SOURCE: “Playing with Discontinuity: Mistakings and Mistimings in The Comedy of Errors,” in Shakespeare's Comedies of Play, Columbia University Press, 1981, pp. 14-34.

[In the following essay, Huston reads The Comedy of Errors as a comic representation of the instability of human behavior and experience, and examines the dissonantly tragic beginning and the lingering tensions in the resolution of the play.]

The Comedy of Errors announces Shakespeare's joy in play-making to the world, for it is the work of a dramatist who, above all things else, delights in his medium. In it he finds a reality easily assimilated and manipulated by his newly discovered dramatic powers, since he manages the dramatic microcosm with absolute control. He builds a plot of mistaking, self-consciously contrived, and then he exuberantly pushes his characters around the world he has trapped them in, all the while encouraging his audience, which knows the reason for the mistaking, to laugh with him at the characters' vain efforts to understand their situation. By thus drawing attention to his obvious manipulation of plot and medium, Shakespeare keeps his play—in both meanings of the word—between the characters and the audience. As a result, there is no need for any real development of character in The Comedy of Errors, since the action derives less from what the characters do than from what the playwright does to them. At times Shakespeare does not even differentiate between characters: the two Dromios really are interchangeable. He never allows his characters any substantial complexity: Antipholus of Syracuse seems at first interesting, but he soon becomes as stubbornly one-dimensional as all the other characters in The Comedy of Errors. He must, if the play is to succeed, because the complications of its plot depend on the characters' persistent refusal to change either their minds or their behavior. In a sense, then, even the characters serve as props in this play; the playwright gives them, like puppets, a few defining and unchanging features—some of them interchangeable—and then he moves his characters mechanically about as he wills. The action, like that of a puppet show, depends in large measure on physical movement—on ‘chance’ meetings, misplaced props, and violent altercations. No doubt it is an oversimplification to say that Shakespeare here gives us drama as puppet show. But such an observation does direct us towards the spirit of the work, towards its basic dramatic simplicity and its exuberant physical energy. It also makes clearer the correspondence between Shakespeare's play-making here and the world of child's play. Like the child playing, Shakespeare working, and playing, with the ‘microsphere’ of the theater wields absolute control over a newly manageable object world, not of toys but of actors, costume, and props, which he turns to his particular dramatic uses.

There is, however, at least one notable difference, other than those of intellect and power, between Shakespeare's play and that of the child. The dramatist proffers his play to an audience for approval, while child's play is often, though not always, self-sufficient. And in so addressing an audience, Shakespeare is, at least in part, attempting to extend the range of his mastery; he is including the audience, as well as players, stage, and props, in the world he controls. It is no wonder, then, that Shakespeare's characteristic response to the members of his audience, repeated in an almost endless number of ways in these comedies, is to manipulate them. He manipulates his characters too, and the relationships between these two kinds of manipulation variously define the world of Shakespeare's comedies of play.

In The Comedy of Errors, for example, Shakespeare keeps his audience almost always at a distance from the action. As its title implies, the work is nearly unmitigated farce. For with its dependence on mistaken identity, mistiming, rapid movement, slapstick violence, exaggerated reactions, and outrageous puns, this play has almost as much in common with a Marx brothers movie as with other Shakespearean comedies. It is also, in some obvious ways, Shakespeare's most simply conceived dramatic work, since all of the action develops out of a single basic misunderstanding, a fact known from the beginning to the audience but withheld from all the characters until the end.¹ As a result, the audience watches the play from a position of almost godlike superiority; it shares with the playwright the secret that very simply explains all the confusion.

The characters, of course, have no such knowledge. They do not know they are characters in a farce; nor are they granted the divine overview offered to the audience, so they continually try to make logical sense out of the confused welter, the discontinuity, of their experiences. They construct hypotheses to account for others' strange, inconsistent behavior, blaming it on jest, drunkenness, madness, witchcraft, adultery, breach of contract, or thievery. And although these hypothetical explanations are erroneous, they are all more logical and probable, more sensible, than the answer ultimately revealed to these characters. For that answer is purposely ridiculous, the playful invention of a dramatist calling attention to his own imaginative energies as he makes dramatic sense, and comedy, out of the most wildly improbable comic situation he can devise.

What most obviously draws attention to the presence of the playwright in this work is the crucial way that Shakespeare assimilates, and diverges from, his source, Plautus' Menaechmi, where there is only one set of identical twins. By doubling the number of twins—and so geometrically increasing the possibilities for confusion provoked by mistaking—Shakespeare abandons any concern with realism and instead focuses his audience's attention on his capacity to play freely and inventively with the exigencies of a comic plot.² In the process he associates his art with play in a number of different forms—as release, by daring to overgo his source's already strained use of unrecognized twins with the same name; as spontaneous invention and fun, by delighting his audience and no doubt himself with ever more ridiculous and exaggerated mistakings; and finally, as the technical skill of playwriting, by manipulating basic dramatic problems of plotting and stage business so that the misunderstandings are continually expanded and intensified, until they threaten the social order of Ephesus with apparent chaos: near the end of the play the bonds of marriage, friendship service, business contracts, and law, which structure society and give coherent form to life in Ephesus, all apparently dissolve, as husband turns savagely against wife, master against servant, and debtor against creditor.

