The original 1594 shareholders of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were George Bryan, Richard Burbage, John Heminges, Will Kemp, Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope, William Shakespeare and probably Will Sly (Gurr, Company, 13). These men would have formed the core acting company for The Comedy of Errors. Additional, hired players for the first season may have included John Holland, Humfrey Jeffes and John Sinkler (or Sincler or Sinklo).152 Burbage would have played Syracusan Antipholus, the leading role, with Kemp probably as Syracusan Dromio, the principal comic part. Sinkler makes sense for Doctor Pinch, since Sinkler was known to have played small, lean, sharp-faced characters, and his name appears in other plays of the Chamberlain’s Men from this period; the part may have been written with him in mind. The actor playing Pinch might also have doubled for Egeon,153 or Shakespeare himself might have taken the part (Foster, 133).154
Errors was apparently performed at Gray’s Inn, late at night, on Holy Innocents’ Day, 28 December 1594. (For the Great Hall of Gray’s Inn, see Fig. 14.) The Master of the Revels’ accounts indicate, however, that Shakespeare, Will Kemp and Richard Burbage received payment on behalf of their company for a performance at Court that same day. E.K. Chambers hypothesizes that the Revels records should have read 27 December instead of 28, and his explanation has been generally accepted; the alternative would be to imagine that the company played twice on the same day in different locales, once before the Court and again in the evening at Gray’s Inn.155 Holy Innocents’ Day remembers Herod’s slaughter of children in his vain search for the infant Jesus, but nothing about Errors or the Gray’s Inn celebration pertains to that feast day. The revels lasted altogether from 20 December 1594 to 4 March 1595 and consisted of daily festivities plus some dozen interspersed major events.156 The general spirit of the revels was to observe social and legal hierarchies and protocols by inverting and lampooning them, with the whole presided over by the elected mock regent, the Prince of Purpoole, and his court. The success of ‘the first grand Night’ (20 December), filled with comic proclamations and elaborate dancing, raised the stakes for the next, scheduled for 28 December. We can follow the account from the Gesta Grayorum (the only surviving record, published in 1688):157
14 The Great Hall of Gray’s Inn, from the east end
There was the Conclusion of the first grand Night, the Performance whereof increased the Expectation of those things that were to ensue; insomuch that the common Report amongst all Strangers was so great, and the Expectation of our Proceedings so extraordinary, that it urged us to take upon us a greater State than was at the first intended: And therefore, besides all the stately and sumptuous Service that was continually done the Prince, in very Princely manner; and besides the daily Revels, and such like Sports, which were usual, there was intended divers grand Nights, for the Entertainment of Strangers to our Pass-times and Sports.
(Nelson & Elliott, 2.395)
That language suggests that before 20 December the Grand Nights had not been planned out fully, or perhaps had not been planned at all, which might partially explain the disorganization, confusion and impromptu quality of the 28 December event. The details are murky:
The next grand Night was intended to be upon Innocents-Day at Night; at which time there was a great Presence of Lords, Ladies, and worshipful Personages, that did expect some notable Performance at that time; which, indeed, had been effected, if the multitude of Beholders had not been so exceeding great, and thereby there was no convenient room for those that were Actors; by reason whereof, very good Inventions and Conceipts could not have opportunity to be applauded, which otherwise would have been great Contentation to the Beholders. Against which time, our Friend, the Inner Temple, determined to send their Ambassador to our Prince of State, as sent from Frederick Templarius their Emperor, who was then busied in his Wars against the Turk. The Ambassador came very gallantly appointed, and attended by a great number of brave Gentlemen, which arrived at our Court about Nine of the Clock at Night.
(2.395)
The ambassador from the Inner Temple and his entourage were received with great mock solemnity by the Prince of Purpoole, though the Temple retinue may have been larger than expected, since the author in one sentence complains about the too-great number of beholders and describes in the next the entrance of the Inner Templarians, as if to explain the ‘exceeding great’ multitude and the resulting disorder.
