The Plays of Shakespeare

Dromio S.
Master, shall I be porter at the gate?

Adriana
Ay; and let none enter, lest I break your pate.

Beginnings can be funny things. Before the Beatles could commence transforming pop and rock music in earnest, they had to make their first album Please Please Me, a collection of pleasant but largely unremarkable tunes, mostly covers, sparked with just a few flashes of pyrotechnical brilliance to let us know what was coming. Before Tom Hanks could become everyone’s mother’s favorite actor, the first person to win the Oscar for Best Actor in two consecutive years, he had to take his first starring role in Bosom Buddies, a two-season sitcom about a couple of reluctant cross-dressers that is exactly as dumb — and as funny — as its title. (I have a feeling that Shakespeare would have loved the name…)

Our man William has much the same story to tell. Before there was The Tempest or Hamlet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream or even Richard III, there was The Comedy of Errors, a deliriously stupid trifle that’s more Bosom Buddies than Philadelphia. At heart, it’s a slapstick, that lowest form of comedy. Any stage production of it that you see will, assuming they’re doing it right, cause the theater to echo with the ringing reports of pans and swords striking heads and shoulders. Of fine speeches there are none. Of noble souls there are none. Of lessons about the human condition that you can take with you to reflect upon as time and wisdom permit, there are most definitely none. But on the flip side, nobody dies, and it really is pretty darn funny in places. Everybody has to start somewhere — even William Shakespeare.

The Comedy of Errors is a farce about mistaken identity, involving not one but two sets of identical twins. One set is a pair of masters, one set their slaves; to add to the confusion, each set shares the same name between them. None of the twins knows about the existence of his opposite number. So, when they suddenly come into proximity with one another, chaos, hilarity, and much bonking on the head with various implements ensue. The beer-swilling crowds in London’s Southwark theater district must have eaten it up.

One thing that will become clear in the course of our journey through Shakespeare’s oeuvre is that the Bard very seldom invented the stories he told from whole cloth. At bottom, he was a great interpreter and storyteller rather than an originalist. Perhaps it had something to do with the sheer pace at which Shakespeare operated during his quarter-century as an active playwright, churning out roughly one new play every seven to eight months, whilst also fielding a myriad of other responsibilities with his theater company, from manager to supporting actor, as well as in his private life as a husband and a father.

The Comedy of Errors established right from the start this precedent that would hold true throughout his career. The outline of its plot is lifted from The Brothers Menaechmus, a play written around 200 BC by a Roman named Plautus, who himself based his story on an earlier Greek comedy that has been lost to us (and was likewise lost to Shakespeare). It might seem a long way back to go for a play that is ultimately kind of trivial and stupid — albeit in the very best sort of way — but this was simply Shakespeare’s standard way of working.

The very fact that the Greek urtext of this plot is missing says something about the position of comedy as the yang to tragedy’s yin. I’ll have much more to write in the future about what these two companionable opposites meant during Shakespeare’s time and before, and how he began to actively destabilize the traditional relationship between them as time wore on and his confidence with his craft grew. For now, though, let me just note that there has always been a tendency in the arts to give longer shrift to tragedy than comedy. Suffering and sadness alone breed profundity, we are told, such that stories with happy endings cannot but pale by comparison.

Well, speaking as an unabashed lover of happy things, who can still be sent to the moon by the right two-and-a-half-minute pop song heard at just the right instant, I beg to differ. Everything that matters in our lives is defined in the end by its opposite. Comedy cannnot exist without tragedy as a companion, just as happiness would be meaningless without sadness. But this doesn’t mean that I don’t prefer to feel happy instead of sad, nor that we should undersell the value of happy art. Our tendency to do so throughout history has created a distorted picture of the peoples of the past as nothing but a bunch of po-faced tyrants and their dullard dupes. It’s so refreshing when we get a glimpse into the reality that, yes, people in the before-times liked to laugh just as much as we do. For this reason, I value Boccaccio and Chaucer over Dante and Plutarch when it comes to Medieval literature, incredible as all of them are. Without humor — even or maybe especially populist, ribald humor — we’re missing out on a huge part of our humanity. I love Shakespeare partly because he so loved a good fart joke. I think it’s a tragedy — to coin a term — that high-school curricula largely only teach the tragedies, such that many students graduate without realizing that there are Shakespeare plays where everybody hasn’t been mowed down on the stage like a wheat crop behind an International Harvester by the time the final curtain falls.

