Shakespeare cleverly turns the classical unity of time into a plot problem by giving the condemned Egeon one day to find ransom. That lugubrious backdrop puts the farcical mishaps in relief. To launch the confusions early, Shakespeare shifts the initial perspective from Plautus’ resident twin to Errors’s traveller, Syracusan Antipholus, who mistakes the other Dromio for his servant and trembles over Ephesian sorcery. The dreamy traveller Antipholus, now the romantic lead, has been made over from the scampish traveller Sosicles Menaechmus, just as the carefree resident Menaechmus turns into the irascible resident Antipholus. Shakespeare additionally shifts the domestic centre from the prostitute Erotium’s house to the wife Adriana’s, foregrounding marriage as an issue. The traveller Antipholus’ romance with Luciana now substitutes for the Menaechmus–Erotium dalliance. With Adriana and Syracusan Antipholus, Shakespeare introduces the possibility for character change and growth more deep-reaching than in farce. Adriana makes for potentially the most sympathetic character in the play, a far cry from Plautus’ one-dimensional matrona.
Shakespeare’s doubling of twins and reorientating of interests employ Plautus’ contrasts, but they also facilitate a mirroring of scenes and episodes definitively greater than in the model.117 For example, Errors begins with parallel arrival scenes, the first (1.1) by the Syracusan father, the second (1.2) by the son. Adriana and Luciana have two scenes of debate about Adriana’s husband (2.1 and 4.2), each interrupted by the entrance of a Dromio (though different ones). Exorcisms happen twice, once when Syracusan Antipholus attempts to exorcize the devil-Courtesan (4.3.49 – 89), and again when Doctor Pinch undertakes to expel the demons from the other Antipholus (4.4.55 – 8). Syracusan Antipholus’ wooing of Luciana (3.2.1–70) reverses Adriana’s wooing of him (2.2.116 –224) and is parodied by Nell’s reported wooing of Syracusan Dromio (3.2.75 –160). Adriana’s lock-out of her husband in 3.1 is re-enacted in the Abbess’s lock-out of Adriana from her husband in 5.1, sparking Adriana’s moment of self-recognition. In 3.1, Shakespeare puts the Dromio twins plus Ephesian Antipholus onstage together for a potential resolution – derailed because they talk to each other through or across a closed door. Instead of mutual recognitions, the confrontation produces angry domestic misrecognitions that send the comic confusions spiralling outward. The scene becomes a ‘false denouement’ (Williams, ‘Correcting’, 96), which must be rectified by the real denouement of 5.1. (The idea of the climactic ‘lock-out’ scene apparently amused Shakespeare, for he also employs it in Shrew, drawing probably from Gascoigne’s adaptation of Ariosto’s I Suppositi.) Ephesian Antipholus and Adriana’s angry accusations and counter-charges in 4.4 fail to get sorted out, perhaps because presided over by the quackish Doctor Pinch, and wait to be rehearsed and resolved before the real authority figure, the Duke, in 5.1. Errors is chock-a-block with such internal parallels, large and small. Repetitions-with-difference create the sense of uncanny surprise, the aura of a magical world recycling itself in mad combinations.
Errors’s ‘lock-out’ scene draws not from Menaechmi but from Plautus’ Amphitruo, which might also have inspired Shakespeare’s use of twin slaves.118 Shakespeare probably knew the play in Latin, since no English translation was published until 1694 (although the Tudor interlude Jack Juggler was based on it). In Amphitruo the gods Jupiter and Mercury impersonate the Theban general Amphitryon and his slave Sosia, respectively. Jupiter has fallen in love with the general’s wife, Alcumena, whom he sleeps with just as Amphitryon arrives home from war (their offspring will be Hercules). When Sosia attempts to enter Alcumena’s house as a messenger, he is blocked by Mercury, who insists that he himself is Sosia (Amph., 341– 462), leading to farcical fisticuffs. Later, when Amphitryon would enter his house to see his wife, Mercury-as-Sosia locks him out and taunts him from the roof (1009 –34). Those scenes, compressed together, inspired Errors 3.1, wherein Adriana orders her door barred, Syracusan Dromio guards it against, and hurls taunts at, the Ephesian master and his Dromio, and Adriana later adds insults from the balcony. The ‘lock-out’ scene parallels the Mercury–Sosia scene in its emphasis on the competition to claim the servant’s identity.119 Given the shortness of Menaechmi (1,162 lines), Shakespeare’s addition of the lock-out device from Amphitruo allowed him to amplify the misidentifications in Errors and to introduce a hilariously climactic false denouement with its consequent restarting of the action.
