The Comedy of Errors

The RSC Shakespeare
Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen
Chief Associate Editors: Jan Sewell and Will Sharpe
Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro,
Dee Anna Phares, Héloïse Sénéchal

The Comedy of Errors
Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen
Introduction and Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater: Jonathan Bate
Commentary: Charlotte Scott and Héloïse Sénéchal
Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Esme Miskimmin
In Performance: Penelope Freedman (RSC stagings) and Jan Sewell (overview)
The Director’s Cut (interviews by Jonathan Bate and Kevin Wright):
Paul Hunter, Nancy Meckler, and Tim Supple

Editorial Advisory Board
Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director,
Royal Shakespeare Company
Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK
Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University,
Western Australia
Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature,
Université de Genève, Switzerland
Jacqui O’Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company
Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan
Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA
James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
Columbia University, USA
Tiffany Stern, Professor and Tutor in English, University of Oxford, UK

Introduction

Plautus Translated

Farce, Comedy, and Identity: The Critics Debate

About the Text

Key Facts

The Comedy of Errors

List of Parts

Act 1

Scene 1

Scene 2

Act 2

Scene 1

Scene 2

Act 3

Scene 1

Scene 2

Act 4

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Act 5

Scene 1

Textual Notes

Scene-by-Scene Analysis

The Comedy of Errors
in Performance:
The RSC and Beyond

Four Centuries of
The Comedy of Errors
: An Overview

At the RSC

The Director’s Cut: Interviews with Paul Hunter, Nancy Meckler, and Tim Supple

Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater

Beginnings

Playhouses

The Ensemble at Work

The King’s Man

Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology

Further Reading and Viewing

References

Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

A merchant of Syracuse has identical twin sons. One is stolen at the age of seven. The other’s name is changed to that of the lost boy, in his memory. When grown up, he wanders the Mediterranean in search of his brother, finally chancing upon the seaport where he lives. The wanderer encounters the mistress, the wife, and other acquaintances of the brother and is inevitably mistaken for him. When he denies all knowledge of the people who greet him, they assume that he is mad and attempt to have him locked up—save that by a further confusion they apprehend the other twin, the one who
does
know them. The audience awaits the moment of resolution that will come when the twins appear onstage together.

Such is the plot of Plautus’
Menaechmi
, a Roman comedy familiar to any Elizabethan with a classical education—which is to say any young man who had been to university and many who had reached no further than the upper level of grammar school. When
The Comedy of Errors
was performed before an audience of London lawyers and their patrons in the Christmas festivities of 1594, it was instantly recognized as being “like to Plautus his
Menaechmus
.” Some years later, a lawyer named John Manningham made the same link, describing
Twelfth Night
, Shakespeare’s later comedy of twins and mistaken identity, as “much like
The Comedy of Errors
or
Menaechmi
in Plautus.” While we applaud difference, Shakespeare’s first audiences favored likeness: a work was good not because it was original, but because it resembled an admired classical exemplar, which in the case of comedy meant a play by Terence or Plautus.

Imitation was at the core of both education and artistic theory in Shakespeare’s world. But good imitation was never slavish: it necessitated an overgoing of the original, often achieved by the fusion of different sources or the complicating of an already complicated plotline. Thus Shakespeare proved his cleverness to his audience of clever young lawyers. It is as if he is saying: Plautus presented one pair of identical twins, so I will give you two. The possibilities for confusion are greatly multiplied by this device. As well as the stranger being mistaken for the local man, and the local mistaken for the stranger, we have the servants of each being mistaken by their own master and the other’s master and the locals. Not to mention the masters mistaken by their servants. The comedy whereby an unmarried man in an alien environment is told that his wife is expecting him at home for dinner is doubled by the comedy of his slave receiving the unlooked-for attentions of the spherical kitchen maid with whom his twin has been sexually involved.

The Comedy of Errors
turns on the essential device of farce: exits and entrances. The wrong person keeps coming out of the door. Classical comedy provided a model in which the action of a drama takes place in a single location during the course of a single day.
Errors
is one of the few Shakespearean plays to follow this convention. The entire action takes place in the marketplace of Ephesus, its temporal structure framed by the Egeon plot (condemned in the morning, released in the evening). Unusually for Shakespeare, the exit and entrance doors represent specific locations: the Phoenix (Antipholus and Adriana’s house), the Porcupine (the Courtesan’s house), and the Priory. They may even have been labeled thus in performance. From the point of view of staging, this device was well fitted to indoor academic drama—as the play’s brevity was suited to its being but a small part of a longer evening’s entertainment at the Inns of Court.
Errors
is by some margin the shortest of Shakespeare’s plays. It has around 1,800 lines; some of the tragedies and histories are more than twice as long. There is no surviving evidence of performance on the public stage, but this is no guarantee that the play was kept in reserve for private performance to elite audiences. The device of the doors could have been adapted for the public theaters, perhaps with the upstage-center “discovery space” serving for the Priory in which the lost mother is found.

Though the Ephesian market economy is brought to life by means of Angelo the goldsmith and various merchants, the largest parts in the play belong to the strangers and the wife. The central comic device of mistaken identity is a means to the discovery of identity. Meeting someone who thinks you are someone you are not is a disturbing but ultimately invaluable way of finding out who you really are. Antipholus of Syracuse has been traveling in search of his family. On arriving in Ephesus and being mistaken for his long-lost brother, he realizes that his own self is not secure:

These lines come to the quick of that experience of wandering and wondering which shapes so many of Shakespeare’s comedies. How can we reconcile the self’s conflicting need for autonomy (the single drop of water) and community (the ocean)? The sense of loss and confusion prepares us for the imagery of Ephesus as a mad world and the potential nightmare—the
reductio ad absurdum
of farce— whereby we are led to imagine what it would be like if everybody else were mad and we alone were sane and therefore taken to be mad.

Comedy’s fond conclusion is that by finding the right partner we find ourselves. Antipholus of Syracuse finds not only father, mother, and brother, but also future wife, in the form of Luciana, sister to his brother’s wife. As in other early comedies such as
The Taming of the Shrew
and
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
, there are two strong roles for the boy actors in Shakespeare’s company. Whereas the two pairs of brothers are identical twins, the sisters are of contrasting appearance and character. Their names are indicative: “Adriana” means “of the earth” and “Luciana” “of the light”; the former is brunette and the latter blond; the wife is perceived as shrewish and the sister as divinely beautiful. But in the play’s most richly written speeches, Shakespeare goes beyond the clichés of femininity suggested by these dualities.

As Shakespeare’s comedies variously suggest, happy endings are all too often mere illusions or at best momentary suspensions of life’s messiness. If we may assume that the twins are reasonably alike in nature as well as identical in appearance, then there is a strong possibility that in the imaginary afterlife of the action Antipholus’ marriage to Luciana, despite its sparky beginning, will end up all too similar to his brother’s marriage to her sister. While unmarried, Luciana speaks in favor of wifely submission and accuses her sister of shrewishness. But her sister has had to put up with a husband who prefers to spend his time about town—not least in the company of a courtesan—rather than at home with his wife. Most of Shakespeare’s comedies are celebrations of courtship, but the married couples met along the way are shaky role models. Once Luciana discovers what husbands are really like, her theory will be sorely tested.

Adriana’s marriage is patched up at the end of the play, but there is no undoing the pain she has expressed in the lines that turn Antipholus of Syracuse’s self-centered image of the drop of water into an account of how every action has consequences for those who love us: