The Comedy of Errors

by Kent Cartwright

  Tudor drama

  The Comedy of Errors follows a Tudor practice in modelling itself on Roman comedy (the latter is a model also for Italian cinquecento comedy). Gammer Gurton’s Needle, a Cambridge University student play and one of the best pre-Elizabethan dramas, adopts Plautus’ farcical mode, including a mischievous ‘bedlam’ character, rampant irrationality among villagers, a mock exorcism (and much Roman Catholic parody) and the eventual arbitrating of partial and conflicting truths by the magistrate Bailly, who in function closely resembles the Duke in Errors. Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister, adapted from Plautus and Terence, offers a send-up of Ralph the braggart soldier as he is manipulated by the parasite MerryGreek. Jack Juggler, another school play, probably by Udall, refashions Plautus’ Amphitruo. Here the Vice Jack dresses like the shiftless servant Jenkin Careaway and insists to Jenkin that he (Jack) is Jenkin. Jenkin becomes confused and suffers beatings. The epilogue discusses the impossibility of something being in two places at once, parodying the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation (Jack may also represent Catholic bullying). Thus, Shakespeare’s farcical doubles and anti-Catholic satire have precedent in earlier Tudor plays based on Roman comedy. Doubling also occurs in another Tudor school play, Tom Tiler and his Wife (c. 1561), whose theme is marriage between a shrewish wife (named Strife) and a wimpish, wife-beaten husband (Tiler). Tiler’s friend, Tom Taylor, impersonates Tiler and subdues Strife. Foolishly, Tiler admits the ruse to her and loses the upper hand, so that she pummels him again. Tom Tiler provides an early instance of doubles in drama connected to the theme of marital mastery.

  Richard Edwards’s humanist court melodrama Damon and Pythias has elements of Roman comedy, such as witty servants. It features two outsiders who arrive in a foreign city, Syracuse, ruled by a tyrant, who threatens the life of one of the friends. The play strongly develops the theme of oneself-as-another. In Errors, the First Merchant’s mentioning of the condemned Egeon (1.2.3 –7) resembles the servant Stephano’s story in Damon of having seen in the street a man condemned by the tyrant (7.12–19). Gascoigne’s Supposes, which influenced The Taming of the Shrew, might have suggested the war of city-states that figures in Errors’s plot, for in Supposes a trade war between Siena and Ferrara makes it impossible for any Sienese to reveal his identity in Ferrara. Supposes’s action proceeds by a series of false surmises, or ‘supposes’, that Gascoigne identifies in the margins of the printed text. Gascoigne illustrates how humans build conjectures upon imperfect knowledge in their efforts to ‘construct a reasonable world’ (Altman, 165). Shakespeare strips away the characters’ trickery and magnifies their ‘supposes’.

  Shakespeare also learned from John Lyly, his predecessor Elizabethan comic playwright. Lyly’s Mother Bombie, a children’s play for popular audiences, may have given Shakespeare the name Dromio, since there it belongs to a clever servant descended from Roman comedy (see List of Roles, 5, 6n.). Mother Bombie emphasizes farcically complicated action and resembles Plautus in its ‘dramatic and comic use of language’ (Riehle, 21). The plot involves two fathers blocking the romance of their respective son and daughter, and two other fathers attempting to deceive each other so as to marry off their mentally challenged respective son and daughter. Those latter two children, in Roman comic fashion, turn out to have been exchanged at birth for the former two. The carefully constructed action employs paired characters along with paralleling and contrasting scenes, and relies heavily on ‘discrepant awareness’ (the audience’s superior knowledge to that of the characters) – a feature shared with Errors. Mother Bombie also hosts a prophetic ‘cunning woman’ (its titular character) and, theatrically, employs two stage houses for the fathers, in the spirit of Roman comedy and Errors.

  Allusions: Elizabethan urban writings

  The Comedy of Errors’s allusions to Elizabethan urban pamphlets influence the atmosphere late in the play. Scenes 2– 4 of Act 4 make various references to contemporary London, especially to bailiffs who arrest individuals for debt and to London debtors’ prisons, both fodder for popular pamphlets and ballads. Those scenes refer to pamphlet skirmishes between Nashe and Harvey (see e.g. 4.4.44n.) and evoke contemporary London more than any other sequence in the play; in these scenes of conflict, confusions whirl beyond control, characters’ emotions boil over, paranoia heightens, and chases and violent actions ensue, all lending a nightmarish realism.

