By contrast, in 2004, Joe Banno’s Folger Shakespeare Theatre production was ‘Mafia-chic’, with the opening scene set in a Brooklyn-style Italian-American restaurant where a godfather-Duke interrogated Egeon across a checked tablecloth with breadsticks and dining items used to illustrate the backstory. The women were sex-starved, the goldsmith looked like a rapper, and Syracusan Dromio turned into a stand-up comic. The next year the Shakespeare Theatre of Washington, DC, produced Douglas Wager’s surrealist Errors with a Salvador Dali melting clock and an M.C. Escher stairway. The two Dromios were played by African-American actors, so that their beatings by white Antipholuses had political resonance and their reunion a profound air of special recognition (black Dromios were first introduced in John Philip Kemble’s Comedy of Errors in 1780). As the two Dromios spoke the closing lines (5.1.417–26), they began to remove parts of their costumes and make-up, and their tone of voice softened from the ‘theatrical’ to the conversational, as if their human identities were being revealed under the confusion and superficiality of costumes. In 2006, Shakespeare’s Globe in London demonstrated the play’s solid dramatic structure with a bare-stage, minimum-prop version, infused with visual and sound gags but emphasizing easy transitions and ensemble acting, although the characters did acquire a caricatured quality. In 2012, the British comedian Lenny Henry starred (as Syracusan Antipholus) in a National Theatre production of Errors directed by Dominic Cooke. This acclaimed staging had a modern, edgy, urban-industrial feel, brightened by Henry’s comic acting and by Adriana and Luciana’s hipness as they swirled martinis on their condo balcony. By contrast, the summer 2013 production in New York’s Central Park, directed by Daniel Sullivan, set the play in 1940s Damon Runyonesque upstate New York, with one of the Dromios suffering abuse by spaghetti but with the ending ‘unexpectedly’ achieving ‘some of the emotional heat’ of the recognition scenes in later Shakespeare (Isherwood).
Explicitly political, a 1950s South African production of Errors ‘subvert[ed] and interrogate[d] official culture’ and became a Bakhtinian ‘communal refusal to be bound by the rigid strictures of theatrical norms developed by white culture’ (Quince, 549), reminiscent of effects in Komisarjevsky’s version. Subsequent South African productions used Errors for socio-cultural satire and carnivalesque purposes and adaptations were enacted not only by whites but by Asians and black South Africans. In 2012 the award-winning actress-director Corinne Jaber directed a Comedy of Errors set in Kabul, performed by Afghani actors and spoken in Dari, as part of the Globe Theatre’s World Shakespeare Festival. Errors’s tale of broken families bore echoes of war-torn Afghanistan, and the reunion of Egeon and Emilia at the end was as deeply moving as the flirtation between Luciana and Syracusan Antipholus was delightful (see Fig. 22). Likewise in 2012, Palestinian director Amir Nizar Zuabi’s production for the RSC used the conflict between Syracuse and Ephesus to allude to contemporary middle-eastern strife, with a shipping-port setting, machine-gun-toting guards and torture of illegal immigrants.183
22 Act 5, Scene 1. Roy-e-Sabs production, directed by Corinne Jaber at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, 2012. Performed by Afghan actors speaking in Dari, with Afghan music and dance. Farzana Sayed Ahmad as Rodaba (Luciana) and Abdul Haq as Arsalan (Antipholus of Syracuse)
The most noted late twentieth-century adaptation of Errors was The Bomb-itty of Errors (New York, 1999), a comic, hip-hop, rap operetta, in the tradition of, but a far cry from, The Boys from Syracuse. Bomb-itty employs ‘rap to mime the verbal texture of early Shakespearean comedy, the regular beat, alliteration and rhyme, density of wordplay and metaphor’, while it ‘incorporates elements of African-American verbal culture that suggest analogies to Shakespeare’ (Lanier, Popular, 78). In 2001, Yasunari Takabashi created a Japanese adaptation, The Kyogen of Errors, which combined elements of Japanese Kyogen (akin to commedia dell’arte) and Noh drama.184 The adaptability and broad appeal of The Comedy of Errors appear to be inexhaustible.