When the Ambassador was placed, as aforesaid, and that there was something to be performed for the Delight of the Beholders, there arose such a disordered Tumult and Crowd upon the Stage, that there was no Opportunity to effect that which was intended: There came so great a number of worshipful Personages upon the Stage, that might not be displaced, and Gentlewomen, whose Sex did privilege them from Violence, that when the Prince and his Officers had in vain, a good while, expected and endeavoured a Reformation, at length there was no hope of Redress for that present. The Lord Ambassador and his Train thought that they were not so kindly entertained, as was before expected, and thereupon would not stay any longer at that time, but, in a sort, discontented and displeased. After their Departure the Throngs and Tumults did somewhat cease, although so much of them continued, as was able to disorder and confound any good Inventions whatsoever. In regard whereof, as also for that the Sports intended were especially for the gracing of the Templarians, it was thought good not to offer any thing of Account, saving Dancing and Revelling with Gentlewomen; and after such Sports, a Comedy of Errors (like to Plautus his Menechmus) was played by the Players. So that the Night was begun, and continued to the end, in nothing but Confusion and Errors; whereupon, it was ever afterwards called, The Night of Errors.
(2.396 –7)
Because there exists no other play from c. 1593 – 4 performed by a professional company based on Plautus’ Menaechmi and entitled ‘Comedy of Errors’, that description must constitute a record of the first known performance of Shakespeare’s play. Apparently the ‘Actors’ referred to early in the narrative were not the same as the ‘Players’ later mentioned, since the former were unable to perform; most likely the ‘Actors’ were members of Gray’s Inn who had rehearsed a ‘notable Performance’, perhaps a mock ceremony along the lines of that at the first Grand Night or a masque or other entertainment. So crowded were the dignitaries on the ‘Stage’ that the Prince’s court could not proceed with the ‘good Inventions’ and ‘Sports’ intended to honour the Inner Templarians. Thus, after some dancing and revelling, The Comedy of Errors was enacted by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, probably late in the evening. Although the performance of Errors must have been part of the makeshift plan for the Grand Night, it was not the main event but rather a diversion to round out the ‘Inventions’, ‘Sports’, dancing and revelling.
Yet the play left a strong enough impression that the members of the Inns seized upon it spontaneously to reimagine the whole evening.158 Because of the great confusion of the ‘Night of Errors’, the Prince of Purpoole conducted a parodic inquiry on the following night at which the ‘Disorders’ were blamed on ‘Sorceries and Inchantments; and namely of a great Witchcraft used the Night before’ (Nelson & Elliott, 2.397). On the next evening following, a public Judgement was read
… against a Sorcerer or Conjurer that was supposed to be the Cause of that confused Inconvenience. Therein was contained, How he had caused the State to be built, and Scaffolds to be reared to the top of the House, to increase Expectation. Also how he had caused divers Ladies and Gentlewomen, and others of good Condition, to be invited to our Sports; also our dearest Friend, the State of Templaria, to be disgraced, and disappointed of their kind Entertainment, deserved and intended. Also that he caused Throngs and Tumults, Crowds and Outrages, to disturb our whole Proceedings. And Lastly, that he had foisted a Company of base and common Fellows, to make up our Disorders with a Play of Errors and Confusions; and that that Night had gained to us Discredit, and it self a Nick-name of Errors. All of which were against t
he Crown and Dignity of our Sovereign Lord, the Prince of Purpoole.
(2.397– 8)
That account suggests the power of the witchcraft motif in The Comedy of Errors, as if the enchantment felt in Ephesus had registered strongly enough upon the play’s beholders that, like Adriana’s mist, it beclouded the imagined principality of ‘Graya’. In a delightful bit of spontaneous, high-handed humour and comic fantasy, all the events and mishaps of the Night of Errors are reconceived as wrought by a powerful ‘Sorcerer or Conjurer’, his diabolical work including the foisting of ‘a Company of base and common Fellows’ (i.e. the professional players) to complete and mirror the night’s ‘Disorders’ and ‘Confusions’. The Prince and his court behaved as did the confused and disordered characters in Errors: Doctor Pinch has triumphed. Shakespeare’s play may not have been entirely lost, after all, upon the assemblage.
The Gesta Grayorum mentions the stage and the scaffold for spectators erected for the occasion. The playing space probably stood in the middle of the long Gray’s Inn Hall (70 feet × 34 feet 8 inches, or 21.3 × 10.5 metres), between the dais, where the Prince of Purpoole held state and where the high table was located, and the temporary scaffolds (Knapp & Kobialka). The stage was thus ‘wide and shallow, with the audience seated on at least two, and possibly all four, sides’ (Knapp & Kobialka, 438). In these crowded quarters, the use of booth-like structures, even modest ones, for Ephesian Antipholus’ house or the abbey is doubtful.159 Rather, the actors would have provided nonce solutions that appealed to the spectators’ imaginations. The account of the Gray’s Inn performance supports the view that Errors was written to be conformable to a variety of venues.
