My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
My aunt Regina was in a production of The Boys from Syracuse at the Goodspeed Opera House, which we were taken to as kids, and it was my introduction to Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare’s shortest play. Plautus’ Menaechmi is the source material, except Shakespeare added another set of twins to add to the confusion. Comedy of Errors plays like a bat out of hell. You don’t even need to do it WELL. The play works, whether you are competent at comedy or not. When you do it well, of course, it’s anarchy and the audience doesn’t have a moment to breathe (preferable, because the play is absurd and if an audience is given time to think, they can poke holes in the entire premise). The device is artificial. Two sets of twins. Identical twin brothers who have servants who are also identical twins. And not only that, but they all have the same names. What are the odds!! ALSO, the Abbess who lives in seclusion isn’t who she says she is!
The whole thing is preposterous! It’s even funnier because … you’d think after the first couple times of misidentifcation you might put it together, like “wait … maybe my identical twin is here and she thinks I’m him?” But no! Antipholus of Syracuse is bombarded by an angry wife, an angry goldsmith, all kinds of people running up to him and shouting condemnations – and he has no idea who these people are or what the hell they are talking about. And he puts it up to sorcery, witchcraft, etc. When you READ it, it might get a little tiresome but when you see a good production of it, the joy of it is in the anticipation, and the accumulation of these misunderstandings. You are, at all times, WAY smarter than everybody else onstage – and this is one of the keys of really good comedy.
So by the time you get to Act IV, the MOMENT the angry goldsmith comes onstage, you alREADY start laughing, because you know he’s mad at the wrong person, and shit’s about to get even funnier.
All that being said: the words “doom of death” appear in the 2nd line of the play, which is not only a comedy, but a comedy where the word “comedy” is in the title. DOOM OF DEATH!! In the first scene, the father speaks for, my God, 10-15 minutes, laying out the entire story of his wife, his twin boys, the twin servants, the storm at sea, the ship cracking apart, the poor wife strapped to a mast with one baby – the other baby strapped to the other mast – which puts really unfortunate vivid pictures in your mind – horrifying! We need this information, yes, but again, this ridiculous comedy is haunted by death and destruction. Shakespeare’s themes are always present, even in early plays and the sonnets: the two constants are time and death. The two, of course, are connected. In The Comedy of Errors, there’s actually a deadline written into the script: everything is going to come to a head at five o’clock!
In one of the books I read, it’s mentioned that Comedy of Errors is the only play where Shakespeare mentions “America”.
The other thing I got in my reading is the importance of St. John’s Letter to the Ephesians. Probably deliberate of Shakespeare to set his play in Ephesus? His audience would recognize immediately. And then there’s all the “wives obey your husbands” talk. What’s interesting though is there is an ancient Greco-Roman atmosphere/environment: Syracuse, Ephesus, the names, the source material! But laid on top of it is Christianity. In the time gap between Plautus and Shakespeare … Jesus happened.
And so I guess Shakespeare was doing this consciously, so as not to write something completely pagan. I mean, I’m just speculating. It’s all speculation. The Christianity here feels super super-imposed, in other words.
I’ve seen this Shakespeare play probably more than any other. It’s un-breakable. You really cannot fuck it up.
Quotes on the play
“This comedy is taken very much from the Menaechmi of Plautus, and is not an improvement on it.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays
“We do not think his forte would have ever lain in imitating or improving on what others here invented, so much as inventing for himself, and perfecting what he invented — not perhaps by the omission of faults, but by the addition of the highest excellences. His own genius was strong enough to bear him up, and he soared longest and best on unborrowed plumes.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays
“[In comedy Shakespeare] seems to repose, or to luxuriate, as in a mode of thinking congenial to his nature.”
— Dr. Samuel Johnson
“His rhymes, surviving from an old convention in comedy, rattle like bleached bones.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare
“‘What I should think of this, I cannot tell,’ says Antipholus of Syracuse (III, ii, 184). What he should think of course is that his twin brother has turned up. He does not so think for the simple reason that he is in a conspiracy with Shakespeare to regale us with the spectacle of his talent for confusion.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare
Ha! That’s exactly what I was saying!
“Nor is the business of the shipwreck which has separated Aegeon from one of his sons more than a hint of the shipwrecks which in the last plays will be so beautiful and awful, and so important somehow to the life of Shakespeare’s imagination. This catastrophe occurs only as a device to get twins separated, and to start the machinery of farce revolving.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare
“…to the year when he will have another try at twins, but will make one of them a girl and give her the name Viola.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare
“Few better farces have ever been written, and there is something appropriate in the thought that Shakespeare so early came to perfection; even if it was perfection in what in what is commonly considered an inferior dramatic type.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare
“One can picture Plautus-Shakespeare making actual puppets or using bits of colored cardboard and moving them about on a table to keep the characters and situations straight.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare
“It’s interesting that a shipwreck — a great Shakespearean theme — should come so early in Shakespeare’s career. In his later works it becomes a great purging test — not a punishment of guilt, but a way in which characters may learn their guilt and repent. In those works, also, the journey in water entails deaths and rebirths as well as the stripping off of the mask of a persona and the discovering of the real self. But nothing much is made of the theme in The Comedy of Errors.”
— W.H. Auden 1946 lecture
“The humor or force in The Comedy of Errors turns on identical twins. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona we have persons in disguise. Both turn on the difference between existence and essence. In The Comedy of Errors there are two existing people and two essences and you think it’s only one person. In the case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one existence apparently contains two essences. In disguise, you think one person is in fact two people.”
