Whenever I have a Shakespeare class, I always try to get The Comedy of Errors into the curriculum. (Since I let the students pick which plays we study, this is not guaranteed to happen.) It has some reasons for this: Of all of Shakespeare's plays, it is the shortest, clocking in at just over 14,000 words; it hues closely to the concept of the dramatic unities (character, time, and place), which makes it easier to follow; and it's flat out funny. Yes, a performance of it is better than reading it--as is quite often the case with Shakespeare--and I usually show them the Globe 2014 version. While it's not the best one I've ever seen (that would be the 2014 Utah Shakespeare Festival production), it's a lot of fun and it gives the class a lot to enjoy. One of the things that's amazing to me about this play is the way that Shakespearean preoccupations still manage to haunt the play, giving this light, breezy comedy unexpected depth. Yes, the zaniness of the plot tends to overshadow any deeper contemplations, I admit it. However, these themes are powerful though mildly drawn. For example, he considers the inevitability of death, the plasticity of madness and sanity, and the intricacies of identity, all while having two sets of identically named and -dressed twins galivanting through Ephesus in a single afternoon. On Death The play begins with a tragic story from Egeon. He explains the convoluted setup for the hilarity that's to come. And though people rightly fixate on the highly improbable chance of Egeon and Emilia both having one natural-born and one adopted son being split apart "by a mighty rock" (1.1.101), what fascinates me is the unjustly punitive laws that Duke Solinus' country has embraced. He explains, If any born at Ephesus be seen This takes trade wars to a whole new level (as it was merchant-class related problems that led to this harsh law), meaning that Egeon is bounded for a doom of birth. Shakespeare doesn't make a lot of this--people being born into their castes fits his view of the world (just look at how Dromioes are treated)--but to me it's indicative of the Homeric concept of "being born to die". Consider the first two lines of the play: "Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall / And by the doom of death end woes and all." Yet in the exuberance of the rest of the play, this possibility is almost entirely ignored. Unlike the later play Measure for Measure, where the possible death of a character is due to a rather uncriminal action (in the case of The Comedy of Errors, it's by virtue of his homeland; in Measure, it's by virtue of fathering a child on a fiancé), the characters don't seek to resolve the problem as a matter of course. That it resolves itself happily is more a generic trope than anything else, though a more somber ending wouldn't jive with the colorful Ephesus that we see here. Nevertheless, death is everywhere in Shakespeare's plays, and he uses that all too-familiar visage to season his comedies with less than comedic outcomes. I appreciate this, as it means that there is nothing that can truly be taken for granted. Indeed, plays like Othello and Romeo and Juliet generate a tragicomic tone that ends on tragedy for the very reason that sometimes Shakespeare won't allow the plot to protect the characters. Sometimes, even in what might seem like a comedy, the stakes can be felt this way, with The Comedy of Errors as a fair proof of that. On Madness Insanity is another constant in his plays. Broadly speaking, there are plenty of other pieces of drama--Shakespearean and contemporaneous to him--that treat on this theme. (As an example of this, I often think of 4.2 of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi wherein the eponymous Duchess is confronted by upwards of eight madmen in order to try to torture her.) Though pre-Enlightenment, the English Renaissance was hardly a medieval haven of pure superstition. Sure, they had their quirks--their beliefs in the balance of bodily humors and how they thought people's eyes work are a couple that spring to mind--but they weren't allergic to the concept of reason. After all, it's Hamlet who says, "Sure He that made us with such large discourse, / Looking before and after, gave us not / That capability and god-like reason / To fust in us unused […]" (4.4.34-38). The depravation of one's ability to reason is something that, I think, we still fear to a certain extent, our scientific process into the workings of the mind notwithstanding. For a late-sixteenth century playwright, it's clear that the value of being able to think was high on Shakespeare's list. The characters in The Comedy of Errors are prone to ascribe