The Comedy of Errors

by Kent Cartwright

  Finally, language problems in Errors often occur as ones of context – predictably, in a play about characters misidentifying each other. After listening carefully to Adriana, who has mistaken him for her husband, Syracusan Antipholus claims that he lacks the wit ‘one word to understand’ of her long, heart-felt plea (2.2.157); later, he will ask Luciana to explain ‘The folded meaning of your words’ deceit’ (3.2.36). Luciana will report to Adriana that Antipholus has wooed her ‘With words that in an honest suit might move’ (4.2.14), but she distrusts his protestations because she mistakes Syracusan Antipholus for Adriana’s husband. Some of the play’s most moving speeches lose their effectiveness because they are not expressed within the bounds of a comprehensible relationship. In Aristotelian rhetorical terms, these attempts lack ‘ethos’, the sense of a rhetor’s credibility. Words fail when characters do not know the speakers, understand the context of communication or trust the petitioner’s intentions. A play concerned with location, Errors illustrates the degree to which contextual dislocation can make verbal communication impossible.

  Objects: ‘The chain, unfinished’

  Just as words can circulate, so can objects, pre-eminently the chain, which functions as both an error-compounding property and a metaphor for the linkages among characters.48 The ‘chain’ – or necklace or carcanet – is ‘promised’ to Adriana by her husband (2.1.105), presumably as a means of marital appeasement; his tardiness for dinner results from watching the chain being crafted. When Adriana locks him out of his house, Ephesian Antipholus angrily reassigns the chain to the Courtesan (for a courtesan, see Fig. 6). Meanwhile, the goldsmith delivers it to the wrong Antipholus. Later, when the goldsmith attempts to collect payment, the other Antipholus denies the debt and suffers arrest for it. Syracusan Antipholus’ subsequent withholding of the chain from the Courtesan encourages her to judge him mad and to inform Adriana, who then has Ephesian Antipholus ‘pinched’, bound and incarcerated as demonically possessed. Finally, Syracusan Antipholus’ wearing of the chain almost leads to a duel with the Second Merchant, who confronts him as a liar. The chain binds characters ever more firmly and contentiously to each other.

  6 An Italian courtesan. From Giacomo Franco, Habiti delle donne Venetiane (Venice, 1610)

  The carcanet (or chain) – a conspicuous ornamental necklace or collar wrought from gold, often with filigreed metalwork and gems (see Fig. 7, and 3.1.4n.) – constitutes a luxury commodity and signifies Ephesian Antipholus’ prosperity. It is linked with both the domestic mercantilism and the international trade that characterize the playworld, since the goldsmith must collect payment for the chain in order to settle accounts with a merchant bound for Persia. As it wanders through the play, the chain becomes an object of desires, expectations, obligations and perceptions of good fortune or injustice; it hoops together not only baffled characters but their spiralling misprisions and farcical violence. It also exemplifies ‘materialization’, for it emblematizes the ideas of linkage and bondage, and so connects to the play’s ropes and bonds. The chain stands figuratively for certain domestic values (marriage or its betrayal) as well as economic ones (the paradoxical abundance and scarcity of wealth).49 More abstractly, the chain expresses the concept of ‘the finding of one’s self by losing one’s self and the freeing of one’s self by binding one’s self’, especially in marriage (Henze, 35).

  7 Lady with a chain. Engraved by Giacomo Franchi, from Fabrizio Caroso, Il Ballarino (Venice, 1581)

  In Renaissance drama, a stage property can gather ‘an uncanny aura because of how its movement from hand to hand in the play links characters in ways they are unable to understand’ (Yachnin, 112). Errors’s chain is such an object. It is being ‘forged as the action is proceeding’, thus evolving into a figure for the plot’s dynamic development. Further, the chain becomes ‘mystif[ied]’ by Syracusan Antipholus’ treatment of it as a golden gift (see 3.2.188), associated with Ephesian witchcraft and sorcery. Although the ‘delusive, magical potency of the chain’ may undergo demystification in the course of the play, it remains ‘a powerfully associative object’ expressing the deep feelings of personal bonds (Dawson, 141, 142). It is a figure in the play and of the play.