The point I’m struggling to get to with all this is that this longstanding cultural prejudice of ours is probably the principal reason that we have a reasonable number of tragedies from the heyday of ancient Greece — or, more specifically, ancient Athens — but have no more than a handful of fragments from the comedies that were performed in the same amphitheaters. Prior to the invention of the printing press, the only way to preserve a text was by hand-copying it onto a parchment, a very time-consuming activity. Even if stored under ideal conditions, such a parchment would remain legible for about 500 years at the outside; the only way to preserve a text beyond that span of time was to recopy it. And what with the number of scribes available to engage in such work not being infinite, one had to prioritize. Thus we have the father text to Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors but not its grandfather. And we are lucky to have even that: many of Plautus’s other comedies have been partially or completely lost.

Having said all of that, it must also be said that The Comedy of Errors is loosely based on The Brothers Menaechmus; another through-line of Shakespeare’s career is his willingness to handle his source material with whatever the opposite of kid gloves happens to be. Plautus included just one set of twins in his play; it was Shakespeare himself who decided to add a second set to his interpretation in order to double once again the chaos and the fun. Plautus’s play was something of a black comedy at heart, cynical in attitude and not afraid to kill of some of its cast. Shakespeare’s shows a gentler touch, surprising as that may sound to anyone accustomed only to seeing him strew his stages with dead bodies. Meanwhile, even as he has ostensibly set his play in the ancient Greek city of Ephesus, Shakespeare has littered the script with anachronistic references to contemporary European life. This too is all just part of the fun. If The Comedy of Errors appeared for the first time today, we might say that it is set in a theme-park version of ancient Greece, fidelity to which can be discarded without a second thought if it will help a joke to land. It’s as much about the historical Greece as, say, the computer adventure game The Secret of Monkey Island is about historical pirates.

The actual reasons that all these twins who don’t know they’re twins wind up thrown together in Ephesus is vastly less important than the farce of identity confusion that follows. Shakespeare rushes through the backstory hastily at the beginning of the play, clearly itching to move on to the fun stuff. But, for the record:

A prosperous merchant named Egeon had identical-twin sons with his wife Emilia. Learning that another, poorer couple had just also had identical-twin boys, the couple thought it would be amusing to purchase them, in order to make them slaves to their own twins. (This was ancient Greece, after all.) But soon afterward, the newly minted household was caught in a shipwreck. The father, one son, and one slave were rescued by one ship and wound up in Syracuse; the wife and the other two boys were rescued by another ship and wound up in Ephesus. The two halves of the family then lived separately for 33 years, neither knowing what had become of the other. And then they are brought together again as the play opens, when a series of fortunate and unfortunate events bring Egeon, his son Antipholus, and the latter’s slave Dromio to Ephesus, where Emilia, her son Antipholus, and his slave Dromio are already living. To make matters still more complicated, Ephesus is currently at war with Syracuse, and Egeon has been taken prisoner by the local authorities and is being threatened with execution.

But how, you might be asking, did both sets of twins wind up with the same names? The answer is that it beats the hell out of me. I rather suspect it beat the hell out of Shakespeare too.

Anyway, to try to summarize what happens from here would be pointless, not least because it’s confusing as all get-out. Nobody knows who anybody else is, and most of the time the audience for any given theater production doesn’t know for sure either. It’s pure absurdist comic mayhem, a late sixteenth-century equivalent of The Benny Hill Show. (Have I mentioned that Shakespeare lies at the root of the grand British comedy tradition?) Masters and slaves become a study in shifting configurations, with every baffling exchange of words resulting in one of the masters giving one of the blameless slaves yet another sound bonk on the top of the head for his seeming dishonesty or stupidity.

And yet in a sly way that we’ll see much more of in Shakespeare’s later plays, these slaves are often cleverer than their masters. Mind you, Shakespeare was no radical. To the extent that it’s possible to discern any concrete political opinions from his works, he appears to have accepted as a given the intensely class-based social order of his day, to the extent of having his upper-class characters mostly speak in verse while his lower-class ones mostly speak in plebeian prose. (Rest assured that I’ll explain how Shakespearean verse works in detail in a later piece; it’s nothing you need to worry about now as we’re just getting our feet wet.) A strict social hierarchy was necessary, Shakespeare must have thought, to preserve order and avoid anarchy, something which England had seen all too much of in recent centuries (and would see again not long after his death, when yet another civil war would wrack the land). Nevertheless, the wise fools and truth-telling laborers who populate his plays show that he was well aware that an elevated social rank does not automatically mean an elevated intellectual or moral sensibility. Frequently just the opposite, in fact.

The conversation you see below will give a taste of how The Comedy of Errors plays out. Before it begins, Antipholus of Syracuse has given his slave Dromio of Syracuse some money for safekeeping. But the slave he is talking to now is Dromio of Ephesus, who naturally doesn’t know a thing about it, having just returned from conversations of his own with Antipholus of Ephesus and the latter’s wife, both of which resulted in him being soundly beaten about the head and shoulders in another context. Note how ingeniously Dromio, who actually speaks in verse here, puns on the word “mark”; clearly he is no dolt. Oh, and anachronism alert: note that Antipholus calls himself a “Christian” here, hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus.