Amphitruo gave Shakespeare a pious and dignified wife, Alcumena, who, without knowing it, sleeps with an impostor husband. Such a wife combines with Menaechmi’s less appealing matrona to engender the complexly comic Adriana – jealous, errantly seductive, misguided in goodwill, yet capable of self-recognition. Likewise Shakespeare augments Amphitruo’s ‘rhetoric of accusation and protest between husband and wife’ and its ‘latent violence’ (Miola, Comedy, 30, 32). Amphitryon’s astonishment at the wonder-filled birth of the half-divine Hercules possibly encouraged Shakespeare to introduce into Errors his own providential wonder at the reunion (imaged as ‘nativity’) of the entire Egeon family. Shakespeare’s addition of such romance values typifies Renaissance practice. At a performance of Menaechmi in 1526 before Cardinal Wolsey, for example, the play was preceded by a pastoral procession (including Henry VIII) and was followed by courtly orations, decorous dancing and a pageant featuring Venus: Plautus’ ‘world of satirically observed realities’ was enclosed by the court’s ‘world of romantically imagined ideals’ (Smith, Ancient, 137). Shakespeare’s ‘magnifying [of] the spectacle and heightening [of] the love interest’ speak to the temper of his times (Miola, Comedy, 7).
In Shakespeare’s comedy, errors double and darken, ethics intrude and eros turns into romance. Certain Plautine elements are sacrificed. Shakespeare abandons the guileful servant, the servus callidus, who often, as in the brilliant Pseudolus, saves the clueless youthful lovers and outwits his master. Likewise, Shakespeare forfeits that familiar Roman comic volte-face, the prostitute discovered to be well-born. And he loses, too, the pleasure of watching various Plautine characters improvise their way out of tight social situations – an effect that he replaces with word-play and comic set-pieces. Nonetheless, Shakespeare has altered the classical comic idea of error from a matter of misinterpretation or trickery to something more intrinsic and potentially darker.120 As Robert S. Miola deftly states, if ‘Plautine comedy begins and ends as a comedy of doors’, Shakespearean comedy ‘is a comedy of thresholds, of entranceways into new understandings and acceptances’ (Comedy, 38).
Italian cinquecento comedy
Shakespeare’s reworkings of Plautus occur in a European humanist culture where, especially in Italy, rediscovered Roman comedies and tragedies were being newly performed, translated, adapted and refashioned.121 Roman and Italian drama had exerted an influence on Tudor theatre well before Shakespeare began to write, as witnessed, in comedy, by Terence in English … Andria (c. 1520); by school-play imitations of Plautus and Terence such as Thersites (c. 1537), Gammer Gurton’s Needle (c. 1553), Ralph Roister Doister (c. 1553), Jack Juggler (c. 1556) and July and Julian (1570); by Inns of Court plays such as Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566), a translation of Ariosto’s I Suppositi (itself a contaminatio of plays by Plautus and Terence), and John Jefferes’s (?) The Bugbears (c. 1566) (a free adaptation of Grazzini’s La Spiritata, in contaminatio with other sources); by educational ‘Christian Terence’ plays such as Misogonus (1571); by Anthony Munday’s Fedele and Fortunio (1585), adapted from Pasqualigo’s Il Fedele; and, more generally, by the comedies of Lyly, especially Mother Bombie (1591). From Italian drama arose what Louise George Clubb calls ‘theatergrams’ – in essence, conventions of character, situation, action, tone and the like. Such shared conventions reflect the practice of borrowing and adapting from previous works, including medieval romances, commedia dell’arte, Plautus, Terence and early Italian comedies. That technique ‘demanded the interchange and transformation of units, figures, relationships, actions, topoi, and framing patterns’ into a shared rep
ository of conventions both efficient for playmaking and ‘weighty with significance from previous incarnations’ (Clubb, Italian Drama, 6).