Nothing people within the world of the play can do will resolve the violent disputes. The characters try to bring order out of the chaos that develops during the fifth act, but they meet only with more confusion. When they appeal to the representative of the Church for help, the Abbess tricks the woman who addresses her, supplies an explanation that immensely oversimplifies the problem at hand, and then retreats with material witnesses into the secluded and detached realm of the priory. Then the Duke, representative of law and social order in Ephesus, proves no more successful than the Church in dealing with the chaos. When both of the principal litigants in the dispute call on him for ‘justice,’ he listens carefully to strange and conflicting accounts of all that has happened, accounts which are inconsistently corroborated and contradicted by witnesses on both sides of the argument, and then he concludes, helplessly, that ‘you are all mated or stark mad’ (v.i. 281).³ They are not. But they are manipulated, because as characters in a comic farce they are subject to the arbitrary control of a playwright who moves them about—who plays with them—at his pleasure, and the audience's.

There is, then, an enormous discrepancy between the characters' experience of their dilemma and the audience's experience of the same situation. No doubt there is always a substantial difference between what an audience and the characters experience of a play. However life-like it may be, art is never really life for an audience, and it is never anything else for the characters. But almost always in Shakespearean drama there are effects that work to promote audience engagement in, as well as detachment from, the action.⁴ We may be attracted to the wit and energy of a comic hero or heroine, or identify with the struggles and suffering of a tragic hero, or nod in assent at the wisdom in the folly of a clown. And even when a dramatic effect works apparently for detachment, as Shakespeare's use of the play within a play almost always does, its ultimate thematic purpose may be to encourage our intellectual engagement in the dramatic situation. By watching an audience of foolish young lovers ignore the relevance of a play about foolish young lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream, we may realize that we are thereby being encouraged to become a better audience than the one before us. By watching an Induction that is a series of plays within plays in The Taming of the Shrew, we may be prepared to see the shrew-taming action which follows as a more complex version of the same sort of imaginative playing.

In The Comedy of Errors, however, Shakespeare depends for his principal dramatic effect upon the disengagement of the audience from the characters; the audience is continually encouraged to enjoy its superior knowledge and to laugh at the foolish mistakings of the bewildered characters. Because they know nothing, and the audience knows everything about their predicament, these characters appear laughable in their confusion. In spite of the fact that they are bodied forth on the stage by real people, the characters seem like mechanical imitations of human beings. They entertain us by threatening and inflicting upon one another violence that does not hurt, by posturing emotions that they put aside almost in the next moment, and by moving rapidly about, never settling for long enough in one place to recognize that it is they and not their world which has suddenly started spinning crazily about. The play is, in short, an almost perfect example of Bergson's definition of comedy, of the mechanical imposing itself on the human.

Almost. But not quite—because Shakespearean comedy is never as neat as a general critical summary would have it, never as tidy as its happy endings imply. For there are always in the comedies problems which never get fully resolved. These seem most often to be embodied in the fates of characters who are not included in the final celebrations and who are usually tied, in one way or another, to violence—characters like Malvolio, Don John, and Shylock. But the problems suggested by the figure of the unreconciled outsider are not the only ones which regularly cast a shadow across the bright surface of Shakespearean comedy; they are merely the best known. Another, similar kind of difficulty is presented by Shakespeare's use of the misleading beginning, which, though it may not qualify the final festivities, still reminds us from the first of the chaotic forces of disruption and discontinuity which comedy must either reorder or render harmless.

In The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, Shakespeare begins as if his play were going to be a tragedy. Forces of dissolution threaten the world and characters of these plays: Egeon and Hermia, both separated from their families and from an earlier life of joy, face the judgment of a harsh law which menaces them and which not even the ruling Duke can countermand. There are forces of dissolution, too, at the beginning of The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing, though they threaten the form rather than the content of the play: in both of these works the playwright apparently cannot get his plot smoothly under way. The Induction of The Taming of the Shrew, lurching through a sequence of fitful beginnings, is finally altogether abandoned once Shakespeare introduces the story of Kate and Petruchio. And the first act and a half of Much Ado About Nothing, spinning out a tangled web of misunderstandings and mistakings, presents a villainous scheme to divide Don Pedro and Claudio, which, apparently following the promise of the play's title, comes at last to absolutely nothing.

The false beginning, as Shakespeare uses it, then, gives a dramatized example of the disorder or discontinuity that the comic dramatist must overcome, both in his play and by his play. If he succeeds in triumphing over this disorder, the proof of the playwright's victory will appear in the comic ending, when resolutions can be worked with miraculous ease. There, what once appeared as chaos proves to be merely part of a larger pattern of order: the storm-tossed sea, which once incomprehensibly divided Egeon's family, just as incomprehensibly brings that family together again. There, what no man before had the power to oppose, is effortlessly put away with a word: ‘It shall not need; thy father hath his life’ (V. i. 390). Such a reversal is not really, as it first seems, a thematic inconsistency, because the whole play has intervened to make the change possible; the threatening chaos of the beginning is displayed by a comic view of life dramatically realized within the play. And at the same time the play, having attained to the order of art, offers the audience and the playwright proof of a temporary victory over the threatening chaos of life outside the theater.