Antipholus S.
No, as I am a Christian, answer me,
In what safe place you have bestowed my money;
Or I shall break that merry sconce [head] of yours
That stands on tricks when I am undisposed:
Where is the thousand marks thous hadst of me?

Dromio E.
I have some marks of yours upon my pate,
Some of mistress’ marks upon my shoulders,
But not a thousand marks between you both.
If I should pay your worship those again,
Perchance you will not bear them patiently.

Inevitably, Antipholos of Syracuse winds up in the home of Antipholos of Ephesus, whose wife Adriana mistakes him for her husband. But her husband’s twin finds that he prefers Adriana’s sister, which leads to all kinds of awkwardness. Meanwhile poor Dromio of Syracuse finds himself trying to fend off the affections of his own twin’s love interest, whom he finds thoroughly unappetizing. His description of her is wildly politically incorrect, but it might just be the funniest passage in the play.

Dromio S.
…yet she is a wondrous fat marriage.

Antipholus S.
How dost thou mean a fat marriage?

Dromio S.
Marry, sir, she’s the kitchen-wench, and all grease; and I know not what use to put her to, but to make a lamp of her, and run from her by her own light. 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.

Antipholus S.
What complexion is she of?

Dromio S.
Swart, like my shoe, but her face nothing like so clean kept: for why? She sweats; a man may go over shoes in the grime of it.

Antipholus S.
That’s a fault that water will mend.

Dromio S.
No, sir, ’tis in grain; Noah’s flood could not do it.

Antipholus S.
What’s her name?

Dromio S.
Nell, sir; but her name and three quarters — that’s an ell [a unit of measurement equal to a little over one meter] and three-quarters — will not measure her from hip to hip.

Antipholus S.
Then she bears some breadth?

Dromio S.
No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip: she is spherical, like a globe; I could find out countries in her.

Antipholus S.
In what part of her body stands Ireland?

Dromio S.
Marry, sir, in her buttocks. I found it out by the bogs.

Antipholus S.
Where Scotland?

Dromio S.
I found it by the barrenness; hard in the palm of the hand.

Antipholus S.
Where France?

Dromio S.
In her forehead, armed and reverted, making war against her heir.

Antipholus S.
Where England?

Dromio S.
I looked for the chalky cliffs, but I could find no whiteness in them; but I guess it stood in her chin, by the salt rheum that ran between France and it.

Antipholus S.
Where Spain?

Dromio S.
Faith, I saw it not; but I felt it hot in her breath.

Antipholus S.
Where America, the Indies?

Dromio S.
O, sir, upon her nose, all o’er embellished with rubies, carbuncles, sapphires, declining their rich aspect to the hot breath of Spain, who sent whole armadoes of carracks to be ballast at her nose.

Amidst this cavalcade of geographical anachronisms, the insulting references to Spain are worthy of special attention. Thanks to a series of disputes with that kingdom, the richest and most militarily daunting power in Europe because of the fortunes in silver and gold it was extracting from its South American colonies, the British Isles had until recently been living under the most serious threat of foreign invasion that they would have to endure between the Norman Conquest of 1066 and the arrival of Nazi armies on the opposite shore of the English Channel in 1940. But in the summer of 1588, a great Spanish invasion fleet, the storied Spanish Armada, had been crushed by the fledgling Royal Navy, in an event which would prove in the course of time to have marked the beginning of England’s own ascent as an imperial and seafaring power nonpareil. In the more immediate term, wild spasms of patriotic jubilation swept the land at this improbable deliverance, which stood as a tribute both to the courage and pluck of the English sailors and to the fickleness of the gods of war, who had raised up an unseasonable storm between England and Spain that had thoroughly discombobulated the Spanish before the first cannonball ever flew. The stupendous victory set its stamp on Shakespeare’s early career, as will become even clearer when we look at his next play, Henry VI, Part 1; it was the first in his series of “history plays,” a whole new theatrical genre which he invented to ride the wave of English patriotism, one which went on to make his early name as a playwright of immense popular appeal. Here, however, he confines himself to these cheeky jabs at the Goliath whose proud navy had managed to get itself crushed by David right on the monster’s doorstep. The Comedy of Errors may have been performed for the first time within weeks of that event. Suffice to say that Shakespeare knew the value of a well-placed topical reference, even when he was retelling a 2000-year-old story.