  Syracusan Dromio’s fantastical descriptions of the Officer, transformed in his imagination from a rather harmless functionary into a demonic predator, and Dromio’s accompanying allusions to London’s harrowing debtors’ prisons, draw upon the writings of Greene, Luke Hutton and others.128 The real-life Elizabethan horrors of arrest, imprisonment and persecution for debt cast a shadow over 4.2–3. (Arrest for debt will come up again in The Merchant of Venice and imprisonment in Measure for Measure.) Dromio’s references to the Officer’s metal-buttoned coat and to the Prodigal Son, along with the Officer’s likeness to a bass viol, suggest affinities with William Fennor’s The Compter’s Commonwealth,129 the fullest and most famous contemporaneous account of arrest and incarceration for debt. But, problematically, The Compter’s Commonwealth was not published until 1617, more than two decades after Dromio was first frightened by the Officer. Given Dromio’s fractured and barely comprehensible descriptions, in contrast to Fennor’s detailed narrative, Errors could hardly have been a source for Commonwealth. The explanation may be that certain images and formulations for arrest and incarceration had so entered the popular imagination that they were reiterated through a body of writing. Allusions to debt, detention and imprisonment reflect shared public fantasies that would have heightened the realism and emotional register of Act 4. Built upon the humanist traditions of Roman drama, the latest fashions of Italian theatre, the narratives of medieval romance and the vulnerable impecuniousness of Londoners, Errors may be short in length, but it possesses depth and reach.

  STAGING

  The Comedy of Errors presents few staging problems and adapts easily to different imaginative settings. A distinctive feature of the play is its implied stage houses, after the model of Roman comedy (for a Roman comic stage scene, see Fig. 12; for a Renaissance version, see Fig. 13). Plautus’ Menaechmi envisions a streetscape with two houses: one, on the left, belonging to the resident Menaechmus and representing civic and familial duty; the other, on the right, belonging to the Courtesan Erotium and representing holiday, sensuality and indulgence. Similarly, modern productions of Errors often feature the house of Ephesian Antipholus and Adriana (the Phoenix) on one side of the stage, the house of the Courtesan (the Porpentine) on the other, with the abbey upstage between them. On the Elizabethan bare stage, curtained booths could have been thrust out, but they are unnecessary, since the main rear opening and the typical theatre’s two side-doors would have served the play’s needs well, with the same doorway even serving for different locales at different moments, as practised in productions at modern replica theatres such as Shakespeare’s Globe in London or Blackfriars in Staunton, Virginia.

  12 A comic stage set. From Terence, Comoediae (Lyon, 1493)

  13 The comic scene (Scena comica). From Sebastiano Serlio, Libro Secondo, Tutte l’Opere d’Architettura (Venice, 1584)

  The ‘lock-out’ scene (3.1)

  One scene, involving a house, poses special problems in staging: 3.1, the so-called ‘lock-out’ scene, in which Ephesian Antipholus and Dromio arrive home at the Phoenix for noon-time dinner only to discover that they have been locked out of their home by Adriana and, as it seems, themselves.130 The Ephesians have been displaced by the Syracusans, the master now dining in an upper chamber with Adriana and the servant guarding the street door to ensure privacy. The mannered hospitality of the arriving party deteriorates into the shouted threats and insults from either side of the Phoenix’s door. The disturbance requires Syracusan Dromio, Luce and Adriana to speak their lines (some twenty of the episode’s fifty) from w
ithin the fictional residence, presumably the stage façade. The problem is whether they are hidden together behind the door or somehow visible to the audience.

