“What country would giveyouharbour?”This is the same question that Shake-speare asks the audience throughoutThe Comedy of Errors. If you were to be placed in the precarious position of Egeon and Antipholus of Syracuse, what country would give you safe refuge? In this play, Shakespeare eschewed realism, incorporating instead a variety of styles and genres: farce, lyrical poetry, and ro-mance (as in the late roro-mancesPericles,Cymbeline,The Winter’s Tale, andThe Tempest)³⁹. The effect is to create a non-realistic dreamscape in which mistaken identity drives a frenetic plot that manages to accommodate within its comedic mayhem the serious theme of alienation.
As indicated above, the action ofThe Comedy of Errorstakes place in less than one day, and throughout the play the audience is reminded that the hour of Egeon’s impending execution (five o’clock that afternoon) is approaching.
The clock is ticking, and (as various characters apprise the audience) it is ticking very quickly:“Within this hour it will be dinner time,”(1.2.11) Antipholus of Syr-acuse informs his servant upon arrival in Ephesus near the start of the play; a few moments later, “The clock hath stricken twelve upon the bell” (1.2.45); a few moments after that, Adriana tells her sister, “Sure, Luciana, it is two o’clock”⁴⁰(2.1.3). The condensing of time in this fashion is a useful dramatic de-vice, which drives the narrative to its expected conclusion, the death of Egeon:
“By this I think the dial points at five; / Anon I’m sure the Duke himself in per-son / Comes this way to the melancholy vale, / The place of death and sorry ex-ecution”(5.1.118–121). This being a comedy, there is no public beheading, “Be-hind the ditches of the abbey here” (5.1.122). Egeon is reunited with his wife Emilia (who in the twenty-five years since they last saw each other has become Abbess of the Ephesian Priory, on the steps of which they meet), his twin sons,
Coleridge and Hazlitt both used the word“romance”to describe these plays: see William Shakespeare,Cymbeline, ed. Martin Butler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Intro-duction 6–7. On Shakespearean romance as“the idea of a quest for discovery or self-discovery […] a psychological journey,”see William Shakespeare,Cymbeline, ed. Roger Warren (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), Introduction, 16. Stephen Orgel states that in connection with a category of Shakespearean plays, the phrase“romance”was first used by Edward Dowden, inShakespeare: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art, published in 1875: William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), Introduction 4, fn. 3.
On time and the making of contracts inThe Comedy of Errors, see Raffield,Shakespeare’s Imaginary Constitution, 65.
and their twin servants. Egeon is pardoned by a benevolent Duke, who also waives the ransom for his life: a higher, moral law– unwritten, other than in the hearts of men–supplants the authority of statute.⁴¹
In only one other of his plays,The Tempest, did Shakespeare compress the action of the drama into less than one day. And in none of his plays other than The Comedy of Errorsdid he confine the action to one specific location, an Ephe-sian street or“mart”in front of three houses: the house of Antipholus of Ephe-sus; the house of the Courtesan; and the House of God, the Priory (even inThe Tempestthe action is scattered across various parts of the island). This points us to interpretations in the early modern period of the Aristotelian classical unities (those of time, place, and action), as discussed inThe Poetics of Aristotle, to which European dramatists of the sixteenth and seventeenth century tended to adhere. In none of the plays that he wrote before The Comedy of Errors (and in none that he wrote after, with the exception, as indicated above, of his last sole-authored playThe Tempest) does Shakespeare demonstrate any interest in complying with the imperatives of the classical unities. Indeed, the action of each of the History plays in the First Tetralogy (c.1591–94) covers several years, involves numerous sub-plots, and is located in various places in England and France. Of course, the restriction of the action to a single location in which one main story is enacted, in a timespan limited to a few hours, suits the farcical convention to which most ofThe Comedy of Errorssubscribes.⁴² But stylistic con-formity with the classical unities is important also for the allusion inherent therein to the work of Aristotle, and it is in this respect that the meta-theatrical significance ofThe Comedy of Errors(to which I refer near the start of this essay) would have registered with the more astute (and classically educated) members of the late Elizabethan audience.⁴³
Sir Edward Coke and Sir John Davies both described common law as a law“written only in the heart”: the former in his report ofPostnati. Calvin’s Casein Part 7 ofThe Reports(1608), the latter in the Preface Dedicatory toLe Primer Report des Cases(1615); see Paul Raffield,“Common Law,Cymbeline, and the JacobeanAeneid,”Law & Literature27.3 (2015): 313–342, 317.
See Richard Janko,Aristotle on Comedy: Towards a Reconstruction of Poetics II(London: Ger-ald Duckworth, 2002).