In Clubb’s analysis, Errors shares so many features with late sixteenth-century Italian comedy that a fundamental resemblance cannot be denied. From the first half of the cinquecento to the second, Italian comedy changed significantly from buffoonishness to the more tragicomic commedia grave (Italian Drama, 49 – 63). Characterizing this change were increased seriousness in aesthetics, morality and emotion; didactic support for marriage and the Church; ethical debates (e.g. on love vs. honour); and heightened emotional tensions, deepened characters, imperilment and sadness: ‘a mixture of sentiment, pathos, and danger with lively comic action’ (55). Even a stock figure such as the Courtesan could become relatively respectable. Commedia grave featured intricate knots of error arising from misunderstandings and character misidentifications, all structured according to protasis, epitasis and catastrophe. A frequent motif was supposed magic, often linked to the theme of madness; another was the ultimate subsuming of fortune, chance and accident under the power of providence. Thus, according to Clubb, although The Comedy of Errors may not be indebted to any particular commedia grave, it betrays an Italianate form that exceeds its predecessors:
The addition of pathos and a hint of tragedy; the moral de-emphasizing of the courtesan’s role to play up the wife Adriana and her sister; the dialogue of these two on the topos of jealousy in marriage; the weaving of multiple sources into a newly complicated pattern of errors with something like a unifying theme in the thread of feared madness and sorcery; Aegeon’s evaluation of ‘the gods’ at the beginning, proved false at the end, when the maddening errors and nearly fatal sentence become instruments to reunite families and confirm loves … It cannot be proved that Shakespeare read Italian plays, or saw commedia dell’arte troupes or Italian amateurs perform commedie gravi at Elizabeth’s court, or heard about them from a friend … It is next to certain, however, that the brilliant upstart crow knew something about the latest Continental fashion in comedy.
(62–3)
The model here is ‘intertextuality’, a language of shared conventions by which plays borrow from, and ‘talk to’, one another, reflective of the methods of imitatio and contaminatio that were central to Renaissance humanism.
However, it remains difficult to grasp how numerous, highly specific theatergrams from late cinquecento commedia grave could have spread, in a few short decades, into English artistic or cultural awareness. Furthermore, Shakespeare’s comedies differ from Italian comedy or tragicomedy in many respects. The streets and houses of the Italian urban stage set, for example, bespeak a familiar world of stable values, while the indefinite and open space of the Elizabethan stage accommodates more abstract and conflicting values (see Pressler). Likewise, Italian Renaissance comedy develops a sexual frankness and bawdiness – as in the barely offstage love-making scene (3.10) in Bibbiena’s La Calandra (1513), or Lelia’s teasing of Isabella and their same-sex kiss (2.6) in Gl’Ingannati (1532), or that same play’s matter-of-factness about sexual assault – missing from Shakespearean comedy. Italian comedy is frequently unromantic and even cynical (e.g. Machiavelli’s La Mandragola (1518)) beyond anything in Shakespeare. Errors also lacks the beffa, the elaborate trick, usually by a servant, that accounts for much of the action in Italian comedy.
Nonetheless, scholars have argued that ‘between Italian and English theatres … some sort of contact must have occurred’ (Pressler, 107), and some general influence can be claimed. English actors toured the continent; commedia dell’arte troupes visited London; Italian novellas were widely translated; and some English travellers and readers knew Italian plays. Shakespeare himself, according to Jason Lawrence, learned Italian in the 1590s, eventually well enough to read plays in the original.122 Yet Errors lacks any known Italian ancestor. The case for shared theatre conventions between Italian comedy and Shakespeare is attractive, but it implies concrete vehicles of transmission and a familiarity on Shakespeare’s part for which evidence remains elusive.
Apollonius: Gower and Twine
The tale of Apollonius of Tyre, well known in the Renaissance, figures as a source for certain incidents in Errors and also influences its tone and genre. Shakespeare might have adapted the Apollonius story from two sources: Book 8 of John Gower’s medieval Confessio Amantis (1393; printed in 1483, 1532 and 1554); and Lawrence Twine’s The Pattern of Painful Adventures, entered into the Stationers’ Register in 1576 but surviving in no edition earlier than 1594. Gower’s version, in tetrameter couplets, derives from Geoffrey of Viterbo’s Latin verse Pantheon; Twine’s romance, in prose, descends from a French translation of the Latin Gesta Romanorum.123 Thus, the story as it came to Shakespeare had dual lineages, with its ‘unbroken popularity’ and ‘almost unchanging plot’ maintained ‘from the fifth century to the seventeenth and beyond’ (Archibald, 3). The story engaged Shakespeare, for he would return to it much later in writing Pericles.
