SOURCE: “Elder and Younger: The Opening Scene of The Comedy of Errors,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3, Autumn, 1983, pp. 325-27.

[In the essay that follows, Parker contends that the opening narration of the shipwreck is frequently misread, and elaborates on the significance of these lines in the context of the work's larger themes.]

Both Henry Cunningham and R. A. Foakes assume in their editions of The Comedy of Errors that there is an inconsistency in Egeon's narrative of the family's shipwreck in the play's opening scene. Egeon states first that it was the mother who was “more careful for the latterborn” (I.i.78), while he was responsible for the elder, when they bound themselves and the children to the “small spare mast” (l. 79). But then he appears, in their reading, to contradict himself when he says in line 124 that he was left with the “youngest” rather than the eldest boy after the mast was “splitted in the midst” (l. 103).¹ The assumption that Shakespeare is here guilty of an “oversight” (Cuningham) or of a “conflict in details” (Foakes) arises, however, from a misreading of the lines (ll. 78-85) that describe the placing of the two sets of twins and the parents on the mast.

I

The lines in question are the following, in which Egeon describes the “delays” (l. 74) sought by himself and his wife before the threat of an “immediate death” (l. 68) at sea:

My wife, more careful for the latter-born,
Had fasten'd him unto a small spare mast,
Such as sea-faring men provide for storms;
To him one of the other twins was bound,
Whilst I had been like heedful of the other.
The children thus dispos'd, my wife and
I,
Fixing our eyes on whom our care was fix'd,
Fasten'd ourselves at either end the mast. …

(ll. 78-85, my italics)

I would argue that the phrasing of this passage, together with the rhetorical crossing, or chiasmus, of the crucial line within it (“Fixing our eyes on whom our care was fix'd”), suggests a placing of the family members on the mast in such a way that a kind of crossing takes place there, too—each parent, bound to one end of the horizontal mast, gazing upon the twin most “cared” for, on the opposite half of the mast. This would mean that there is no oversight or slip at all on Shakespeare's part when Egeon tells his audience that he was left, after the splitting of the “helpful ship” (l. 103), with “My youngest boy, and yet my eldest care” (l. 124), since the child bound by the mother would be on the father's half of the mast and vice versa.

The repeated rhetorical sense of crossing or exchange in the phrasing of “youngest boy” and “eldest care” suggests that the idea of crossing is being emphasized throughout the speech—an emphasis not at all inappropriate in a scene where Egeon faces death precisely because he has crossed an absolute dividing line between two sides.

Within the immediate context of these lines (ll. 78-103), the original positioning of the family members on the mast would mean that each parent is severed from the twin he or she had been most “careful” for. And the sense of an original crossing, missed if we assume that Shakespeare is simply nodding in this scene, imparts an even greater dramatic tension to the subsequent seeking of one divided half for the other after their “unjust divorce” (l. 104) at sea.

II

But there is also in this opening scene's repeated emphasis on “elder” and “younger” a further resonance, which connects Egeon's extended speech with both the intervening “comedy of errors” proper and the play's closing lines. The detail of lines 78 and 82 (“My wife more careful for the latter-born … Whilst I had been like heedful of the other”) raises there a seemingly gratuitous echo of the Biblical story of Jacob and Esau, the “younger” and “elder” twins on whose rivalry so much of subsequent Old Testament history depends.² One might think nothing more of such a reference to “elder” and “younger” in this opening scene were it not that it returns in the play's final lines, in the two adopted Dromios' discussion of who should take precedence and their decision to abandon the question altogether:

Eph. Dro. Methinks you are
my glass, and not my brother:
I see by you I am a sweet-fac'd youth;
Will you walk in to see their gossiping?
Syr. Dro. Not I, sir, you are my
elder.
Eph. Dro. That's a question,
how shall we try it?
Syr. Dro. We'll draw cuts for
the senior; till then, lead thou first.
Eph. Dro. Nay then, thus:
We came into the world like brother and brother,
And now let's go hand in hand, not one before another.