  Errors assumes an Elizabethan bare stage, with two side-doors, a central discovery space and a balcony above containing an opening (see Appendix 2),131 as in an Elizabethan public playhouse. At the end of 2.2 the exiting Adriana has instructed Syracusan Dromio to ‘play the porter well’ and to ‘keep the gate’ (217, 212), that is, the door to Adriana’s residence.132 The playtext, like Taming of the Shrew at 1.2.5 –19, implies an urban street door, i.e. a door in the stage façade, which entails the question of Syracusan Dromio’s positioning. At the end of 2.2, there is no SD for Dromio’s exit; rather, Adriana orders Dromio to guard the door: ‘if any ask you for your master, / Say he dines forth, and let no creature enter’ (215 –16). Reasonably then, one might insert a stage direction, as Bevington does, for Dromio to remain onstage, ‘visible to the audience but not to those approaching the door’ (SD at 218, Bevington4; 225 in this edition). Some modern productions import a free-standing door (fixed in a frame or held by extras) to give Syracusan Dromio visibility and to put him physically close to the opposing Ephesian party.133 In Clifford Williams’s 1962 production, Dromio simply drew a door in the air and played behind it. A production might also employ an open-framed arcade house (as possibly used for the tomb scene in Romeo and Juliet).134 Still, the action hardly requires a free-standing door or an arcade house. As the eighteenth-century editor Nicholas Rowe imagined, at the end of 2.2 Dromio could follow Luciana, Adriana and Antipholus through a doorway in the façade (probably the centre one),135 after which – so as to ‘let none enter’ (224) – Dromio might linger in the opening.

  When 3.1 begins, the opposite set of twins, Ephesian Antipholus and Dromio, enter with Angelo and Balthazar. Finding the door locked, Antipholus orders Dromio to ‘Go bid them let us in’ (30), launching the scene’s central fifty-odd lines of heated dialogue between insiders and outsiders.136 Syracusan Dromio apparently delivers his ripostes from just inside the ‘locked’ door that he is guarding. F supplies him with no entrance direction because, in effect, he has never exited, a condition that requires conceiving of the playing space as extending backwards behind the façade.137 Soon Dromio is joined in his badinage – ‘Enter LUCE’ (47.1) – and, in turn, those two are joined by the wife – ‘Enter ADRIANA’ (60.1).

  A character can ‘enter’ yet still remain backstage, behind the frons scenae. Ichikawa cites examples in Romeo and Juliet, Measure for Measure and other contemporary plays of characters being directed to ‘enter’ while remaining behind stage doors (Entrances, 130 –2). Luce might then ‘enter within’ by joining Syracusan Dromio behind the door (Jorgensen inaugurates this emendation).138 Alternatively, Luce might enter on to the balcony (as in Cam). Notwithstanding, because she begins by addressing Syracusan Dromio, partners with him in retorts (even shares a rhyme) and appears to the outsiders as able instantly to let them in (see 49), she may well ‘enter’ to Dromio behind the stage door.139

  But that approach presents the problem of a previously unintroduced character participating extensively in dialogue while still remaining behind the façade, invisible to the audience.140 Luce might perhaps be sighted partially or fleetingly (without undercutting Syracusan Dromio’s imaginative description in 3.2). According to Andrew Gurr and Egan, ‘[t]here is strong evidence … for doors giving access to the stage having grilles or grates cut into them’ (139). Salisbury in 1 Henry VI describes himself as looking through such a ‘grate’ (1.4.60).141 Although references to grates in Renaissance plays are more likely to be ‘fictional’ than ‘theatrical’,142 enough instances of characters speaking from behind bars occur to keep open the possibility of grated doors.143 Thus, Dromio and Luce might have been visible through a grille or grate in the stage door (or grilles in double doors).

  This problem of visibility introduces the enigmatic line that Syracusan Dromio addresses early in the scene to his brother: ‘Either get thee from the door or sit down at the hatch’ (3.1.33). A ‘hatch’ might be a ‘half-door … with an open space above’, or ‘the lower half of a divided door’ (OED n.1).144 Errors’s reference to a ‘hatch’ may evoke the proverb ‘It is good to have a hatch within the door’, a figurative cautioning of someone, here Ephesian Dromio, to be silent (see 3.1.33n.). But ‘sit down at the hatch’ sounds literal (‘sit down’) as well as metaphorical (‘and be quiet’).145 These considerations suggest that F envisions Luce to be partially and occasionally visible behind either a grille or a fleetingly opened upper half-door. She and Dromio, of course, could also rapidly open and close the door(s) in taunt. Such staging encourages comic near-misses and visual jokes that complement the dialogue’s rhymes, rapid pacing and shared lines.