Screen
The Comedy of Errors has infiltrated cinema and television in localized and liberally adapted forms. Laurel and Hardy’s 1936 film Our Relations echoes Errors in its multiple pairs of twins and plot motifs.185 The 1981 Mexican film Los Gemelos Alborotados transposes the action to a rural Mexican town with sombrero-wearing good and evil twins. The celebrated Bollywood Hindi comedy Angoor, directed in India by Gulzar in 1982, makes the play into a domestic farce set in a modern Indian city, with the travellers getting the resident’s household high on opium-laced aubergine snacks. The traveller-protagonist’s reading of crime novels generates his misperceptions of the locals. Angoor is one of several Indian films based on Errors. The 1988 American film Big Business, starring Lily Tomlin and Bette Midler, uses the twin motif to comment on corporate rapacity: Errors’s symmetries provide attractive opportunities for social satire. For television, a 1984 BBC production (available on video), directed by James Cellan-Jones, forfeits some comic voltage in favour of close-ups that attend to the characters’ inner lives.
Over three hundred years after the Rowe frontispiece, those productions and many others confirm The Comedy of Errors’s enduring vitality, its range of tones and generic values, its emotional depth and mystery and its adaptability. The play’s central trope of doubleness and its pattern of repetition-with-difference lend all its aspects multivalency and reach. The play’s concerns – identity, debt, religion, time, marriage, language, genre – radiate prismatically from the sense of multiplicity that overwhelms Ephesus, that workaday centre of commerce and, simultaneously, enchanted world. Errors’s very nexus of doubled, paradoxical values and tones has made the play delightfully open to different critical and theatrical interpretations. It has become the paradigm: every comedy is a comedy of errors.
* * *
1 The relative dating of these plays remains conjectural. Wells and Taylor place Errors (1594) chronologically after both Two Gentlemen and Shrew (see Oxf). Hodgdon speculates, however, that Shrew, the most problematic to date, may be post-1594 (35).
2 On mirroring scenes and episodes.
3 Brown argued that Errors creates laughter more through action and ‘situations’ than through linguistic play (272).
4 On the uncanny, see Freud’s famous essay ‘The “Uncanny” ’ (1919), in Freud, 19 – 60.
5 Heywood, Wife (sometimes attributed to Joshua Cooke). See Foakes, lii. Heywood’s passage turns from verse to prose, as if the speaker were carried away by the force of the description.
6 Sidney calls comedy ‘an imitation of the common errors of our life’ (Apology, 98). Heller argues that ‘every comedy is a comedy of errors’ (44).
7 On Errors’s critical history, see Miola, ‘Play’.
8 See Rowe, ‘Some Account of the Life, etc. of Mr. William Shakespeare’, in Works, 1.xvii, xxii; Jonson, ‘To the Memory of my Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare’, in F, sig. A4r.
9 Pope2, 1.xxi; sig. B1r.
10 See Baldwin, Small Latine; Structure.
11 Betteridge & Walker, 8.
12 See Rigolot, 1220; Shelburne, 138.
13 Evanthius, in De fabula (attributed to Donatus in the Renaissance), describes the epitasis of comedy as the ‘development and enlargement of the conflict and, as it were, the knot of all the errors’ (305).
14 The word derives from the Latin verb errare, which, according to the OLD, collects several meanings: aimless movement (‘to wander’; ‘to float or drift’); uncertainty (‘to be in doubt’); and departure from reason or rectitude (‘to think or act in error’; ‘to stray from the path of virtue’).
15 Errors’s structuring into the plot of an alternative, tragic ending is a device that Shakespeare will exploit elsewhere, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
16 See Griffiths, esp. 298 – 9.
17 See Shelburne, 141–2.
18 ‘Renaissance high culture seems to have foregrounded the involuntary character of error, with its uncanny origin and often disastrous consequences’ (Rigolot, 1223).
19 See Aen., 6.27: ‘hic labor ille domus et inextricabilis error’, a reference to the house of the Minotaur, an inextricable labyrinth built with great labour.
20 Mistaken identity fascinated Elizabethans. In a letter of 10 July 1590, the traveller Sir Henry Wotton described meeting in Florence someone ‘so like me as we are saluted in the street for one another’, ‘the spirit of myself’ (Wotton, 1.282).