(V.i.417-26)

The two twins' walking “hand in hand” through the door is entirely appropriate to the general comic resolution of the play and to its more specifically thematic concern with the abandoning of the quest for possession or control. It is in this final scene that the impatient wife, Adriana, is shown her own “error” by Emilia in a speech (V.i.68-86) which clearly recalls Luciana's earlier virtual paraphrase of the injunction to wives in the Epistle to the Ephesians.³ But the appearance of the question of “elder” and “younger” at both beginning and end is striking enough to raise the question of its significance for the interpretation of the play as a whole. And it is Ephesians which again provides an interpretative frame.

III

Foakes and others have suggested a number of ways in which the Epistle itself is echoed in this play set in Ephesus.⁴ But there is a crucial passage in Ephesians which has not been commented on in relation to Comedy, though it suggests a wider resonance for the echo of Jacob and Esau in Egeon's opening speech, the emphasis in that scene on strict dividing lines, and the transformation of the situation of this first scene in the reconciliations of the last. The Epistle's second chapter speaks of the Law and its strict dividing line between “stranger” or “alien” Gentile and citizen Jew,⁵ a division into sides as absolute as that between Syracusian and Ephesian in Comedy's opening lines. But it goes on to speak of the Cross of Christ (ii. 16) as the crucial trespass across the boundaries of the old Law, a crossing which joins the two divided sides: “For he is our peace, which hath made both one: and hath broken down the middle wall that was a stop between us … for to make of twaine one newe man in himselfe.”⁶ In Ephesians, the division of Gentile and Jew is replaced by a reconciliation in which the former “aliants” are “no more strangers and forreiners: but fellowe citizens” in “the householde of God.”⁷ And the Old Testament rivalry of Jacob and Esau is converted into a partnership in which both are equally “adopted” (Ephesians i.5) sons and heirs (iii.6).

The Comedy of Errors similarly begins with the harsh “law” which sets a barrier between Syracuse and Ephesus and condemns the crosser of this dividing line to death. After he tells the story of the division of his own household into two halves and responds to the Duke's request to “dilate” (I.i.122) his narrative, Egeon is granted a temporary respite from “doom” (ll. 150-55) which becomes the period during which the intervening multiplication of “errors”⁸ occurs—until both plots come (together in the place of doom which turns out to be a place of “nativity” (V.i.400-406). In the middle of the “comedy of errors” proper—the comedy of “alien” and citizen twins—their mutual recognition and reunion are prevented by an intervening “partition wall,” the wall which (in the scene borrowed from the Amphitruo) keeps one half of the divided family out (III. i). The Comedy’s final acts are filled with as yet still largely uninterpreted Biblical allusions which have to do with the period of waiting for “redemption” (the commercial metaphors of the play nicely crossing with the figure of Ephesians i.14) and with the final apocalyptic end to “error” adumbrated in the Cross.⁹

IV

The opening scene's recall of Jacob and Esau, “younger” and “elder” twin, evokes the Old Testament context of the Law and its divisions (the reciprocity of commercial exchange between the two cities now replaced by the reciprocity of the lex talionis the Duke's opening speech describes). But the evocation of the rivalry of these Biblical twins in the lines describing the mother's and father's greater “care” (I.i.78-85) is already placed in a context which attenuates the Jacob-and-Esau sense of parental preference:

Our helpful ship was splitted in the midst;
So that in this unjust divorce of us,
Fortune had left to both of us alike
What to delight in, what to sorrow for …

(ll. 103-06)

And the rhetorical crossing of Egeon's later lines “My youngest boy, and yet my eldest care, / At eighteen years became inquisitive / After his brother,” ll. 124-26) evokes a brotherly seeking more suggestive of the Joseph than of the Jacob narrative, even as the crossing of the boundary by both Egeon and his “wandering” son already anticipates the ultimate reuniting of divided sides.¹⁰

The play's closing exchange between the two Dromios on the subject of elder and younger, and their final abandoning of the question of precedence, concludes The Comedy of Errors in a way appropriate to the Epistle to the Ephesians and its New Testamental recognition scene.¹¹ “Alien” and “citizen” twin are reunited now that the wall which prevented their mutual recognition in Act III is, to borrow from Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (v.i.337), finally down. And it is the two “adopted” (Ephesians i.5) twins whose abandoning of any Jacob-and-Esau rivalry concludes the scene of reconciliation. What therefore has been perceived as a simple mistake on Shakespeare's part—the confusion of “elder” and “younger” in the opening scene—is not only not an oversight or slip but a figure, and a crossing, important within the opening scene itself and within the larger allusive structure of the play as a whole.