An apparent allusion to Errors in 1598 offers ‘evidence’ that it was ‘revived in 1597– 98’:
Persuade me to a play, I’le to the Rose,
Or Curtaine, one of Plautus Comedies,
Or the Patheticke Spaniards Tragedies
(Everard Guilpin, ‘Satire V’)160
Those lines may well refer to both The Comedy of Errors, staged by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the Curtain, and The Spanish Tragedy, from the Admiral’s Men at the Rose (this latter is confirmed by Henslowe’s Diary; see Knutson, 62–3).161 Francis Meres’s reference to Errors in 1598 (see Appendix 1) likewise implies its public performance after 1594, perhaps in the 1597– 8 season, as Roslyn Lander Knutson proposes. In addition, the anonymous Birth of Hercules (published c. 1598), a play based on Plautus’ Amphitruo, contains a witty servant named Dromio whose name may derive from Errors, strengthening the conjecture that Errors was revived in 1597– 8.162
The vitality of Errors in the public imagination was such that, in February 1602, John Manningham could remember it when seeing another Shakespearean play, Twelfth Night, performed at another Inns of Court establishment, the Middle Temple, as his diary records: ‘At our feast wee had a play called “Twelfth night, or what you will”; much like the commedy of errores, or Menechmi in Plautus’ (Manningham, 48). Since Manningham was not admitted to the Middle Temple until 1598 and was apparently studying at Cambridge in 1594, he, too, might well have seen Errors in revival in 1597– 8.
On 28 December 1604, The Comedy of Errors – the ‘Plaie of Errors’ by ‘Shaxberd’ – was performed by Shakespeare’s company, now recommissioned as the King’s Men, before the newly crowned King James as part of the Court’s Christmastide celebrations, ten years to the day after its performance at Gray’s Inn (Chambers, ES, 4.171). Perhaps the play was recommended to the King by Sir Francis Bacon, who had written considerable material for the 1594 Gray’s Inn revels and who may have remembered Errors from that occasion.163 If not recommended by Bacon, Errors might have come to the Court because it was being performed in revival as part of the King’s Men’s 1604 –5 season. Knutson observes that around 1594 there had been a ‘flurry of interest’ in plays related to magic, such as Doctor Faustus, The Wise Man of West Chester and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (143). Errors, with its hilarious and slightly disconcerting treatment of magic, could have reasonably been included. Likewise, around 1602–3, ‘another such flurry’ arose (143); a reappearance of Errors at that time might well have been part of a renewed interest in plays dealing with magic. Thus, the early performance history of Errors argues for its firm place in the public theatre, its persistent appeal and its memorability.
AFTERLIFE: IMAGE, STAGE AND SCREEN
Image
When Nicholas Rowe, the first named editor of Shakespeare, published the collected plays in 1709, The Comedy of Errors was no longer being presented in the London commercial theatre, although, much cut, it may have been performed privately. Rowe’s frontispiece illustration (see Fig. 15) represents the climactic scene, derived from reading but visualized as theatre; it constitutes one of the ‘earliest direct responses’ to Errors.164 The illustration combines events synchronically that happen sequentially: a puzzled Syracusan Antipholus and Dromio in the left foreground; the Second Merchant on the right, about to duel with Antipholus but restrained by Adriana (or Luciana) and a bystander; the condemned Egeon bareheaded in the left middle ground; the Abbess (or perhaps Adriana) at centre supplicating the Duke on bended knee;165 and the Duke’s guards forming a horizontal line across the background before the dark, recessed abbey entrance. Shadows bespeak late afternoon. The illustration brings together multiple dimensions: the framing set itself may reflect Sebastiano Serlio’s notion of a tragic stage setting, but the scene’s energy and confusion evoke comedy, and the abbey portal, which centres the scene’s triangular geometry, points towards the romance of family reunion and its concluding ‘gossips’ feast’ (5.1.405; Sillars, 13 –17). The visual arrangement of characters and episodes thus moves inward and towards the play’s resolution, with a ‘metatheatric’ sense of the whole (Sillars, 16).