— W.H. Auden 1946 lecture
“This is an early instance of the characteristic Shakespearean storm, an event-in-the-world that had its counterpart in actual 16th-century storms, often devastating to the seafaring English nation of travelers, merchants, and explorers — but which is also a recurrent dramatic theme, from this early play through Othello and King Lear to the play aptly named The Tempest, that marks a turmoil both inside and outside the minds and psyches of the major characters.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All
“The storm takes place inside these characters as well as around them, despite the fact that they seem to have little ‘psychology’ or inwardness in the sense that we will come to expect from later Shakespeare plays. The depth of this play lies in its surface.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All
“[Identical twins were] a device of particular interest to Shakespeare as a playwright and also, perhaps, as a man. Himself the father of twins, Hamnet (who died young) and Judith, he would later place a pair of “identical” male and female twins at the heart of Twelfth Night, a comedy about shipwrecks, identity, and disguise that has much in common with The Comedy of Errors.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All
“Typically for Shakespeare, the major themes of the play are all doubly inflected, offering both benign and dangerous possibilities. Thus, for example, the question of dream, wonder, magic, and transformation — the journey to Ephesus as a place of wish fulfillment — has its dark underside in the fear of sorcery, trickery, and loss of control over events.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All
“The Comedy of Errors maps in clear and recognizable terms a pattern that we will find throughout Shakespeare: losing is finding; confusion the path to sanity; the stern edicts of the law may give way to mercy; and madness and dream offer a path to transformation.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All
“… in exactest consonance with the philosophical principles and character of farce, as distinguished from comedy and from entertainment.”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“Shakespeare may very well have felt in the early 1590’s that it would be a useful discipline to submit himself to the three unities, even if (as it turned out) he saw no subsequent need to employ them until he wrote The Tempest at the end of his career.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare
“Egeon allowed Shakespeare to open the play under the shadow of death and to keep this threat alive in the background, like a sword that has been drawn and not sheathed until it flashes into prominence again in Act V only to dissolve before the discoveries and accords of the final scene.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare
“It is true that in comedy Shakespeare was free to be himself from the start, whereas the shadow of Marlowe darkens the early histories (Richard III included) and Titus Andronicus.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“Shakespeare, who was to become the subtlest of all dramatists, already is very ambiguous in The Comedy of Errors.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“A role in a farce hardly seems an arena for inwardness, but genre never confined Shakespeare, even at his origins, and Antipholus of Syracuse is a sketch for the abysses of self that are to come.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“Antipholus of Syracuse falls in love to refind himself, presaging the erotic pattern that will be amiably satirized in Love’s Labour’s Lost. There the wit Berowne audaciously secularizes the Christian paradox that Shakespeare evades in The Comedy of Errors.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“It would be absurd to burden The Comedy of Errors with sociopolitical or other current ideological concerns, and yet it remains touching that Shakespeare, from the start, prefers his clowns to his merchants.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
^^ Harold Bloom can be a LOT, and his whole thesis of Shakespeare “inventing the human” just doesn’t hold together, but boy he has his moments.
“He was the author of The Comedy of Errors, but he was also the author of Henry VI … How can a man be both playwright and historian? Here is an antimony: the theatre with its dedication to illusion, history with its reverence for fact.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare
“The dream of restoration haunted Shakespeare throughout his life. In Comedy of Errors, a merchant of Syracuse, in search of his lost twins, is arrested in the rival city of Ephesus and is threatened with death if he cannot pay a heavy fine. At the end … the family is magically restored.”
— Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
Quotes from the play
… the always-wind-obeying deep…
— EGEON, Act I, sc i, 63
I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.
So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.
— ANTIPHOLUS (SYRACUSE), Act I, sc ii, 35-40
This fool-begged patience …
— ADRIANA, Act I, sc ii, 41
He asked me for a thousand marks in gold.
“’Tis dinnertime,” quoth I. “My gold,” quoth he.
“Your meat doth burn,” quoth I. “My gold,” quoth
he.
“Will you come?” quoth I. “My gold,” quoth he.
“Where is the thousand marks I gave thee, villain?”
“The pig,” quoth I, “is burned.”
— DROMIO (EPHESUS), Act II, sc i, 62-67
lol
ANTIPHOLUS (SYRACUSE): Shall I tell you why?
DROMIO (SYRACUSE): Ay, sir, and wherefore, for they
say every why hath a wherefore.
— Act II, sc ii, 42-43
DROMIO (EPHESUS):
Say what you will, sir, but I know what I know.
That you beat me at the mart I have your hand to
show;
If the skin were parchment and the blows you gave
were ink,
Your own handwriting would tell you what I think.
ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS:
I think thou art an ass.
— Act III, sc i, 11-15
Again, you literally cannot fuck that up. You could read it monotone and an audience would laugh.
LUCIANA:
Why call you me “love”? Call my sister so.
ANTIPHOLUS (SYRACUSE):
Thy sister’s sister.
LUCIANA:
That’s my sister.
ANTIPHOLUS (SYRACUSE):
No
— Act III, sc ii, 61-64
See above editorial comment. It’s un-fuck-up-able.
I warrant her rags and the tallow in them will burn a Poland winter. If she lives till doomsday, she’ll burn a week longer than the whole world.
— DROMIO (SYRACUSE), Act III, sc ii, 98-100
Time is a very bankrout and owes more than he’s worth to season.
Nay, he’s a thief too. Have you not heard men say
That time comes stealing on by night and day?
If he be in debt and theft, and a sergeant in the way,
Hath he not reason to turn back an hour in a day?
— DROMIO (SYRACUSE), Act IV, sc ii, 58-62
It is written they appear to men like angels of light. Light is an effect of fire, and fire will burn: ergo, light wenches will burn.
— DROMIO (SYRACUSE), Act IV, sc iii, 55-57