21 On inwardness, see Maus.
22 Lanier, ‘Character’, 317.
23 See Freedman, Gaze, 84 – 8.
24 On recent performances of Luciana as ‘Edwardian’ and ‘prim’, see Rutter, 457.
25 See Freedman, Gaze, 89 – 92.
26 See Carroll, Two Gentlemen, 3 –19.
27 Findlay argues that Errors ‘is almost obsessively concerned with the minutiae of social decorum’ because ‘[r]itualized interactions which endow the self with proper respect – make the self a sacred thing – are the essence of … social order’ (338, 352).
28 See Lanier, ‘Character’.
29 On emotional responses to the credit system in early modern England, see Leinwand, esp. 42– 80.
30 See Lanier, ‘Character’, 307–10.
31 Antipholus’ reported singeing of Pinch’s beard (see 5.1.170 –1) suggests the further degradation of symbolic emasculation.
32 Discussing Bakhtin, Selleck comments, ‘In this model, the self not only counters and responds to the other, it emerges through the conceptual framework of the other’ (4); see Selleck, 1–20.
33 See Selleck, 36 –7.
34 In these speeches, argues Piesse, Adriana ‘acknowledges the inadequacy of a single way of seeing’ (159).
35 On the Renaissance fascination with metamorphosis, see Carroll, Metamorphosis, 3 – 40.
36 See Bate.
37 See Boehrer; also Maisano.
38 Circe was a widely applied Renaissance image. Gosson’s The School of Abuse (1579) links Circe to poetry’s transformational power: ‘These are the Cuppes of Circes, that turne reasonable Creatures into brute Beastes’ (sig. A3v): Shakespeare may be alluding to anti-theatrical arguments. In Errors, Roberts sees the expression of Renaissance ‘anxieties’ over ‘seduction, rebellion, subversive enthrallment of men by women, loss of male rationality’ and ultimately fiction’s power to destabilize truth (‘Circe’, 203; see 194 –206).
39 On the ending, Altman comments: ‘as each individual’s practical understanding increases through the collective testimony … so also does his concept of self, seen now in all its relations’ (174).
40 See Brooks, ‘Themes’.
41 See: ‘mart[s]’, 1.1.17, 1.2.27, 74; ‘goods’, 1.1.20, 42, 1.2.2; ‘confiscate’, 1.1.20, 1.2.2; ‘dispose[d]’, 1.1.20, 83, 1.2.73 (and ‘undisposed’, 80); ‘thousand’, 1.1.21, 1.2.81, 84; ‘too soon’, 1.1.60, 1.2.2; ‘five’, 1.1.100, 132, 1.2.26; ‘inquisitive’, 1.1.125, 1.2.38; ‘quest’, 1.1.129, 1.2.40; ‘travel[s]’, 1.1.139, 1.2.15.
42 See Elliott, 61–2; Cartwright, ‘Language’, 337– 8.
43 See: ‘woe[s]’, 1.1.2, 27, 108, 2.1.15; ‘adverse’/‘adversity’, 1.1.15, 2.1.34; ‘bound[s]’, 1.1.81, 133, 2.1.17; ‘burden[ed]’, 1.1.55, 107, 2.1.36; ‘helpless’, 1.1.157, 2.1.39.
44 See Cartwright, ‘Language’, 341–2; Parker, ‘Bible’, 71; also Cartwright, ‘Scepticism’, 225 – 8.
45 In that regard, he is quasi-allegorical; on the interpenetration of the mimetic and allegorical in English Renaissance drama, see Lin, 71–104.
46 See Carroll, Two Gentlemen, 64 –7; Woudhuysen, 16 –33.
47 In Errors’s first scene alone, Shakespeare draws freely from the Renaissance’s rich inventory of rhetorical forms of repetition, using polyptoton (see 1.1.38n., on hap), antimetabole (see 1.1.49n.), diacope (see 1.1.66 –7n.), anadiplosis (see 1.1.70 –1n.) and epanalepsis (see 1.1.84n.).