The best way, though, to understand Shakespeare's complex use of what I have called the misleading beginning is to examine one in detail. The Comedy of Errors, by its very title, gives its audience a good idea about what kind of play it is, a knockabout farce built upon mistakings; but the title, however aptly it may be suited to the play as a whole, hardly prepares an audience for the first scene. For there, in an announced ‘comedy of errors,’ Shakespeare sounds the notes of tragedy—or perhaps of romance,⁵ since the pathos of Egeon's tale, with its references to fortune, its interpolated life stories, and its account of a wife and child lost at sea, might suggest the outlines of romance to an experienced Elizabethan playgoer. But whether the beginning suggests tragedy or romance, it must seem confusing and discontinuous to an audience prepared for a ‘comedy of errors.’ Consider, for instance, the opening speech:

Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall
And by the doom of death end woes and all.

(I. i. 1-2)

This hardly sounds like a beginning. The end-stopped verses, with their emphasis on death, doom, end, and fall, and their heavily accented rhymes, seem much more suited to an exit than to an entrance; and Egeon undoubtedly means them to be exit lines, since he is prepared for a judgment of death. At the beginning of a comedy we confront what appears to be the ending of a tragedy—an old man speaking his last words before being led to execution. His words, too, suggest how dominant the idea of death will be in this first scene, where we hear of ‘mortal and intestine jars’ (11), of merchants executed, of laws that promise death to ‘any Syracusian born’ (19), of an agent's sudden demise, of the heavens’ ‘doubtful warrant of immediate death’ (69), of near drowning, of a wife and child lost and feared dead, and of a second child perhaps lost in search of the first. Here surely is a scene filled with sorrow and tragedy, a fact emphasized not only by Egeon's despair at his hopeless condition but also by repeated references to the arbitrariness of the powers that persecute him. He is condemned by a law he cannot even have known about, since the enmity between Syracuse and Ephesus has sprung up ‘of late’ (5), and Egeon has not been in Syracuse for five years. Earlier he has been separated from his wife and child by a chance accident at sea. And earlier still he has been called away from the embraces of his wife by his business agent's apparently sudden death, which has left the care of his goods ‘at random’ (43). Egeon seems indeed, as the Duke describes him, one ‘whom the fates have mark'd / To bear the extremity of dire mishap!’ (141-2).

But Egeon's story and the first scene are not really as tragic as they initially appear, since they may, as I have already suggested, trace the outlines of romance, with its promise of miraculous renewal, rather than of tragedy, with its focus on immeasurable loss. Even more to the point, they are part of a play which will ultimately prove a comedy. And finally, and most significantly, a number of details within the first scene qualify its apparently tragic tone. The first of these details is the fact that Egeon is not an altogether reliable narrator. In general what he says about the events of his past life is true, at least as far as we can tell, but he sometimes jumbles the particulars of these events, and his interpretation of their meaning is often misleading. For example, Egeon has a tendency to see only the worst in a situation. He begins the story of his life of ‘griefs unspeakable’ (33) as if it were one uninterrupted tale of woe. But it is not, for he gives an account of salvation as well as loss, of joy as well as sorrow. Here is the beginning of his story:

In Syracusa was I born, and wed
Unto a woman, happy but for me,
And by me, had not our hap been bad.
With her I lived in joy; our wealth increased
By prosperous voyages I often made
To Epidamnum; till my factor's death
And the great care of goods at random left
Drew me from kind embracements of my spouse …

(37-44)

There is in this account a certain discontinuity. Egeon claims that his wife would have been happy but for him and for the fact that their luck was bad, and then he says that they were joyfully married and prosperous. The argument makes no sense. Of course, we know what Egeon means: the sorrow came after he and his wife had been happily married for some time, when they were separated. But that is not what Egeon says. So overwhelmed is he by present grief that he makes it color even his account of past joy. In his despair he would reduce the events of his life to the simplistic consistency he sees in them now—to a long series of ‘misfortunes’ (120) and ‘mishaps’ (121).

And what Egeon does at the beginning of his story he does throughout: he tries to impose a perfect, uncomplicated continuity on the complex, discontinuous experiences of his life. To some extent, he succeeds in what he attempts, for his story has a convincingly tragic tone and is coherent enough to be easily understood by an audience. In summary that story sounds perfectly continuous and consistent, but in its particulars it is not nearly as neat and tidy as it sounds, for it is rife with inconsistencies both great and small. We have no idea, for instance, how long Egeon and Emilia have been married before they are first separated. By his overriding tone of sadness, Egeon implies that their happiness has been short-lived, a suggestion apparently confirmed by the story of Emilia's pregnancy, which seems the immediate result of the lovers' ‘kind embracements’ (44). Yet Egeon also explains that after the marriage their wealth increased ‘By prosperous voyages I often made / To Epidamnum …’ (41-42), and this detail suggests a marriage of some substantial length.

There is, of course, good reason for the apparent double time in Egeon's narrative: the marriage seemed short because he was so happy and because it is now viewed under the aspect of memory, which sometimes plays tricks with time. In fact, Egeon's memory repeatedly plays such tricks with time during the course of his story; he often shortens or conflates it to give his experience continuity. We do not know, for example, how long he is married before business takes him from his wife, but the time is longer than he implies. Nor do we know how long he and Emilia stay in Epidamnum before setting out for home. More noticeably, we never hear a thing of the years between the separation at sea and the son's eighteenth birthday, a time during which Egeon apparently gave no thought to searching for his lost family. And also, there is a hiatus in his narrative between the time when his son sets out in search of his lost brother and when Egeon undertakes his five-year journey through Greece and Asia, for we later hear that father and son have in fact been separated for seven years (V. i. 309, 320).