witchcraft, sorcery, or satanic influence to explain the otherwise inexplicable behaviors of the Antipholi. During 4.4, as Antipholus of Ephesus strikes out at Doctor Pinch, Antipholus' courtesan shouts, "Mark how he trembles in his ecstasy" (46). A few lines later, the doctor's analysis is in: "Both man and master is possessed. / I know it by their pale and deadly looks" (87-88). His prescription is within the boundaries of accepted practices of the time: " They must be bound and laid in some dark room" (89), a typical remedy for those deemed insane. (This is the treatment that Malvolio suffers in the latter part of Twelfth Night, too.) But the judgment on loss of wit runs both ways. Antipholus of Syracuse (I use the mnemonic of the "stranger" twin to remember this), having beaten the man he thought was his servant, looks about the bustling port of Ephesus and tells the audience They say this town is full of cozenage, After some shenanigans, Antipholus of Syracuse surmises that "Lapland sorcerers inhabit here" (4.3.11), which gives rise to his assumption that it is the courtesan who is in league with Satan: ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE And while the courtesan tries to pass it off as a fit of being "marvelous merry" ("being hyper", I suppose, would be our modern version of this), it's clear that this explanation loses its validity as the play rushes to its ridiculous and enjoyable ending. Surely it is a crazy version of Ephesus, one with hints of violence inside the irrational. Only once reason reasserts itself in the lengthy fifth act do we see violence subside. Who's mad and who's not only becomes clear to the characters when the correct identities can be asserted, which leads us to… On Identity The last piece of this play that both informs the entirety and dances on the fringes is the concept of identity. My Norton International Student Edition (not for sale in the US or Canada) has an opening essay on the play by none other than Stephen Greenblatt. In it, he points out Montaigne's story about a Frenchman: […] a cunning imposter succeeded in assuming the identity of Martin Guerre, a man who had disappeared some years before. The imposter lived in the community for three years, sleeping with Guerre's wife and farming his land, until the real Martin Guerre unexpectedly returned. Convicted of fraud, the imposter confessed and was hanged. (717) Greenblatt goes on with another Montaigne quote: "[…] The more I frequent myself and know myself, the more my deformity astonish me, and the less I understand myself" (717). These as a preface help to underscore just how crucial identity is to the characters--and, by extension, to us. The entire reason Antipholus of Syracuse is wandering the wide world is in order to find his long-lost mother and brother. He'd grown up with Egeon, knowing that he had family, and at last he is seeking them out. In one of this play's rare monologues (the best resources for knowing the minds of Shakespearean characters), he says, I to the world am like a drop of water His Dromio has his own existential crises when the servant happens upon Nell, the kitchen wench and wife to the Dromio of Ephesus. "Do you know me sir? Am I Dromio? Am I your man? Am I myself?" (3.2.73-74). These questions make us laugh, as does the exaggerated, grotesque description of poor Nell, but only because we're in this version of the world where doppelgangers exist. In our own, we only have our own mirrors to look in, our own sense of self when we ask if we are who we are.
Though he has his fair share of foibles (as do all of us; as do all of Shakespeare's characters), Antipholus of Ephesus has done things in his past--including fighting by the duke's side in war--that differentiate him from his twin. Antipholus of Ephesus is of a faster, hotter temper. But, like his brother, he is quick to beat Dromio who--like his brother--is fast to respond with a pun and a fetch of wit. The fact that the Antipholi do behave differently shows his trademark knack for characterization and points strongly to an individual sense of self. After all, Dromio of Syracuse has quite different taste in women than Dromio of Ephesus does. Keeping that in mind, what does it mean to be "a drop of water that in the ocean seeks another drop"? Not just in terms of the vast ocean of humanity, but also within our relationships and interactions? While in a society and a rapidly growing, globalized world, what does it mean to be one's self? And what do we do when we find someone we are so similar to that the connection is uncanny? Pretty profound questions for a comedy, I'd say. |
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