15 Act 5. From Nicholas Rowe (ed.), The Works of Shakespear (1709), vol. 1. Probably designed by François Boitard and engraved by Elisha Kirkall
The Rowe frontispiece holds diverse, potentially conflicting, aspects of the play in balance: bafflements at apparently magical events; farcical confusions and violence; marital troubles; familial sufferings; threats of death; mystical reconciliations. By contrast, few stage productions manage to balance such issues equally, and many choose to stress only some of Errors’s dimensions to the exclusion of others. Commonly, productions ramp up the farce, strip out material about identity and marriage, stereotype characters, de-emphasize the family romance, add visual and physical gags and turn the Dromios into the de facto stars. The late-seventeenth-century acting versions of the play – for example, the Smock Alley promptbook – distil the play into fast-moving farce. Such productions are facilitated by Errors’s overt symmetries, its multiplication of mistakes and its progressive recombinations of different characters illustrating the permutations of misprision. A few productions – most famously Theodore Komisarjevsky’s at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1938 – give Errors a decidedly abstract mise en scène, overturning realism, mixing styles of dress and acting, inserting music and saturating the play with comic, generic and cultural allusions. Such productions can shade from ‘interpretation’ to ‘adaptation’, as exemplified by Thomas Hull’s late eighteenth-century adaptation or by Abbott, Rodgers and Hart’s 1938 The Boys from Syracuse. Here politicized issues – for example, Errors’s exploration of marriage – often undergo revision. At the other end of the spectrum, bare-stage versions of Errors have been successfully mounted, from William Poel’s important 1895 Elizabethan-revival production to contemporary ones at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. Stagings that avoid big production values open the door to exploring Errors’s language and its shifting and complex tones, and those – such as RSC productions by Clifford Williams in 1962 or by Tim Supple in 1996 – come closest, although in different ways, to realizing Errors’s rich multivalence, as evoked by the Rowe frontispiece. The historical adaptability of The Comedy of Errors expresses the play’s multidimensionality
.166
Stage: the Restoration and the nineteenth century
Although Errors went largely unproduced during the Restoration, extant promptbooks indicate that it may have been performed at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin, c. 1670; possibly at the Barbican ‘Nursery’ in London, a training company for young actors, c. 1672; and in Douai, France, perhaps for the English Roman Catholic college, c. 1694.167 John Ashbury’s Smock Alley promptbook (a mark-up of part of a copy of the Third Folio of 1664) is representative; it cuts Shakespeare’s shortest play by a remarkable 30% (Evans, 8.75), possibly with student or amateur actors in mind. The first scene, for example, loses some forty lines of Egeon’s recounted grief and tragic narrative detail. Syracusan Antipholus’ ruminations in 1.2 about Ephesian magic disappear, as does almost all the debate between Luciana and Adriana about marriage in 2.1 (see Evans, 3.2). The ensuing cuts systematically strip out Errors’s darker tonalities and its human and social concerns; what remains assumes the brevity, speed and punch of a Plautine romp.
In the first half of the eighteenth century, Errors was adapted as a stage farce under the titles Everybody Mistaken (1716) and See If You Like It (1734).168 In the second half of the century, it was largely replaced by the actor-writer Thomas Hull’s adaptation, which theatre historians believe was first performed in 1762 at Covent Garden (Var., 525). With various alterations, Hull’s Errors was revived regularly – and with increasing frequency – during the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. Hull’s version was popular enough to be printed twice, privately in 1770 and again, revised, in 1793, holding the stage for some fifty years (Var., 525 – 6, 542). Hull’s influential 1793 text sentimentalizes the relationship between Syracusan Antipholus and Dromio, deepens Adriana’s pathos, fills out the recognition events in Act 5 and eliminates the closing conversation between the Dromios. In Hull’s opening scene, for example, the hints in Egeon’s narrative of encompassing nature and providential order recede, along with his fatalism; the scene moves economically, despite added sympathetic interruptions by the Duke, but forfeits its cosmic implications. Similarly, in 1.2, Syracusan Antipholus’ fantasia about Ephesian witchcraft disappears, replaced by a lament over the lost comforts of a father’s love, with magic ebbing as a theme. In 2.1, Hull retains the women’s debate on marriage but adds lines to Luciana’s defence of female forbearance, re-enforcing patriarchal values against Adriana’s egalitarian revisionism. The byplay between Syracusan Antipholus and Dromio in 2.2 drops out, presumably on account of its bawdiness. Ephesian Dromio’s lament at being beaten in 3.1 is likewise cut, leaving violence against servants unquestioned. To Adriana’s advances, Syracusan Antipholus responds decorously and coldly, all hint of sexual misadventure deleted. Hull’s Errors is Syracuse to Shakespeare’s Ephesus: attitudes are conventionalized, music is introduced, rough edges filed away, sentimentality increased, Dark Ephesus brightened. Such complacency has its satisfactions – George Odell, for example, prefers Hull’s adaptation to Shakespeare’s original – but it forfeits the tragicomic dimension.169
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