In addition, confusion about time is matched in Egeon's story by confusion about details. The twins can be differentiated from one another only by names (53), but they have the same names (129); before the storm Emilia takes care of the latter-born twin (79), but the child who survives with Egeon is ‘My youngest boy’ (125); when the family faces approaching death at sea, Emilia's tears induce Egeon to seek a means of preservation (75), but it is his wife who initiates the action of fastening herself and the twins to a mast; and finally, the storm that has threatened them all never comes, and the sea at last waxes calm (92), but in this calm sea the ship is ‘violently borne upon’ a rock (103).

All these inconsistencies undoubtedly can be dismissed as unimportant, as the result merely of Shakespeare's carelessness or inexperience. And, besides, they would never be noticed in a theater, where an audience, responding to Egeon's despair, would interpret his story as he interprets it. But what an audience consciously notices is not always all there is to a play, even for that audience. Drama sometimes reaches below the surface of consciousness to stir the depths beneath, as anyone who has ever watched a good production of Hamlet or King Lear knows. A play does not, however, have to be a great tragedy to affect an audience more deeply than that audience may consciously know. Even so apparently frothy a work as The Comedy of Errors may reach at times beneath the level of an audience's consciousness. It will not go so deep as a great tragedy, but it should not be dismissed as all surface just because it is not Hamlet or King Lear.

For example, behind the story of Egeon and his separated family in the first scene of The Comedy of Errors we may glimpse the outlines of genuinely mythic themes which are everywhere in Shakespearean drama—arbitrary natural violence manifesting itself in storm, confused and uncertain identity,⁶ shipwreck on a strange shore, sudden and inexplicable divorce between husband and wife, an old man hopelessly separated from those he loves and wandering in a world of unspeakable griefs, the transforming power of time, the miraculous return of what seems irrevocably lost, and finally, the incomprehensible abundance of great creating nature. More directly to my purposes here, though, is the fact that beneath the surface of this scene we encounter a pattern which will eventually become a dominant thematic concern in the play. That pattern is of the discontinuity of human experience. We have met it first in Shakespeare's confusing beginning, which plays with the audience's expectations about what kind of drama this ‘comedy of errors’ will be. We have met it next within the realm of the play in Egeon's story, which he tries to make perfectly neat and consistent but which in its small particulars resists his reductively simplifying vision. We can now meet it also in the behavior of the Duke, whose conduct in this scene is inconsistent enough so that even an audience in the theater might take note of it.

Solinus begins by commanding Egeon not to plead his case any longer. But there is nothing in the speech Egeon has delivered which suggests such pleading; the merchant, apparently prepared for a sentence of execution, has called for the Duke to end his woes with the doom of death. For some reason Solinus is not listening to what Egeon is saying, and we soon discover why: he is trying to suppress his sympathy for his prisoner so that he can enforce the harsh law of Ephesus. His first speech is, in fact, a conscious effort to convince himself of the need for Egeon's death. He is not disposed, he claims,—confirming the idea by his denial—to set aside the laws of his country; Syracuse and Ephesus have of late engaged in wars, and the Duke of Syracuse has harshly put Ephesians to death, so Egeon can expect no pity from ‘our threatening looks’ (10). The sudden shift here from the ‘I’ of line four to the royal ‘we’ gives emphasis to the Duke's attempt to act as impersonal justiciary. But he is not as successful at achieving impersonality as he sounds, since he continues to marshal evidence against Egeon, as if he had not yet quite convinced himself to order execution. By the end of the speech, however, the Duke seems to have conquered his impulses for mercy; his conclusion has the ring of inevitability: ‘Therefore by law thou art condemn'd to die’ (26). Solinus still cannot associate himself with this judgment—the prisoner is condemned ‘by law’—but the Duke has at last apparently issued the decree of death. He has no more issued it, however, than he begins to take it away, to delay its enactment: he calls for Egeon to tell his story and to explain what cause drew him to Ephesus. Having begun by ordering his prisoner to plead his case no more, Solinus now in effect commands him to plead it again. The only continuity in the behavior and speeches of this Duke is discontinuity.

And this pattern of apparently discontinous behavior continues as the scene progresses, for after listening to the first part of Egeon's long account of shipwreck and separation, Solinus encourages him to finish his story, assuring him that ‘we may pity, though not pardon thee’ (98). The statement is a direct contradiction of the Duke's earlier claim that the outrage perpetrated by the Duke of Syracuse ‘Excludes all pity from our threatening looks’ (10). Then, when the merchant's tale is finally done, Solinus, moved by the pity which has been implicit in his conduct towards Egeon from the first, delays the execution again. He grants the prisoner a day's reprieve, to allow him time to raise the money necessary for his ransom. Temporarily at least, the Duke puts aside incontrovertible law. His action is thematically significant for at least two reasons. First, it gives evidence that the tragedy threatening both Egeon and this announced ‘comedy of errors’ can be avoided; it converts the apparent end presented at the beginning of this play to a beginning, and so reinforces a comic pattern established but not recognized in Egeon's story—the pattern of sudden miraculous deliverance from imminent death.