  The marketplace and religion: ‘redemption – the money in his desk’

  Greeted by friendly Ephesians who would loan him money or sell him commodities, Syracusan Antipholus conjectures that ‘Lapland sorcerers’ (4.3.11) must inhabit the city. What Antipholus takes as magic, the audience understands as mercantilism, the marketplace’s power to multiply things almost by legerdemain. According to one critic, Errors’s ‘process of doubling, exchange and possession, wherein people, things, identities and even attributes endlessly circulate’ reflects a fantasizing of the ‘nightmarish threat of the market’ (Raman, 193). The play’s mysterious circulation of words and objects is matched by the market economy’s circulation of obligations and goods. Errors is saturated with merchants (for a merchant, see Fig. 8); the comedy’s backdrop is a trade war; a luxury commodity plays a key role in the plot; and an international trader’s urgency to collect a debt spurs the action into crisis. The idea of ‘debt’ assumes not only financial but religious, emotional, moral and social connotations that help to structure the play. Adriana wants her husband, Ephesian Antipholus, to pay the marriage debt (see 2.1.105 –7); he is detained for financial debt, while he wishes to remunerate Adriana, by beating her, for the debt of humiliation he has suffered at her hands (see 4.1). Egeon awaits death ‘Hopeless[ly]’ (1.1.157), deficient of the money needed to settle a state-imposed fine.50 The ending takes the form of the repayment of a debt of time as well as of forgiveness of debt, or redemption, a term of financial and equally religious power. These effects exceed a modern sense of impersonal, balance-sheet accounting.

  8 A merchant. From Cesare Vecellio, Habiti Antichi, et Moderni di tutto il Mondo (Venice, 1598)

  Market circulation reformulates the play’s larger question of whether agency is a function of the self or of outside forces (recalling the problem of identity). Here Errors vacillates between ‘a traditional view of commerce as a subset of ethics, in which the appetitive subject assumes moral responsibility for his or her transactions’ and ‘an emergent conception of commerce as an amoral, global system to whose demands the subject and the nation have to submit’.51 In the background of Errors is the capacity of market exchange to reduce people to objects. Illustrating the extreme case, the Dromios are essentially chattel, vulnerable to physical abuse like spurned footballs. Ephesian Dromio’s intermittent hostility towards his master reflects that dark side of the brothers’ existence: they are slaves (‘Dromo’ was a slave’s name in Terence), ‘bought’ from their mother to serve Egeon’s sons (1.1.57). The true status of the ‘servant’ becomes clear from Shakespeare’s primary source text, Plautus’ Menaechmi, where the slave Messenio is eventually manumitted for helping to sort out the identities of the twins. When a Dromio is called a ‘slave’, the word is more than an epithet.52 Often regarded as attendants, though beaten as slaves, the Dromios illustrate conditions of ‘de facto enslavement’ that could exist in Elizabethan England; thus their representation may constitute ‘social commentary’ (Hunt, 40, 38). In particular, Ephesian Dromio’s marked ambivalence towards his master – evidenced by occasional sarcasm and hostility and by his vivid speech about his years of being beaten (4.4.31– 40) – invites audience sympathy for him in his enslavement. Yet, unlike Menaechmi’s Messenio, the Dromios can apparently never receive or buy out their freedom.

  For others, wealth can tighten or loosen domestic knots. Ephesian Antipholus would proffer Adriana a showy chain, instead of the show of love that she desires (see 2.1.105 –7), and he will display his anger at her by investing his jewellery in her rival, the Courtesan. If money can negotiate relationships and confer status, then impecuniousness means adversity. Egeon must forfeit his life less for being a Syracusan than for lacking a thousand marks (see 1.1.
18 –25). Errors achieves its denouement not when the Abbess frees Egeon’s bonds (at 5.1.339 – 40) but when Ephesian Antipholus’ purse of ducats finally makes its circuitous way to the Duke as pawn for his father (at 389). Only with the financial forfeiture placed before him does the Duke respond, ‘It shall not need’ (390). The Duke’s sympathy notwithstanding, clemency seems most possible when the merchant’s exchange value has been confirmed and the money put on the table. Yet tones constantly shift, for the play locates its final sentiment in the affectionate restoration of brotherhood by the two characters who are the most used by, and the most excluded from, the market economy: the Dromios.