“[…] the plot being a representation of a piece of action must represent a single piece of ac-tion and the whole of it; and the component incidents must be so arranged that if one of them be transposed or removed, the unity of the whole is dislocated and destroyed”: Aristotle,The Po-etics, trans. William Hamilton Fyfe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946), 33–35, c.
VIII. On the particular form of classical education in Elizabethan grammar schools, see Carol Chillington Rutter,“Shakespeare and School,”inShakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argu-ment, Controversy, eds. Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 133–144. On the study of rhetoric at schools and the universities, see Peter
The Aristotelian allusion inThe Comedy of Errorsis confined not only to the classical unities andThe Poetics.It extends toThe PoliticsandThe Nicomachean Ethics.InShakespeare’s Imaginary ConstitutionI argued that the ideal system of justice on which Shakespeare reflected inHenry IV, Part 2was Aristotelian, in the sense that the integration of the legal institution into the society it sought to reg-ulate was contingent upon the recognition that community, association, or friendship was a crucial factor in creating and maintaining the polis.⁴⁴ In Book I ofThe Politics, Aristotle used the microcosm of the village community to demonstrate the interdependency of the various constituent members of the State. They were“homogalactic”: literally, they suckled from the same source of milk, the communal cow.⁴⁵Of equal relevance toHenry IV, Part 2andThe Com-edy of Errorsis the political importance that Aristotle attached to friendship in Books VIII and IX ofThe Nicomachean Ethics.For Aristotle, friendship was the bond of communities and was also, he claimed, more important to lawgivers even than justice, simply because the primary objective of lawgivers was the at-tainment of concord and the elimination of faction, and concord was synony-mous with friendship.⁴⁶
The major theme of Aristotelian friendship inThe Comedy of Errorsis tran-scribed in the shared name of one set of twins: Antipholus. The name translates from the original Greek as“against friend”(“anti philos”or“αντι φιλοσ”). Anti-pholus of Syracuse is the lost brother, in search of friendship. He is the archety-pal alien, thrust into an Ephesian society that is hostile towards Syracusians and whose citizens are divided by the commercial imperatives of monetary profit. The image of the stateless citizen in search of his identity not only as a sentient being
Mack,Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 76; also, Peter Mack,A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380–1620(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Raffield,Shakespeare’s Imaginary Constitution, 171.
Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T.A. Sinclair (London: Penguin, 1992), 58–59, 61, Bk.
I.II.1252b15–27, 1253a29–b1. On the importance of cattle to communal existence in ancient Greece, see Jeremy McInerney,The Cattle of the Sun: Cows and Culture in the World of the Ancient Greeks(New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010). Regarding the commonwealth described in Sir Thomas Smith’sDe Republica Anglorum, Burrow argues that Smith (despite his claims to the contrary) presents“a single, Aristotelian model of what a commonwealth suited to the Eng-lish temperament should be”: Colin Burrow,“Reading Tudor Writing Politically: The Case of2 Henry IV,”The Yearbook of English Studies38.1/2 (2008): 234–250, 240.
Aristotle,The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J.A.K. Thomson (London: Penguin, 2004), 200– 201, Bk. VIII.I.1155a1–32. On the bonds of friendship, which form the basis of the Aristotelian polis, see Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981), 146.
but also as a person linked to his fellow man by their common humanity is con-jured in Antipholus’s description of himself soon after his first entrance, an image derived both from the shipwreck in which he almost drowned as a child and his more recent encounter with the Mediterranean Sea, in search of his lost twin:
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. (1.2.35–38)⁴⁷
His irascible (and occasionally deranged) twin, Antipholus of Ephesus, is for most of the play the personification of discord; he is literally anti philos or
“against friend.”All of his relations, whether with his wife, his servant Dromio, or the various merchants, moneylenders, and craftsmen with whom he deals, are characterised either by disharmony or violence (I refer above to the“rope’s end,”
which he threatens to“bestow / Among my wife and her confederates / For lock-ing me out of my doors by day”(4.1.16–18)).⁴⁸Caught up in the maelstrom of far-cical action, revolving around mistaken identity but driven by the relentless ob-session of Ephesian citizens (and the Ephesian legal institution) with mercantilism, he finds some kind of spiritual, emotional, and social repose only at the end of the play, when he is reunited with his twin brother and they leave the stage, for the last time, together.⁴⁹Their overjoyed mother Emilia speaks for the audience as well as herself when she announces:“After so long grief, such felicity”(5.1.406).
The image recurs when Adriana speaks of her love for her husband:“For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall / A drop of water in the breaking gulf, / And take unmingled thence that drop again / Without addition or diminishing, / As take from me thyself, and not me too.”
(2.2.125–29) SeeThe Comedy of Errors, ed. Foakes, 14, note to 1.2.35–38.