Three times in Egeon's tragic account of his misfortunes he avoids expected ruin: when first he would gladly have accepted his ‘doubtful warrant of immediate death’ (69), his wife's cries force him to ‘seek delays’ (75) of their end; when later the sailors, frightened by the approaching storm, have abandoned Egeon and his family on a ‘sinking-ripe’ (78) ship, the sun unexpectedly disperses the storm clouds (89-90); and when finally this ship is wrecked upon a rock and the family is cast into the sea, they are all soon rescued. Having escaped from it three times in the past, Egeon is now once again delivered from death—by the Duke's reprieve. And though he may view this deliverance, like the ones which preceded it, as fruitless—since his exit lines are as much concerned with death as his first speech was—he is nevertheless exiting to something different from his execution. The tragic pattern initiated by the play's dark beginning has not been dispelled, but it has at least been qualified. The Duke's decision to put off Egeon's execution for a day, then, gives a suggestion of form to traces of comedy obscured by the apparently tragic tone of the first scene. That form will be more fully developed in the scenes that follow.

The second reason why the Duke's reprieve of Egeon's sentence is important is because it makes clearer the relationship between the theme of discontinuity and forms of play in The Comedy of Errors. Against the discontinuity of his experience, against the conflict between his human feelings that Egeon should be spared and his sworn duty to enforce an inhuman law, Solinus throws up the defense of a temporary reprieve. For a while he holds the intrusive discontinuity of reality at bay, not, as Egeon has done, by imposing the pattern of tragedy on discontinuous events, but rather by pushing the problem away from him, in time and space: he gives Egeon the rest of the day to search out the money needed to buy release from harsh law, and he turns the prisoner over to the keeping of another. Against law he opposes a temporary reprieve, which creates an insulated world limited in space and time—‘I'll limit thee this day / … Try all the friends thou hast in Ephesus’ (I. i. 151-3)—to contain Egeon and the problems his story and presence bring to the Duke's consciousness and conscience. But although the Duke partly manipulates this intrusive reality by pushing it away from him, he can find no way to assimilate it effectively, to play with it: as Duke he must enforce the law; as human being he cannot bring himself to do so. Caught between the unyielding rigors of law and the equally compelling dictates of human feeling, he tries to satisfy both demands at once and manages to provide Egeon, and himself, only with a temporary reprieve.

Problems only temporarily pushed aside have a way of returning with redoubled force, however; so when we next see Solinus, in the fifth act, he is besieged on all sides by the apparent discontinuity of reality, which batters at the insulated world of the reprieve. Now all cry for ‘justice’ (V. i. 133, 190, 194, 197) and demand action from their ruler. In a way this scene presents Solinus with a nightmare version of his earlier experience. Once again he is called upon to render the doom of ‘justice’; once again he listens to stories which seek to impose coherence on an apparently discontinuous sequence of events; and once again he finds himself temporarily unable to settle harsh judgment upon those before him. But now he confronts, in place of one difficult decision, many apparently impossible ones; in place of barely discernible discontinuity, an engulfing chaos of contradictions. Where earlier, judgment was rendered difficult because of the discontinuity between the Duke's duty as a ruler and his feelings as a human being, now judgment appears impossible because of raging discontinuity in the very nature of things. Everyone has his own account of events, and none of the accounts matches.

In the conflicting reports of what has happened in Ephesus during the afternoon we find discontinuity in forms we have met before: in the details of the narratives, as with Egeon's tale earlier, and in Solinus' continuing inability to reconcile his duty as a law enforcer with his emotions as a human being:

She is a virtuous and a reverend lady:
It cannot be that she hath done thee wrong.

(V. i. 134-5)

Long since thy husband served me in my wars,
And I to thee engaged a prince's word,
When thou didst make him master of thy bed,
To do him all the grace and good I could.

(V. i. 161-4)

But in addition we find discontinuity disrupting even the most basic facts of nature, apparently overthrowing the very laws which govern the movement of things in space and time. Antipholus seems ‘borne about invisible’ (V. i. 187) or, perhaps more correctly, he seems too often visible: here disappearing in retreat behind the walls of the abbey, there appearing in attack after his beating of Dr. Pinch; here dining with his wife and sister-in-law at home, there dining with the courtesan at the Porpentine; here receiving a gold chain of Angelo, there denying that he has ever even seen the chain. In the first scene Egeon's presence threatened the laws of Ephesus; now Antipholus' presence threatens even the laws of nature. Maddening, unassimilable discontinuity, expanding its compass and intensifying its attack, threatens everyone in Ephesus. More than a temporary reprieve is now needed to rescue Solinus from paralysis, Egeon from death, and the society of Ephesus from dissolution in madness, adultery, and incest. Clearly what is needed is the wonderful, restorative power of miracle. In desperation, the Duke summons the Abbess as witness to events. He turns literally and figuratively towards the Church, which at last delivers up its miracle: enter the Abbess with Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse.