  Contrastingly, Errors also brims with religious language, sometimes politically charged. Words such as ‘jugglers’, ‘sorcerer’ and ‘mist’ were often employed in attacks on Roman Catholicism for practices that include exorcism, veneration of the Host and intercessory prayers for souls in purgatory. With ‘nimble jugglers’ (see 1.2.98 and n., on nimble jugglers), Syracusan Antipholus invokes a loaded noun frequently used to derogate Catholic priests as tricksters and would-be magicians, as in Reginald Scot’s The Discovery of Witchcraft (1584). In its anti-Catholicism, ‘jugglers’ recalls earlier stage history. Nicholas Udall’s Jack Juggler (c. 1556), based on Plautus’ Amphitruo, employs two presumably identical characters to discredit indirectly the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation on the grounds that Christ cannot have two bodies and be in two places (heaven and the Host) simultaneously. Likewise, Errors’s suggestive image of an enchanting ‘mist’ was marshalled variously in attacks on Catholic superstition and irrationality (see 2.2.222n., on mist). Errors stages two mock exorcisms, at 4.3.49 – 80 and 4.4.55 – 8, the latter memorable for its satire of the bogus, slightly creepy conjuror Doctor Pinch. Against Ephesus’s presumed demons and fairies, Syracusan Dromio would reach for his rosary beads, recite paternosters and cross himself manically (see 2.2.194 and nn.), in comic allusion to Roman Catholic practices. Such freighted images and incidents pepper the play.

  Those moments of satire strike in scatter-shot fashion, more opportunistic and local than systematic. Other bursts of nonce topical satire – references to Henry of Navarre’s French wars, jokes about venereal disease, jabs at Spanish imperialism, slighting allusions to Gabriel Harvey – find their way into Errors and are typical of earlier Tudor drama generally. Notwithstanding, anti-Catholic thrusts constitute the most persistent of the play’s topical references, extending from ‘jugglers’ to the Duke’s ‘Circe’s cup’ – the enchantress Circe being a figure frequently associated by Protestant reformers with the Roman Catholic Church (see 5.1.271n.). Yet even regarding Catholicism the play’s attitude can vary. The Abbess, in 5.1, arrives from England’s pre-Reformation world. She has implicitly displaced the pagan goddess Diana of New Testament Ephesus as a representative of authority, and her remedies are not Pinchian exorcisms but the humane administration of ‘wholesome syrups, drugs and holy prayers’ (5.1.104) after the ‘charitable duty of [her] order’ (107). At astute psychology, rational analysis, skilled rhetoric and the restoring of social cohesion, the Abbess surpasses the Duke. She is, in sum, both Catholic and exemplary (despite her dust-up with Adriana, suggestive of that between a wife and a mother-in-law). Indeed, she resembles other well-meaning Shakespearean figures of the Roman Catholic cloth, such as Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet or Friar Francis in Much Ado About Nothing.

  The Comedy of Errors has been seen as enacting a movement from a pagan to a Pauline Christian ethos. It directs us ‘away from the farce of a world of men who are foolish in their pursuit of fortune and family when they forget about God and toward a sense of comedy … as providential confusion’ leading to ‘rebirth’ in the form of ‘reuniting’ (Kinney, ‘Kinds’, 33). The experience of ‘reuniting’ signifies a Pauline quickening of new life, as expressed, for example, in the New Testament Epistle to the Ephesians, ch. 2. The incipient imagery of Christ at the play’s end emphasizes ‘the precise moment of that catastrophic change [from the pagan world to the Christian] as the Elizabethans always perceived it – at the moment of the nativity’ (Kinney, ‘Kinds’, 32). That argument rightly claims the salience of the play’s religious imagery and biblical allusions, but it leans heavily towards seeing the play in the context of medieval religious theatre. While one may not wish to turn Errors into a religious play, its sense of reuniting and rebirth acquires considerable power from its aura of spiritual mystery.

  The idea of rebirth also responds to the play’s inchoate sense of the ‘apocalyptic’ (Kinney, ‘Kinds’, 34) (the apocalypse being doomsday as foretold in the New Testament Book of Revelation). That notion helps to organize Errors’s copious but seemingly disparate biblical allusions to Genesis, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Matthew, Mark, Acts, Romans, Corinthians and especially Ephesians.53 Errors begins ‘heavy with the sense of impending end’ represented by the law’s condemnation of Egeon, while its later acts ‘are filled with fragments of allusion to the biblical interim of waiting for redemption … before a final Doom’ (Parker, ‘Bible’, 57). In that waiting’s ‘dilation’ (its expanding quality of delay), as it deepens towards the apocalyptic, there emerges the possibility of recovery, reunion and redemption. Yet such readings are in danger of over-allegorizing Errors, for the play never quite surmounts the ‘disjunction of contexts and discourses’ between its portentous allusions and its ‘mundane’ marketplace setting (77, 78).