I’m slightly tempted to talk about identical twins in general at this juncture, about how they unsettle us by messing with the notion that each of us is a truly unique creation. But in all honesty, that’s just not what The Comedy of Errors is about; maybe we can have that discussion when we get to Twelfth Night, Shakespeare’s other play that revolves around twins. That one is a comedy as well, but a far more textured and sophisticated one than The Comedy of Errors. This play is almost aggressively trifling, showing every sign of having been dashed off rather hurriedly by the young Bard. For one thing, it’s the shortest play Shakespeare ever wrote, being less than half the length of Hamlet, his longest. For another, the budding playwright can’t even be bothered to keep his names straight; Dromio of Ephesus’s colorfully described paramour Nell is inexplicably known as Luce a little later, as if Shakespeare changed her name just to make a pun on “ell” and then never got around to revising the rest of the text.

But, just as (a wise man once said) even bad sex is still pretty good, The Comedy of Errors is still Shakespeare, and thus well worth reading, hearing, or seeing. Indeed, in his scholarly introduction in my beloved 1969 Pelican Shakespeare, Paul A. Jorensen suggests that it is “a good play to begin on,” despite or because of the fact that it doesn’t have much of anything but slapstick entertainment on its mind. Certainly its title could hardly be more literal. There are no heroes or villains, no profound speeches, just… comedy drawn from errors.

There is no probing of personality in The Comedy of Errors. No one learns more about himself or his neighbor as a result of his errors. Confusion leads to near-madness but does not bring about the breakdown of an ego prior to self-knowledge; it leads rather to drawn swords and headblows. The resolution of the play is not the serene elevation of vision which we find in the later comedies; it is simply a recognition of who, physically, is who.

We’ll get to the profound stuff in due course. For now, go forth and enjoy The Comedy of Errors, the perfect riposte to anyone who says that Shakespeare isn’t fun.

The Comedy of Errors is one of Shakespeare’s least-performed plays today, for reasons that aren’t hard to divine: it’s short, it’s shallow, and it’s not at all what most people think of when they think about a Shakespeare play. Most theater troupes who go to the effort to mount a Shakespeare production prefer to set their sights a little higher, for better or for worse. Then, too, The Comedy of Errors presents some fairly intractable logistical problems for its stagers. Assuming one doesn’t have two sets of actual identical twins to hand, the obvious approach is to cast one actor to play each pair of twins, and it’s almost manageable on those terms — until the very last scene, that is, when everyone is expected to be onstage at once. Small wonder that so many producers have decided that such a trifling play just isn’t worth the trouble.

There have, on the other hand, been a fair number of extremely loose adaptations for stage and film, which are happy to run with the core idea of colliding sets of identical twins and the mass confusion that results and discard most everything else. Rodgers and Hart, for example, debuted the musical The Boys from Syracuse on Broadway in 1938; it was turned into a movie in 1940, and has been periodically revived on the stage ever since. I’m afraid I’m unqualified to offer you an informed opinion on it, because my wasted youth as a punk rocker instilled in me a prejudice against the contrivances of musical theater which I’ve never quite been able to shake.

In the realm of less refined and even less faithful interpretations, Laurel and Hardy made Our Relations in 1936, and the Three Stooges made the fifteen-minute short A Merry Mix-Up near the end of their careers in 1957. In truth, these adaptations probably come closest to the slapstick spirit of the original play.

Released in 1970, Start the Revolution Without Me moves the setting from ancient Greece to late-eighteenth-century France, trying to combine a comedy of mistaken identity with a broader satire of pretentious period dramas. Sadly, it doesn’t really work, despite the presence of Gene Wilder in twin roles, hot off the marvelous black comedy The Producers.

A better effort is the quintessentially 1980s movie Big Business. It turns the setting into “Greed is Good”-era Manhattan and turns the twin boys into twin girls, placing Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin in two roles each. It’s surprisingly good fun, the movie I would recommend to anyone who, like me, finds musicals a little too mannered and Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges a bit too archaic to enjoy. (Cue here your jokes about my making this comment whilst writing about a turn-of-the-seventeenth-century playwright. What can I say? For me, Shakespeare is timeless…)

All of the English-language interpretations I’ve just mentioned notwithstanding, The Comedy of Errors has arguably been more popular in the mass-media age outside of the Anglosphere than inside it. The reasons aren’t that hard to divine: as the Shakespeare play that is least reliant on language, it’s a heck of a lot easier than most of the others to translate to a foreign stage. And whenever conventional words fall short, a well-timed frying pan to the side of the head is something of a universal language of its own. I’ve heard that The Comedy of Errors was especially popular in the Soviet Union. I have no clue what lesson to take from this, other than that, to paraphrase an insufferable Sting song (is there any other kind?), the Russians apparently love their slapstick too.

If you have your own media recommendations that I’ve missed, by all means share them in the comments below.

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(A full listing of print and online sources used will follow the final article in this series.)