In a single moment of wonder Emilia's entry with the second Antipholus and Dromio resolves all the apparent discontinuity in Ephesus: instead of one Antipholus and Dromio, there are two; and all the misunderstandings and mistakings suddenly appear in their true form, as misunderstandings and mistakings merely, rather than as indications of witchcraft, madness, or adultery. At last the playwright reveals to his characters the secret he has shared with his audience since the second scene. And in the process he partly dissolves, at least for a moment, the distance between audience and characters, for when Emilia enters with the second Antipholus and Dromio, all the characters, struck dumb with wonder, become an audience to the revelations played out before them. And as characters become temporarily an audience, Shakespeare's audience may recognize that this situation is reversible—that an audience may be transformed into characters by a world more expansive than the one the playwright creates. After all, the revelations of the comic ending, by resolving the complications of the plot, remind the audience that the play is coming to an end; and one of the effects of such a reminder is to draw attention to the contracted nature of the audience's immediate experience. As they watch the play being concluded, the members of Shakespeare's audience may become aware that they must shortly surrender their perspective of godlike superiority and enter again a world where they themselves are characters. In this world, too, they may, like the characters of the play, be assailed by apparently discontinuous experience and perhaps observed by an audience which, from its godlike perspective, sees a comedy of errors in their fruitless efforts to understand a seeming discontinuity, whose meaning cannot be discovered without revelation.

In Shakespeare's manipulation of his audience's perspective here we find him again self-consciously playing with both his medium and his audience: using his medium to reflect back to the members of his audience an image, assimilated and reshaped, of their own condition; using his audience's awareness that the play draws to wards its end to prepare its members for their return to a wider world. And, as of way of reminding the audience that its immediate world has been limited, in spite of the fact that it has temporarily experienced the illusion of a godlike perspective, Shakespeare dissolves that perspective. He plays with the audience's self-assurance about its understanding of events in The Comedy of Errors by reminding that audience, in the most obvious way, of its essentially limited perspective: he shocks his audience, as he shocks his characters, with a wondrous revelation—that Emilia is wife to Egeon and mother to the Antipholuses. The information is outrageous and ridiculous; it is also miraculous and wonderful, of a piece with the only other event quite like it in Shakespearean drama, the resurrection of Hermione. For in that moment, too, Shakespeare reveals to his audience a secret he has kept hidden from all, and audience and characters experience miracle and wonder together. Here, though, the tone of the revelation is more obviously playful than in The Winter's Tale, for Emilia, in revealing her identity, almost steps out of the action of the play to announce the playwright's exuberant delight in his powers. In the world of a play anything is possible: all characters and events serve the playwright's purposes as he suits them to the ordering form of his plot. Then, too, such an obvious manipulation of the dramatist's play world emphasizes the absoluteness of his powers over his audience, which can still be as suddenly surprised by the play as the characters are. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, Shakespeare here does what Solinus earlier could not do: he plays with discontinuity, suiting it to his purposes—and so reshaping it into the effectively coherent form of his plot—instead of merely pushing it aside. By playing with discontinuity, he transforms what is ridiculous to what is wonderful; out of manipulation, he makes miracle.

From one perspective Emilia's revelation offers yet one more example of discontinuity in this play world. How can she have been separated from her son and still live in the same town with him? Where has she been during the past twenty-five years? And why has she never revealed herself to Antipholus of Ephesus, who carries the name of her lost son and is served by a bondman named Dromio? Though an audience might not ask itself these particular questions—since they take us clearly beyond the boundaries of the play and precariously close to the state of mind that once found profit in exploring the girlhood of Shakespeare's heroines⁷—that audience would find Emilia's revelation preposterous, altogether discontinuous with her previously established identity as Abbess. But from another perspective, the miraculous revelation is both natural and coherent: since the action of The Comedy of Errors has driven its characters inevitably and predictably to this moment of pairing, to this public bringing together of all who have formerly been separated, the reunion of Egeon and Emilia becomes almost a thematic necessity. Though that reunion may seem logically ridiculous, discontinuous with the details of the play as we know them, it is at the same time thematically coherent, consistent with the patterns of the play as they are revealed to us. Emilia's appearance in the role of wife and mother, then, proves miraculous in two ways. Within the world of the play it offers wonderful resurrection and return; within the microcosm of the theater, it gives evidence of the dramatist's all-encompassing creative powers, which enable him, in making the ending of his play, to assimilate the particulars of logical discontinuity by fitting them to the patterns of overall thematic coherence.

Shakespeare's assimilation of discontinuity at the end of The Comedy of Errors also returns us, with a new perspective, to the concerns of the opening scene and of comedy in general—that is, to the problem of how to order the welter of human experience, filled as it is with missed opportunities, mistakes, forgettings, losses, and misjudgments, into a pattern that is both coherent and life-affirming. For comedy assures us that though our life may be tied inevitably to death, to loss, loneliness, and isolation, we may yet find an indefinite reprieve from such ontological disorder in temporary stays against confusion, in friends, family, and community. Such reprieves are, of course, always temporary, since, as Egeon's tale in the first scene shows, they all inevitably dissolve, sometimes even without warning, before the forces of time and tide; but they are, variously, reprieves nonetheless, and the best that man can do in the face of nature's arbitrary, apparently unyielding laws. All of which brings us back to Solinus and his problem in the first scene—and to the relationship between his action and Shakespeare's: the Duke's reprieve of Egeon's sentence here serves as a kind of dramatic emblem for the action of Shakespeare's play itself, since both offer insulated worlds of temporary relief from the harsh laws of intrusive reality. And the insulated world Solinus creates for Egeon—‘I'll limit thee this day / … Try all the friends thou hast in Ephesus’ (I. i. 151-3)—becomes for the audience the comedy of errors which fills up the time between Egeon's exit under temporary reprieve and his re-entry on the way to execution.