  The world of biblical apocalyptic time and the world of the market resist easy assimilation to each other, even when they overlap linguistically. The play applies religiously charged words such as ‘redeem’ and ‘redemption’ in a monetary sense: to release Ephesian Antipholus from arrest, Dromio asks Adriana for ‘redemption – the money in his desk’ (4.2.46). Monetary angels function as religious ones (for an angel coin, see Fig. 9). Similarly, Ephesian merchants are condemned to death, says the Duke, because they lack ‘guilders to redeem their lives’ (1.1.8). Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians is filled with the language of redemption: ‘redemption through his blood’ (1.7); ‘redemption of the purchased possession’ (1.14); ‘the day of redemption’ (4.30); and ‘redeemying the time’ (5.16). Such biblical language fits the commercial world of Errors without shedding its Pauline Christian colouring. Indeed, Paul’s epistle is notable for its ‘physical, even mercantile metaphors’ that ‘negotiate between visions of capital acquisition and those of salvation’, so that ‘the marketplace becomes an image of Christ’s actions’ (Finkelstein, 328, 329). Thus, in Errors, the mercantile and the salvific converge in the talismanic power of gold to effect quasi-mystical redemptions.54 Yet the potential brightness of the play’s ending still leaves lingering the dark doomsday tones of its middle, which evoke fears deeper than can be reached by exorcisms, comic reunion or marriage. In those elements beyond reconciliation, such as the apocalyptic with the mercantile, the play signals the tensions in an ‘early modern shift’ from a religious episteme towards a more secularized one (Parker, ‘Bible’, 81).

  9 An angel coin. Illustration by Frederick William Fairholt, from James O. Halliwell (ed.), The Works of William Shakespeare, vol. 3 (1854). ‘The Angel, or the Noble Angel’ is ‘so called because St. Michael the Archangel slaying the Dragon, is on one side … and on the other side, a Ship with one Mast and Tackles, and an Escochion with France and England quarterly’ (Randle Holme, The Academy of Armoury (Chester, 1688))

  Errors expresses a further tension, that between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. While Donna B. Hamilton, for example, sees the play as a ‘reworking’ of the religious–political conflicts involving Elizabethan Church establishmentarians and Puritans,55 Aaron Landau argues that the play’s scepticism towards strict rationality, as in the Abbess’s ‘sympathized one day’s error’, reflects a Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation reassertion of wonder. That argument, in effect, musters the religious reading of the play in service of a polemical position within Renaissance religious debate.
But if the play indeed valorizes a religiously tinged wonder, it also employs anti-Catholic code words such as ‘jugglers’ and parodies Roman Catholic superstitions. In the end, Errors does not align easily with one confessional position over another.

  Time and marriage: ‘a time for all things’

  Luciana connects time not only to business but to marriage when she attempts to excuse Adriana’s husband from dinner because ‘Time’ is the ‘master’ of men of affairs (2.1.8) – and thus wives must wait. Time shapes Errors’s plot and orchestrates its sense of immediacy and speed, since events transpire in one day, with all narrative lines converging at 5 p.m., the time scheduled for Egeon’s execution. Like his classical predecessors, Shakespeare employs the ‘unity of time’ as a source of narrative anxiety and suspense. Errors mentions the advancing hours repeatedly and contains more time references than any other of Shakespeare’s comedies (Salgādo, 83), references not only to specific hours but to temporal urgency, lateness and earliness: ‘soon’, ‘day’, ‘ere the weary sun set’, ‘till’, ‘hour’, ‘dinner-time’, ‘then’, ‘Soon at five o’clock’, ‘afterward’, ‘till bedtime’, ‘present … now’ – all of that in just the first thirty lines of the second scene. Farcical speed disrupts the characters’ experience of time and sequence. Whether there is a time for all things is the subject of the Syracusans’ mock disputation in the second act (2.2.66 –114), while Adriana will wonder confusedly if time is running backwards (4.2.54). Her comment crystallizes an aspect of farcical time in Errors, its sense of repetition and recurrence. Against the compressed, topsy-turvy time of farce stands a more expansive sense of time. It occurs in the apocalyptic images in Act 4; in the decades-long, slowly unfolding family narrative that encloses the farcical action (see Salgādo); in the metaphoric sense of cyclical death and rebirth that defines the Egeon family; and in the romance-time delay, that suspended temporal bubble, created by the Duke’s postponement of execution, within which the play’s action unfolds. Expansive Christian or romance time and compacted or precarious farcical time resolve in the biblical and narrative idea of redeeming the time: the ecstatic reunion of the Egeon family returns the romance narrative to its starting point, reclaims the family’s past, enables the characters’ futures and reorders and restarts time: ‘After so long grief, such nativity!’ (5.1.406).56