Notes

1. All quotations in the play are cited from the Arden edition of The Comedy of Errors, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Methuen, 1962). References to Cuningham's remarks here are to Henry Cunningham, ed., The Comedy of Errors, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1926).

2. Northrop Frye, in A Natural Perspective (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), p. 145, notes other Jacob and Esau allusions in The Winter's Tale as well as more obviously in The Merchant of Venice.

3. II.i.7-25. Compare Ephesians v.22ff. both with Luciana's speeches here and with Adriana's speech on the “one flesh” of marriage in II.ii.119-46.

4. See Foakes, ed., p. xxix and Appendix I; Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1957), I, 9; Richmond Noble. Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge (New York: Macmillan, 1935). pp. 107-9. For a reading of The Comedy of Errors in terms of the theme of possession and possessiveness, see John Russell Brown, Shakespeare and his Comedies, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1962), pp. 54-57.

5. Ephesians ii. 12 (Vulgate, “alienati”; Bishops' Bible, 1585. “aliants”: Geneva 1560 version, “aliantes from the communewelth of Israel”).

6. Ephesians ii. 14-15 (Bishops' Bible, 1585). The Geneva 1560 version gives “hathe broken the stoppe of the particion wall.” James Nohrnberg, in The Analogy of “The Faerie Queene” (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. 1976), p. 602, notes the generalized echo of Ephesians' “wall of partition” in the Wall of the mechanicals' play of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night's Dream (see V.i.165, “partition”).

7. Ephesians ii.19 (Bishops' Bible, 1585, virtually identical in the Geneva version). This passage is also part of the Epistle for St. Thomas Day, in The Book of Common Prayer (1559).

8. In the play's final scenes the concentration of New Testament allusions to the period before deliverance from bondage indirectly makes the structure of the play itself, from its opening reprieve from “doom” (I.i.2) and its subsequent “errors” to its end, an analogue of the period before the apocalyptic Judgment of Doom. “Dilate” here refers to the rhetorical dilatio or … of the Renaissance handbooks; but dilatio patriae or “the dilation of the Kingdom” before the apocalyptic end also refers to the period of deferred doom or grace-given respite before that end. See OED (“dilate”; “dilation”; “defer”) and the discussion of dilatio in this context in my Inescapable Romance; Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 57-58. Typologically, “breaking down the middle wall of partition” includes both the deliverance wrought by the Cross and its apocalyptic fulfillment (Ephesians i. 13-14, “ye were sealed with the holy spirit of promise, Which is the earnest of our inheritance, unto the redemption of the purchased possession,” Bishops’ Bible 1585).

9. See, for example, the allusion to the “old Adam” of the … in his “prison” (IV.iii. 13, 16-17), to the Lucifer who appears in this period before the end as an “angel of light” (IV.iiii. 53;2 Corinthians xi. 14), to the “redemption” wrought by the punning “angels” (IV.iii. 38; Acts xii. 11), and to the pre-apocalyptic binding and loosing of Satan (IV.iii. 72-73; Revelation xx.1-2).

10. Frye. p. 47, remarks on this sense of anticipation and even foregone conclusion in the opening scenes.

11. Though he does not mention Ephesians and its “particion wall,” Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London: Methuen, 1973), p. 15, does, interestingly enough, describe the recognition scene in the following metaphorical terms: “At the end of the play … Aegeon returns—as it were, bringing his story with him—and as the characters come together for the traditional comic denouement the barriers between them and the different worlds they inhabit begin to fuse.”