, such matters may appear as structural harmonies that provide unity, but from within the play, they suggest an uncanniness that permeates Ephesian life, its effects wandering from scene to scene. Indeed, exactly this quality of experience must obtain to create the full force of the Abbess’s meaning when she exclaims upon the ‘sympathized one-day’s error’ (5.1.397), for ‘sympathy’ in Renaissance magic expresses the psychic ability of one being to work a long-distance effect on another being or object, and, in the Abbess’s usage, it claims a capacity for mysterious, psychic infectiousness.
A related aspect of magic in the play is what can be called ‘materialization’ or ‘manifestation’, referring to the power of words or thoughts to call forth objects or actions, to produce real effects.44 Such materialization intensifies late in the play, as the Ephesian world increasingly seems mad and magical. Syracusan Antipholus’ early fear of cozeners and sorcerers eventually becomes manifest in the figure of the conjuror Doctor Pinch, although his conjurations are pursued against the other Antipholus (see Figs 3 and 4). Ephesian Antipholus excoriates Pinch as a ‘mountebank’ and ‘juggler’ (5.1.239, 240), repeating terms used by his fearful brother when he imagined Ephesian sorcerers (see 1.2.101, 98), as if the brothers were sharing the same psychic experience. Pinch’s scene parallels that in which Syracusan Antipholus has attempted to conjure away the devil-Courtesan. The sorcerer is, in effect, a bogeyman fulfilling the characters’ apprehensions of witchcraft and demonic possession.45 He exists as both fraudulent and psychologically real. His appearance has been foreshadowed by Dromio’s fear of fairies: ‘They’ll … pinch us black and blue’ (2.2.198), and it calls forth his counterpart, the Abbess, as an after-effect. In the last act, another character, Egeon, also flickers into relief as a kind of materialization, here of the figure of Time (see Fig. 5). When Egeon refers to ‘Time’s deformed hand’ he is speaking, by way of a transferred epithet, of his own age-changed hand and of himself as Time’s personification (see 5.1.299 LN). Cumulatively, such moments evoke the potential of the quotidian and the sensible to be crossed unexpectedly with wonder: indeed, the marvellous recombinations of the ending strive for exactly that effect.
3 Doctor Pinch subduing Antipholus of Ephesus (4.4). Drawn by Francis Hayman, engraved by Hubert-François Gravelot, from Thomas Hanmer (ed.), The Works of Shakespear, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1743)
4 Doctor Pinch subduing Antipholus of Ephesus (4.4). Drawn by John Gilbert, engraved by the Dalziel brothers, from Howard Staunton (ed.), The Plays of Shakespeare, vol. 1 (1858)
5 Emblem of Death and Father Time. Engraved by William Marshall, from Francis Quarles, Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man (1638)
Language: ‘your words’ deceit’
The Comedy of Errors, like Shakespeare’s other early comedies, treats language thematically. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the problematic constancy of linguistic meaning parallels the problematic constancy of the male lovers, qualities amplified in Love’s Labour’s Lost, where the open-ended use of language coincides with the tenuousness of male vows and foreshadows the irresolution of the ending.46 In The Taming of the Shrew, the word-play between Kate and Petruchio in the wooing scene establishes a form of private love- and sex-play. In such instances, a particular use of language becomes a metaphor for aspects of the action. In Errors, language likewise responds to its play-world, such as its aura of magic. When Dromio thinks fearfully of a demon, he quasi-chants a list of the totemic items by which a demon works: ‘Some devils ask but the parings of one’s nail, a rush, a hair, a drop of blood, a pin, a nut, a cherry-stone’ (4.3.73 –5), as if one image preternaturally generated the next.
Puns, quibbles and word-play help to create the vagrant energy of the Ephesian world. Errors’s puns generate a ‘linguistic anarchy’ that contrasts to its modes of formulaic rhetorical speech (Grennan, 158). Puns embody multiple meanings spoken from different imagined worlds; conversation and thought may, at any moment, turn in a new direction. Quibbling also expresses the classical humanistic value of copia, or amplitude and expansiveness. Likewise, word-games bespeak festivity and playfulness, associated most with the Dromios. Linguistic play in Errors thus enriches and enlivens, offers new perspectives and seems, on the whole, morally positive. Yet quibbling can get out of hand. The mounting crisis of Act 4 is refracted in Syracusan Dromio’s speech about the Officer (see 4.3.16 –34 and nn.), composed of puns with multiple meanings piled upon other puns – legal, urban, biblical – such that Syracusan Antipholus takes it as obscure ‘foolery’ (36) and the audience has little better prospect of understanding. Dromio’s speeches to Adriana about the same character a scene earlier (see 4.2.32– 40, 44 – 6 and nn.) have their own hallucinogenic feel, as if that rather mild-mannered sergeant were the demon lurking in Dromio’s imagination.
Quibbles and language-play broach another feature of Errors: repetition as a form of comic patter. In 2.2, for example, the two Syracusans engage in a mock disputation based on each character’s ability to appropriate and reinterpret the other’s words: ‘sconce’, ‘basting’, ‘dry’, ‘a time for all things’, ‘fine and recovery’ and more (see 35
–114). Conversations frequently advance by a listening character’s fastening on the words of the preceding speaker and questioning, exploring or reanimating them in a fresh direction. ‘How chance thou art returned so soon?’, asks Syracusan Antipholus; ‘ “Returned so soon”? Rather approached too late!’, answers Ephesian Dromio (1.2.42, 43). Dromio invests Antipholus’ phrase with a different energy and meaning, and then uses it to fashion his own statement (rhetorically, asteismus47) – and so it goes throughout the play. Such activity enacts repetition-with-difference on the level of language. Sometimes called ‘connective repetition’, this device is part of the ancient art of theatrical improvisation and of the Italian tradition of slapstick commedia dell’arte that informs Errors. Connective repetition involves shifts of thought, of tone and even of genre, in Errors’s spirit of spontaneity and unpredictability.
The Dromios often employ connective repetition for a further purpose: self-defence. In 4.4.24 – 40, Ephesian Antipholus, beating Ephesian Dromio, calls him a ‘senseless villain’; Dromio captures the adjective and sends it back at Antipholus with a changed signification and an implicit accusation: ‘I would I were senseless, sir, that I might not feel your blows.’ Antipholus next calls Dromio ‘an ass’, to which the servant retorts, ‘I am an ass, indeed’, and proceeds to detail the folly of his service – in his best speech in the play. The Antipholuses may dominate their slaves physically, but they cannot overpower them with wit. In the economy of such farcical moments, the Dromios’ clever rejoinders confirm their superiority to their circumstances and provide a measure of revenge.
The Comedy of Errors Page 4