A Comedy Of Errors – William Shakespeare, c. 1594 ★★★★

It's Raining Twins

Though I doubt many Shakespeare buffs put A Comedy Of Errors on their Bard Top Ten list, I have to ask: Does any comedy of his deliver the same measure of pure silly delight as this early farce? It’s not going to win anyone a Tony, no, but can you imagine an audience of youngsters having more fun watching another Shakespeare play?

Heck, I like it. More than that, I admire it. I said it, and now I’ll try to explain why I think you should, too.

The set-up is pretty broad. Two sets of twin brothers, one wealthy, the other purchased to be their slaves, are separated by an ocean storm, splitting them into two mismatched pairs of man and slave. Searching many years later, their father journeys into the right town, Ephesus, at the wrong time. Being from an enemy town, Syracuse, he awaits execution. All four twins are also in Ephesus. Two live there; the others visiting. The wife of one meets the other and complains he behaves as if they are strangers. Her anguish takes him aback:

Am I in Earth, in heaven, or in hell?
Sleeping or waking, mad or well-advised?
Known unto these, and to myself disguised!
I’ll say as they say, and persever so,
And in this mist at all adventures go. [Act II, scene ii, lines 225-229]

Making matters more confusing for everyone: The high-born twins go by the same name, Antipholus; as do the slave twins, Dromio. What parent this side of George Foreman would give multiple children the same first name, especially twins? Never mind, it works for the farce. It would be a short comedy indeed if the Antipholus from Syracuse went by “Gary” or somesuch. Clear everything up in a jiff.

You see why scholars downgrade A Comedy Of Errors. There is an air of contrivance about it.

Scholars differ on where A Comedy Of Errors belongs chronologically. For a while, I recall it was said to have been Shakespeare’s first authored play, but according to Wikipedia that view was perhaps out of date as far back as 1930. That year Shakespearean scholar E. K. Chambers declared it Shakespeare’s fifth play, behind four histories: the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III.

Another chronology covered on Wikipedia puts Comedy Of Errors ninth, after the aforementioned plays; Two Gentlemen Of Verona; The Taming Of The Shrew; Titus Andronicus; and a play the hovers just outside the officially accepted canon of Shakespeare authorship, Edward III.

An overview of the questions and controversies surrounding Shakespeare’s surviving legacy is an enjoyable detour, but I feel has relevance to our play today. Compared to the Henry VI plays especially, this reads to me like the work of someone with a professional confidence about him, an air of seasoning regarding stagecraft. 

Antipholus of Ephesus is arrested for not paying for a jeweled necklace made for him by the artisan Angelo. Angelo presented the necklace to the other Antipholus; this one doesn't understand why he should pay for something he never got. Image from https://www.imagekind.com/The-Comedy-of-Errors-Act--Scene-_art?IMID=7dda85b6-3f9e-4dd8-8062-569c1744ed2c.

The comedy is structured very well, building momentum through a series of encounters between the various Antipholi and Dromii and those who know or don’t know them. It keeps everyone guessing:

When I desired him to come home to dinner,

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.” “My gold,” quoth
he. [II.i.62-70]

Such rampant mistaking is punctuated by a lot of striking, mostly when a Dromios triggers an Antipholus, although other times, too. Other Shakespeare comedies employ puns or maladroit manners to get laughs. A Comedy Of Errors uses a lot of good old-fashioned slapstick.

PINCH: Give me your hand and let me feel your pulse.

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE: There is my hand, and let it feel your ear. (Strikes him.) [IV.iv. 53-54]

The Pelican edition I have may be the best way to appreciate A Comedy Of Errors. It provides brief explanations of archaic terms but not the historical analysis of, say, Folger or Oxford. Normally I prefer the latter approach, but have to say I appreciated the minimal expositoration here. Keeping track of the mismatched twins required all my concentration.

Pelican editor Frances E. Dolan makes a case for A Comedy Of Errors as a play of hidden depths, specifically on the matter of double identities and the subordination of women and slaves. I felt hers was a modernist overreading of the material, but I did sense an examination on the nature of kinship/twinship.

At the center of the play is loss; of freedom, of material wealth, of home, of spouse. It all centers around the separated twins. When we meet the first Antipholus, the one visiting from Syracuse, he speaks of his spiritual disquiet around needing a missing piece:

He that commends me to mine own content
Commends me to the thing I cannot get.
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. [I.ii. 33-40]

Shakespeare himself was the father of twins, Hamnet and Judith; did he have a sense of that unique psychic territory twins are said to share? Throughout the play, both Dromios react to their troubles with the same doughty common sense. Antipholus of Syracuse is more of a dreamer, and more likable, than his twin; but they share a solidity of purpose that drives events forward, a willingness to see matters through to their end.

While lacking the modern revivals enjoyed by other Shakespeare plays, The Comedy Of Errors was recently made into a rap musical. Perhaps its most famous incarnation was a Rodgers & Hart musical, made into this 1940 film, The Boys From Syracuse. Songs include "This Can't Be Love." Image from https://www.pinterest.com/jamespasikowski/the-boys-of-syracuse/

Brevity is a strength in most comedies; it may not be so with A Comedy Of Errors. Shakespeare’s shortest play, it crams a lot of incident into a handful of scenes, just 11 of them. Once you get past the two pairs of twins, it is a thin cast: one wife, a few servants, a couple of merchants, a duke, a prioress, and Poppa Prisoner. A courtesan and an exorcist show up to deliver some fun lines. But they are over and out quickly.

I do find the oddities of the play fascinating. The opening scene – featuring the father’s sentence of execution – is bereft of comedy, it hints we are in for 90 minutes of bleak despair. “Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall,/And by the doom of death end woes and all” are the play’s opening lines. This mood continues through a long exposition scene. The father details his sad circumstances. Duke Solinus expresses sympathy but says he will kill him anyway, the one chuckle here.

Perhaps a director could milk matters by having the duke flirt silently with a servant girl while the father talks and talks; otherwise it seems a staging nightmare to me. Perhaps this was Shakespeare’s very strategy, a misdirection ploy for audiences of the late 16^th century coming into this cold. Were they ready for the bumptious farce that follows? Shakespeare doesn’t tip his hand.

By play’s end, the father and the Duke are about forgotten, giving their reappearance a payoff that suggests some of the witchcraft said to be at work throughout the play. “They say this town is full of cozenage/As, nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,/Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind…” [I.ii. 97-99] is the initial take we get on Ephesus from Antipholus of Syracuse, and while the exorcist Pinch is dealt with in a decidedly non-mystical way, there is a sense of wonder running through the play, coming across most strongly at the end.

I suspect it’s another reason critics downgrade A Comedy Of Errors; the ending is a bit too fantastic. Still, any decent comedy needs to end on an up note to the benefit of its saddest character, and Shakespeare provides. What others see as contrivance strikes me as Shakespeare being on point with his stagecraft.

People don’t read Shakespeare these days for simple pleasure; but of course that was precisely the purpose for which he wrote. I think that’s where A Comedy Of Errors delivers. You get a lot of surefire comic bumbling that mostly holds up despite the years; some lines to remember (“For slander lives upon succession,/Forever housed where it gets possession.” [III.i. 105-06] and “The venom clamors of a jealous woman/Poisons more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth.” [V.i. 69-70]; and a marvelous appetite-whetter for the glories of deeper Shakespeare.

Sure, W. S. wrote better plays. But he wrote worse ones, too. Take my word for it. As I get older, I find myself liking the simpler pleasures of life. They simply don’t get much more pleasant than this.