Kinney notes the“customary definitions and discussions”of the play, which comment on
“the aggressive, hostile, and violent movement and sensing a basic theme the destruction of the family and of family values”: Arthur F. Kinney,“Shakespeare’sComedy of Errorsand the Na-ture of Kind,”Studies in Philology85.1 (1988): 29–52, 30; for an exemplar of this“customary”
definition, see Bentley’sLife of the Drama, in which the author argues that“Farce is perhaps even more notorious [than melodrama] for its love of violent images”: Eric Bentley,The Life of the Drama(London: Methuen, 1965), 219.
Shakespeare was himself the father of twins: Hamnet and Judith (b. 1585); Hamnet died aged eleven in 1596. On the depiction and interpretation of twinship in early modern literature, see Daisy Murray,Twins in Early Modern English Drama and Shakespeare(Abingdon: Routledge, 2017).
As noted above, the golden chain or carcanet, purchased by Antipholus of Ephesus as a gift for his wife Adriana, has obvious Platonic connotations of pub-lic law and the legal order;⁵⁰but the dispute over its purchase also performs the metaphorical function of signifying a society bound together only by the com-mercial pressures of the market, having broken the true bonds of friendship through which a political community may be recognised.⁵¹ The emphasis on so-cial harmony engendered by the bonds of friendship extends to the last lines of the play, when the Ephesian Dromio announces to his twin brother:“We came into the world like brother and brother, / And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before the other” (5.1.425–26). The bonds of friendship (upon which the foundations of the Aristotelian polis were built) is the final, healing image of the play.
The first recorded performance ofThe Comedy of Errorswas at Gray’s Inn on 28 December 1594, described in the anonymous account of the revels Gesta GrayorumasThe Night of Errors;⁵² when revels turned to riot and the honoured guests of Gray’s Inn–the Ambassador of the Inner Temple and his retinue–left in a huff.⁵³ Scholarship regarding the Gray’s Inn revels of 1594 tends to concen-trate exclusively on the riotous events of that fateful night;⁵⁴but this is to over-look the thematic similarity betweenThe Comedy of Errors and the Gray’s Inn revels themselves. The overarching theme of the Candlemas revels of 1594 was friendship and the warm reception of foreigners by a host nation-state (a matter of striking contemporaneous relevance, given the race riots of the early 1590s discussed above). The hosts of the revels, Gray’s Inn, had invited their“ancient Friend the State ofTemplaria”(the Inner Temple) to attend Gray’s Inn (whose
See text to n. 16, above.
See Raffield,Shakespeare’s Imaginary Constitution, 53; see also Ian Ward,Shakespeare and the Legal Imagination(London: Butterworths, 1999), 137.
Anonymous,Gesta Grayorum or The History of The High and Mighty Prince Henry Prince of Purpoole Anno Domini 1594, ed. Desmond Bland (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1968), 32.Gesta Grayorumwas first published in 1688 by William Canning.
Gesta Grayorum, ed. Bland, 31; after the departure of the Ambassador,“a Comedy of Errors (like toPlautushisMenechmus) was played by the Players,”32.
OnThe Night of Errors, see Raffield,Shakespeare’s Imaginary Constitution, 51–52; also Paul Raffield,Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558– 1660(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 111–123; Bradin Cormack,“LocatingThe Comedy of Errors:Revels Jurisdiction at the Inns of Court,”in The Intellectual and Cultural World of the Early Modern Inns of Court, eds. Jayne Elizabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring and Sarah Knight (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 264–285; William N. West,
“‘But this will be a mere confusion’: Real and Represented Confusions on the Elizabethan Stage,”Theatre Journal60.2 (2008): 217–233.
ruler for the duration of the revels was“Henry,Prince ofPurpoole,Arch-Duke of StapuliaandBernardia,Duke ofHighandNether Holborn,Marquis of StGiles’s and Tottenham,”among other noble titles) on the evening of Holy Innocents’
Day (28 December).⁵⁵ The words “friendship” and “amity” recur throughout the account of the night’s festivities. Following the indignity suffered by the Am-bassador of the state of Templaria on The Night of Errors(the cause of which, according to the anonymousGesta Grayorum, was“a great Witchcraft”: echoing the malign presence of witchcraft and sorcery in the Ephesus ofThe Comedy of Errors),⁵⁶the host “nation”(Gray’s Inn) expressed its profound regret that“our dearest Friend, the State ofTemplaria”was“disappointed of their kind Entertain-ment.”⁵⁷A few days later, friendship was restored and reaffirmed. On the evening of Friday 3 January 1595“an Altar to the Goddesss of Amity”was erected in Hall.