Of course there is a manifest difference between Solinus' reprieve of Egeon and the reprieve Shakespeare offers his audience. Solinus is throwing up a kind of desperate defense against a real and imminent threat to life, while Shakespeare is merely playing with the disorder threatening life. The play world he creates is doubly insulated against the intrusions of reality, since his Ephesus is an imaginative construct contained within the wider imaginative construct of the theater itself, while Solinus' temporary reprieve of Egeon is immediately circumscribed by the press of reality. But in a more general way the action of Shakespeare's comedy provides its audience with a reprieve not unlike that which Solinus offers Egeon. The members of Shakespeare's audience, attending a play, temporarily put aside their own problems, frustrations, and sorrows. They enter the theater, there to be entertained, and so to escape, for the space of an afternoon, the often harsh and arbitrary laws of nature and society which hold sway over their lives. The parallel is not, by any means, exact. Egeon is delivered from immediate execution, while Shakespeare's audience, if it thinks on death at all, views it from a great distance; no one ever went to a comedy for the express purpose of delaying his execution. But an audience which attends a ‘comedy of errors’ at least partly goes to the theater in order to find temporary reprieve from the problems of everyday life. Against such problems the play provides refuge by transporting that audience for a time to a realm of imaginative play—to an Ephesus shaped by Shakespeare's self-delighting dramatic powers.

Partly, too, the play offers its audience a reprieve from tragedy by its content as well as its context. The dominant sorrow and woe of the first scene quickly yield to the humorous mistakings and misunderstandings of the scenes which follow, and it is not long before Egeon's tragic story is, perhaps quite literally, forgotten. Shakespeare announces the advent of unmitigated comedy in this play by using a technique he will later employ almost unchanged in The Taming of the Shrew: he writes a second beginning which is essentially a revised version of the first, but very different in tone. In it many of the potentially tragic themes of Egeon's story are restated and reviewed through the perspective glass of comedy.

The second scene begins with a reference to the problem which has been the dominant concern in the Egeon episode, the law forbidding Syracusians to come to Ephesus; but where in the first scene that law was incontrovertible, binding even a ruler to its harsh dictates, here it is something that can be circumvented with ease: the traveler from Syracuse needs only to pretend that he is from Epidamnum. In this scene, then, we have clearly entered the realm of comedy, where laws are merely an inconvenience to be circumvented. Next we hear of Egeon, who has been the focus of our attention until now, but his story is put aside as easily as the law associated with it. The casual way in which Egeon's plight is dismissed may be a little surprising, since we have been led to believe in its dramatic importance, but the gesture of dismissal has obvious thematic purposes. First, it anticipates the ease with which the play itself will put aside Egeon's problems, since he is not to appear again until the last scene. And second, it presents a dramatic analogue of the audience's response to the same situation, because soon, like Antipholus of Syracuse here, the audience will become too absorbed in other business to give much thought to Egeon's plight.

It is a commonplace of criticism about The Comedy of Errors to argue that the tone of sadness established in the first scene is never really dispelled until the happy conclusion, that the perils of Ephesus as imagined by Antipholus of Syracuse are set in contrast to the real peril of Egeon there.⁸ And this argument is undoubtedly true—but incomplete, because it does not stress the fact that the effect it describes is essentially subconscious. For it is perhaps even more true of an audience's response to this play to say that Egeon is soon forgotten and only returned to memory with his entrance in the fifth act. The reason for this effect is obvious: Shakespeare, playing with his audience's expectations and responses, directs attention away from Egeon. He puts almost a whole play between Egeon's first exit and his next appearance, and he radically alters the tone of the work in the meantime, filling it with all manner of laughable comings and goings. In addition, he releases his audience from worry about Egeon in the second scene, where first the problems raised by his plight are set aside and then the humorous confusion of comic mistaking begins.

Another melancholy merchant from Syracuse in search of his lost family arrives in Ephesus, but he is not threatened by the law that rigorously holds Egeon in bondage—he has only to declare himself of Epidamnum in order to walk freely about—and he is generously supplied with the commodity most valued in Ephesus and, sadly, unpossessed by the other merchant: money. He is also, as we can guess, one of Egeon's missing sons. And when, soon after the scene begins, he is mistaken for another Antipholus by a matching Dromio, we know that what Egeon has lost will soon be found again. That moment of mistaking is important for other reasons also. It finalizes the transformation begun in the play's opening speech, because it converts a potentially tragic situation to comedy by presenting apparent inconsistency of behavior in a humorous rather than a serious context. Here, too, the arbitrary violence of nature and society, so destructive and divisive in Egeon's view of experience, is reduced to comic form, as a slapstick beating and the subject of jokes:

I have some marks of yours upon my pate,
Some of my 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.