In each version, Apollonius, Prince of Tyre, suffers shipwreck, washes up on the shore of Pentapolis, distinguishes himself and marries Lucina, the king’s daughter (she goes unnamed in Gower).124 As they voyage back to Tyre, Lucina apparently dies while giving birth to a daughter, Tharsia, and her coffined body is commended to the sea. The casket drifts to Ephesus, where Lucina is discovered alive and revived; she becomes a nun at Diana’s temple. Apollonius, believing Lucina dead, mourns in extremis (especially in Gower). Grief-stricken, he leaves his daughter in Tharsus to be raised by a trusted couple. Later, returning for her, he is told that she, too, is dead, and his suffering increases. Apollonius eventually arrives at the city of Machilenta, where he is miraculously reunited with Tharsia – who has endured threats to her life and maidenhood but who is now beloved of the city’s prince. Advised in a dream to go to Diana’s temple, Apollonius sails to Ephesus and is movingly reunited there with Lucina.
The Apollonius tale involves wandering, shipwreck, harrowing loss, suffering and miraculous recovery – the stuff of romance. Shakespeare refashioned these events into Egeon’s framing narrative.125 Adapting the Apollonius ending, Errors’s denouement spectacularly reveals the Abbess of the Ephesian priory to be Egeon’s wife, Emilia, not known to be alive. In Gower, the wife is an ‘abbesse’ at the temple (1849),126 in Twine a ‘nunne’ (e.g. Ch. 10, par. 96). In both works, as in Errors, it is the wife who recognizes the husband. In Twine’s version (but not in Gower’s), when Lucina identifies her husband, she rushes to him, embraces him and attempts to kiss him, at which Apollonius, not yet perceiving who she is, takes offence and pushes her away. That detail may have been reworked by Shakespeare into Egeon’s poignant recognition of Antipholus and Dromio (of Ephesus), which they deny (see 5.1.283 –329). The Apollonius story accounts for important differences between Errors and Plautus’ Menaechmi: the family romance that gives context to the day’s adventures; the shock of the Abbess’s unexpected return from presumptive death; Egeon’s abiding sadness from loss, transformed into joyous recovery; the mysterious sense of a redemptive providential order governing the tides and winds. For these effects, both Apollonius sources, rather than one alone, probably influenced Shakespeare. Twine’s version attends more than Gower’s to physical details, such as the beauty of Lucina’s pseudo-corpse; on the other hand, Gower more strongly registers Apollonius’ near-despair; and the reunion of husband and wife in Gower draws towards its close with the same rhyme on ‘wende’ and ‘ende’ (1883 – 4) that forms Egeon’s concluding couplet in Errors’s first scene (1.1.157– 8). Twine’s version has more surface play of emotion, Gower’s more depth. Both sources emphasize moralism, however, while Errors avoids enunciating any moral as such.
The Bible: Acts and Ephesians
Errors refers frequently to the Bible and, as noted (see n. 2), especially to the New Testament Acts of the Apostles and Epistle to the Ephesians. Those writings, with the Apollonius story, provided inspiration to
locate Errors in Ephesus. According to Acts, the Apostle Paul evangelized for two years in Ephesus in the mid-first century AD and a decade later wrote (from Rome) the Epistle to the Ephesians. From Acts, 19.1– 41, Shakespeare drew on pre-Christian Ephesus’s reputation for mercantilism and pagan sorcery and on specific incidents such as Paul’s sensational encounters with false exorcists and heathen icon-sellers, material familiar to his audiences. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians forms a background to the debate in Errors 2.1 about mastery in marriage, for Paul advises wifely obedience, a view contested by Adriana but defended by Luciana (see 2.1.7–25 and n.). Likewise, in Ephesians, 6.5, Paul commands slaves to obey their masters. On both topics, however, he calls for mutuality, and he models human relationships on the love between Christ and his Church. Ephesians’s sense of new beginning in Christ (4.22– 4) is alluded to at 3.2.39, and the epistle’s famous armour-of-God language (6.11–17) is invoked by Syracusan Dromio moments later at 3.2.150. More generally, Ephesians’s vivid description of the sin-dead soul made quick through Christ (2.1– 6) adds resonance to the Apollonius story. Ephesians imagines Christ’s followers, once strangers and foreigners, as putting away contentiousness and assuming the forgiveness that allows them to become citizens in the household and temple of the Lord (2.19 –22, 4.31–2), not unlike the concluding spirit of Errors. Passages from Paul’s epistle would have been read aloud in Church of England services between 25 August and 30 October 1594, when Shakespeare might have been working on Errors.127 Extensive references from other parts of the Bible also range across the drama. Sometimes they evoke a sense of the apocalyptic that darkens the play, or make problematic the differences in marriage between the union of the flesh and the union of the spirit. They also foreground the tension, and overlap, between mercantile and religious ideas. The New Testament lends Errors complexity in tone and content.
The Comedy of Errors Page 9