48 Objects accompany farcical action. Errors features a chain, a ring, a key, two purses of coins and a rope’s end, each passed once or more times among characters; in Love’s Labour’s Lost, multiple letters circulate from scene to scene.
49 See Bruster, 75 –7.
50 Egeon the merchant’s world-weariness cannot be separated from ‘the uncertainties of his mercantile estate’ (Perry, 42).
51 Harris, 30. Harris argues further that the tension between internal and external causal forces mirrors ‘later sixteenth-century medical discourse’, raised in Errors by allusions to venereal disease.
52 See 1.2.87, 104; 2.1.1, 74, 77; 2.2.2, 175; 4.1.96, 107.
53 See Parker, ‘Bible’.
54 See Finkelstein, 334, 336 –7; also Freedman, Gaze, 100.
55 Hamilton, 61; see 58 – 85.
56 On the Abbess’s doorway, through which characters exit in 5.1, as representing a final convergence of time and space, see Low, esp. 80 –7.
57 On English ideas of companionate marriage in the sixteenth century, see Wayne. On the play as advocating a companionate view, see Strier.
58 According to Luxon, humanist thinkers reserved the oneness of souls largely for male friendship; see above.
59 Adriana’s complicated views may reflect some ambivalence in emerging Protestant ideas of marriage; see Matz, ‘Introduction’.
60 On poetic geography, see Gillies, esp. 1–7; also Sullivan.
61 See Martin, ‘Artemis’, 366.
62 Baldwin speculates that Shakespeare might have had in mind a second ancient Epidamnus in Ionia near Ephesus (see Genetics, 113 –14, 149 –50), but for a trade route to Sicilian Syracuse the Illyrian city makes the better sense.
63 Two other cities, Epidaurus and Corinth, receive seven mentions in Errors’s opening and concluding scenes; they enhance Errors’s sense of Hellenism, biblical times and modern commerce. On Epidaurus, see 1.1.93 LN; on Corinth, see 1.1.87, 93n.
64 Shakespeare probably derived his geographic knowledge for Errors from ‘the leading atlas of its time’ (Parks, 97), Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Antwerp, 1570), the 1579 edition, one of whose maps features Epidamnus and Epidaurus on the eastern Adriatic coastline. The ‘Nomina … Antiqua’ in Ortelius lists ‘Ephesus’, ‘Epidium’, ‘Epidamnus’ and ‘Epidaurus’ one below the other in a column. Ortelius’s Theatrum contains a map of Paul’s New Testament peregrinations that might have brought Ephesus and Corinth to mind; no other single source provides so many of Errors’s geographic details, especially concentrated close to each other in entries and maps (Parks). Shakespeare also could have consulted Solinus Polyhistor’s Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium, to which the opening line of Errors alludes, and which mentions Epidaurus and Ephesus in separate places; or Cooper’s Thesaurus, which contains dispersed entries on Ephesus, Corinth and Epidamnus but not on Adriatic Epidaurus.
65 Errors’s goldsmith Angelo may recall the Ephesian silversmiths of Acts who become enraged against Paul.
66 On the green world, see Frye.
67 In The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare locates the values of the mundane and the madcap in one character, Petruchio.
68 See Martin, ‘Artemis’, and Hart.
69 See van Elk, ‘Misidentification’.
70 Kehler, 229; King, 5 – 8.
71 See Cartwright, ‘Surprising’; van Elk, ‘Genre’, sees the play’s generic stra
ins of romance and farce as in competition with each other.
72 See Witmore, 62– 81.
73 Salgādo, 82; see also Witmore, 66.
74 Farce is often set in motion by a mischief-maker who embodies the form’s spirit; the role of Dream’s Puck or Twelfth Night’s Sir Toby is here fulfilled by error.
75 Freedman, Gaze, 105.
76 Freedman, ‘Farce’, 234.
77 On defining romance, see Fuchs, 1–11; on romance as a medieval and Renaissance form, see Cooper, Romance, 1– 44.
78 See Parker, Romance, 4.
79 See Parker, Romance, 16 – 44. According to Dolven, romance has a ‘generic habit of subjecting settled ideas to the disruptions of error and marvel’ (135).
80 See Shelburne, 139.
81 See Parker, ‘Bible’, 56 – 61.
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