(I. ii. 82-6)

But the most important function of this moment of mistaking is to turn the perspective glass of comedy upon the potentially tragic problem of discontinuity in human experience—a problem which, given comic form in this scene, becomes the organizing theme of the play. For from the time when Dromio of Ephesus mistakes Antipholus of Syracuse for his master until the time when the two sets of twins finally confront one another, characters are baffled, frightened, frustrated, and nearly maddened by a long series of experiences discontinuous with what they know to be the order of things. Antipholus of Syracuse, a stranger to Ephesus, is treated by Ephesians as if he had lived there all his life; Antipholus of Ephesus, who has spent his life establishing a reputation for honesty ‘Second to none that lives here in the city’ (V. i. 7), is accused of being a liar and a cheat; Dromio of Ephesus, a poor and faithful servant, is twice accused of stealing enormous sums of money; Dromio of Syracuse, following his master about a strange town, is claimed as a husband by a kitchen wench, all grease, whom he has never seen before and hopes never to see again. Adriana, trying to convince her husband to return home for dinner, is treated as a stranger by him; and Luciana, lecturing her brother-in-law on his duties to his wife, is answered by claims that he is unmarried and in love with her, not her sister.

What Shakespeare is here making laughable by his skilful manipulation of two sets of identical twins is only a ridiculous and exaggerated form of the inconsistency of ordinary human behavior and conduct. All men at different times put on different personalities;⁹ and although very few of us have to live with the circumstance of repeatedly being mistaken for our identical twin, we all have known the embarrassing experience of being confused with someone else or of not being recognized by someone who should know us. Life is not altogether consistent or coherent in spite of our efforts to make it that way, and it is the incoherence, the discontinuity, of life that Shakespeare makes the subject of comedy in The Comedy of Errors. That is why he plays in this work not only with two confused sets of identical twins but also with man's abiding concern for time, money, and law. For all three—time, money, and law—provide man with an artificial but generally effective way of ordering inchoate experience; all three give him the illusion of constancy in a world of flux. Time is as regular as clock work and as coherently patterned as yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Money is a sign of man's trust in at least one continuing system of values.¹⁰ Law is a measure of his trust in his society. And all three, if they are to have meaning for man, must retain some measure of constancy, of stability.

This stability, however, is always partly illusory, because values are subjectively affected by experience. The thousand marks that Antipholus of Syracuse thinks it annoyingly inconvenient to lose are for Egeon his very life; an afternoon is a long time for Adriana to wait for her husband to return for dinner, but it is a short time indeed for Egeon to find a thousand marks in a strange city; and the law of Ephesus which not even the ruling Duke can countermand, a visiting sightseer can effortlessly circumvent. Life recalcitrantly resists' the continuity man, with his limited vision and understanding, would impose on it. And sometimes that resistance creates tragedy: Egeon cannot initially reconcile his sense of what life has given him with what it has taken a way. But sometimes, too, that resistance creates comedy: Antipholus of Syracuse, repeatedly resolving to escape from the sorcery of Ephesus, becomes more and more entangled in its witchcraft, until miraculously his lost and wandering family is found and reunited—delivered from isolation and sorrow, and reborn, as Emilia's language makes clear, into the joy of life together.

This final togetherness, characteristic of the inclusiveness of comic endings in general, provides a dramatic and thematic reflection of Shakespeare's technical mastery of, and delight in, his medium in The Comedy of Errors. As characters, apparently discontinuous in their behavior, at last are brought together and delivered into the wholeness of family and secured community, so also dramatic forms and formulas, seemingly discontinuous in their relationship, are ultimately brought together and assimilated into the wholeness of coherence and comedy in this play. Beginnings and endings, tragedy and comedy, farce and romance, laughter and sadness, logical impossibility and thematic necessity, characters and audience, predictability and surprise, mistake and miracle—all are made to serve the playwright's purposes and proclaim his powers as he shapes them into a ‘comedy of errors’ and coherent play, in both senses of the word.

Notes

1. See Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960) pp. 1-9, for a detailed presentation of this argument.

2. A similar argument is made by A. C. Hamilton, The Early Shakespeare (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1967) pp. 103-4.

3. All references to Shakespeare in this study are from the edition of Hardin Craig, The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1951).

4. The most interesting and developed statement of this idea, particularly as it applies to the comedies, is Maynard Mack's, ‘Engagement and Detachment in Shakespeare's Plays,’ in Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor of Hardin Craig, ed. Richard Hosley (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1962) pp. 275-96.

5. For a full discussion of this idea, see Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 1974) pp. 59-67.

6. See Michel Grivelet, ‘Shakespeare, Moliere, and the Comedy of Ambiguity,’ Shakespeare Survey, 22 (1969) pp. 15-26, for a discussion of this theme in The Comedy of Errors and of its relation to the work of Moliere.

7. Exploration beyond the immediate boundaries of the play, though, does not always have to seem as misguided as L. C. Knights makes it sound in ‘How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?’ Explorations (New York: George W. Stewart, 1947) pp. 15-54. Often a play encourages such speculation as a way of understanding present actions, as I hope to show later in a quasi-psychological analysis of Kate.

8. See particularly R. A. Foakes' ‘Introduction’ to the New Arden edition of The Comedy of Errors (London: Methuen, 1962) p. xlii, and Harold Brooks ‘Themes and Structure in The Comedy of Errors,’ Early Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 3, eds John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London: Edward Arnold, 1961) p. 65.

9. A similar argument is made by Hugh M. Richmond in Shakespeare's Sexual Comedy (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971) pp. 50-1.

10. This argument is presented in a somewhat different form by Ralph Berry in Shakespeare's Comedies (Princeton University Press, 1972) p. 36. A more general statement about the thematic importance of money in comedy appears in Thomas McFarland's Shakespeare's Pastoral Comedy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972) pp. 15-16.