Worshipping at the altar were members of the two Inns, dressed as archetypal
“friends” from classical literature. These included Theseus and Perithous, Achilles and Patroclus, Pilades and Orestes, and Scipio and Lelius: “Lastly, were presented Graius and Templarius; and they two came lovingly, Arm in Arm, to the Altar, and offered their Incense as the rest.”After this touching dis-play of mutual love and affection, the High Priest or“Arch-Flamen”to the God-dess of Amity“did pronounceGrayusandTemplariusto be as true and perfect Friends, and so familiarly united and linked with the Bond and League of sincere Friendship and Amity, as ever wereTheseusandPerithous”and the other arche-types of male friendship who paid homage to the Goddess of Amity.⁵⁸
Gesta Grayorum, ed. Bland, 23, 29.
The Acts of the Apostlesdescribes Ephesus, as visited by St. Paul, as a place of“exorcists”
and“evil spirits”(19.13), in which people“used curious arts”(19.19). The Biblical association of Ephesus with witchcraft is emphasised by Antipholus of Syracuse:
They say this town is full of cozenage, As nimble jugglers that deceive the eye, Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,
Soul-killing witches that deform the body […] (1.2.97–100)
See Richmond Noble,Shakespeare’s Biblical Knowledge and Use of The Book of Common Prayer, as exemplified in the Plays of the First Folio(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1935), 106–107.
Gesta Grayorum, ed. Bland, 32.
Gesta Grayorum, ed. Bland, 35–36. On the symbolism of these rites, and the early modern legal profession as “a fraternity predicated upon the image of masculine friendship,”see Paul Raffield,The Art of Law in Shakespeare (Oxford: Hart Bloomsbury, 2017), 57–58. The word“homosociality”is used by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen to describe the nature of relationships in a professional or working environment. He uses the term“‘political’zone”to describe this location, an area occupied (he posits) predominantly by men: Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen,The Freu-dian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 76, 78. On the cult of masculinity at the early modern Inns of Court, see Lynne Magnusson,“Scoff Power in
In the plethora of classical references and allusions at the Gray’s Inn revels of 1594, it should not be forgotten thatThe Comedy of Errorsunites a Plautine plot with a profoundly Christian theme: that of birth and rebirth. Christianity emerges from paganism, just as comedy emerges from Plautine farce. The choice of play for performance on the evening of Holy Innocents’Day was not acciden-tal: The Feast of Holy Innocents commemorated the slaughter of young, male children in Bethlehem, ordered by King Herod and recorded inThe Gospel Ac-cording to St. Matthew(2.16). In 1604, ten years after the performance ofThe Com-edy of Errorsat Gray’s Inn, the play was again performed on Holy Innocents’Day, at the court of King James I.⁵⁹ Like Christ, both the Antipholus and Dromio twins – “the calendars of their nativity” (5.1.404) – were born in an inn (1.1.53); Antipholus of Syracuse declares himself to be“a Christian”(1.2.77); Dro-mio of Syracuse calls for his rosary– “O for my beads” –and crosses himself
“for a sinner.” (2.2.188); Act Four opens with a reference to Pentecost (4.1.1);
the schoolmaster Doctor Pinch performs a Christian exorcism on the distraught Antipholus of Ephesus (4.4.52–55); and the play ends with an invitation to a feast, in celebration of reunion and rebirth: “Go to a gossips’ feast, and joy with me” (5.1.405). The Epidamnum of Plautus’s Menaechmi has been trans-formed into the Christian, specifically Pauline, setting of its mise-en-scène, Ephesus.⁶⁰
In the classical world, Ephesus had been one of the twelve cities of the Ion-ian League, before coming under control of the Roman Republic in 129 B.C. It be-came the capital of pro-consular Asia in twenty-seven B.C. during the reign of the Roman emperor Augustus. Ephesus was also a cultural hub during the classical era: it contained the Library of Celsus, the Temple of Artemis (Diana), and a the-atre.⁶¹ In the post-classical period, Ephesus was the site of several Christian
Love’s Labour’s Lostand the Inns of Court: Language in Context,”Shakespeare Survey57 (2004):
196–208.
See Kinney,“Shakespeare’sComedy of Errors,”31–32.
Kinney,“Shakespeare’sComedy of Errors,”38. Epidamnum had a strong Middle Eastern, Is-lamic character, and was notable (among other things) for the number of its mosques. Captured by the Ottomans in 1501, it is now the chief seaport of Albania, known as Durrës (Durazzo).
Kinney,“Shakespeare’sComedy of Errors,”38. Epidamnum had a strong Middle Eastern, Is-lamic character, and was notable (among other things) for the number of its mosques. Captured by the Ottomans in 1501, it is now the chief seaport of Albania, known as Durrës (Durazzo).