  Finally, Adriana. ‘Who is that at the door’ making ‘all this noise’, she asks on entrance (3.1.61). Ephesian Antipholus responds, ‘Are you there, wife? You might have come before’ (63). Antipholus’ ‘there’ and ‘come before’ might suggest that Adriana has joined Dromio and Luce behind the stage door.146 Notwithstanding, some editors (e.g. Bevington, and Mowat and Werstine) fix Adriana on the balcony, alone or with Luce, presumably because Adriana had proclaimed in the previous scene to her presumed husband that she would ‘dine above with you today, / And shrive you of a thousand idle pranks’ (2.2.213 –14; emphasis added). Productions sometimes signify Adriana’s dining and ‘shriving’ with remnants of food and dishevelled articles of clothing flying from the balcony, ‘above’.147 A balcony location for Adriana allows for a widening ripple of comic disruption, while the lower-level location associates her less appropriately with Dromio and Luce’s fishwives’ joking. The balcony positioning also makes the scene’s dialogue triple-directional and physically two-tiered, and it multiplies the possibilities for changes in characters’ orientations and for related stage gags and near-sightings. Such staging would fit the notion of the ‘lock-out’ scene as a comic failed ending – a ‘false denouement’ – at Errors’s mid-point. The scene radiates with invigorating theatricality.148

  Visually for the spectators, the balcony occupies the same vertical plane as the ‘gate’ or ‘door’: the plane of the stage façade. Thus, if Adriana enters on to the balcony, she would be speaking, in terms of the fictional moment, from inside her house to other characters likewise inside. On the other hand, Adriana stands forth theatrically on the façade’s exterior balcony even though she is fictionally inside the dwelling, so that the frons scenae represents simultaneously both the interior and the exterior of the house. That interpenetration of spaces allows for Adriana and her husband almost, but not quite, to make eye-contact, a fictional impossibility but a theatrical danger that becomes part of the fun.

  To double actors or not

  A major divide occurs between productions that employ four different actors for the two Antipholuses and the two Dromios and productions that employ one actor for both Antipholuses and one for both Dromios. Doubling these major roles solves the presumed problem of finding two sets of actors who look credibly like each other – although costumes, wigs and make-up can go a long way, and some productions, such as Tim Supple’s (1996), simply ignore the problem. Doubling the twins can create potential confusions for the audience that a production may attempt to solve by emphasizing props, sometimes associated with the characters (e.g. the chain and ring), or by distinguishing characters through clothing articles or caricatured body movements. Doubling underscores the actors’ virtuosity and thus draws audience attention towards performance per se and away from narrative.149 That approach turns the last part of Act 5 into the ‘big’ moment, anticipated with suspense, when both sets of twins are onstage together: how will the actors manage the impossible? Overall, productions that double the major parts tend to stress farce and showcase acting; those that employ different actors leave more room for Errors’s romantic and dark elements to emerge. Both approaches can be highly successful. (For other p
ossible doublings, see Appendix 3.)

  Pacing

  Errors moves masterfully from Egeon’s dignified, tragical and oratorical speeches in the opening scene, to the comic encounters involving two or three characters of 1.2–2.2, to the crowded, contentious ‘false denouement’ of 3.1, to the expansive chaos that ties issues and characters in knots in Act 4, towards the flurry of entrances and exits and the grand convergence of Act 5, with its decompression in the final, affecting chatter of the Dromios. Steadily, individual scenes and the play as a whole incorporate more and more characters and more and more movement, reaching a climax in the chase of 4.4. In the beginning, chaos is narrated; in the climax, it is experienced. The play’s pacing, its building of momentum and its capacity for varied tones and surprises constitute a gift of masterful stagecraft to any company that would undertake a production.

  EARLY PERFORMANCES

  In June 1594 the London playhouses, having been closed for most of the preceding year and a half because of plague outbreaks, reopened. The assorted playing companies of 1592, damaged by the closure, were now reorganized into two: the Lord Admiral’s Men, led by Edward Alleyn, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, led by Richard Burbage, with Shakespeare as a member. Shakespeare appears to have belonged previously to Pembroke’s Men (and before that perhaps to Lord Strange’s Men).150 Pembroke’s Men had been forced by London’s plague to tour in the provinces and in the summer of 1593 had broken up from financial failure while on the road. Under the terms of the 1594 reorganization, the Lord Admiral’s Men received permission to perform at the Rose Theatre in Southwark, south of the Thames, while the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were approved for the Theatre, to the city’s north.151 The reopened companies faced a demand for plays, both revived and new. Since it is improbable that it could have been commissioned specially for a performance at Gray’s Inn in December 1594, and since it was probably written late in the 1593 – 4 period, Errors is likely to have been among the new plays performed by the Chamberlain’s Men at the Theatre during the latter half of 1594 (see Appendices 1 and 2).