SOURCE: “The Comedy of Errors,” in Shakespeare's Comedy of Love, Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1974, pp. 1-19.

[In the following essay, Leggatt focuses on the “interweaving of the fantastic and the everyday” in the play, contrasting it to Plautus' Menaechmi.]

In the second scene of The Comedy of Errors, Dromio of Ephesus meets Antipholus of Syracuse for the first time, and rebukes him for not coming home to dinner. Antipholus ignores the rebuke (which means nothing to him) and turns to a more urgent matter:

antipholus s: Stop in your
wind, sir; tell me this, I pray:
Where have you left the money that I gave you?
dromio e: O—sixpence that
I had a Wednesday last
To pay the saddler for my mistress' crupper?
The saddler had it, sir; I kept it not.

(I. ii. 53-7)

We settle ourselves for a couple of hours of farce. The confusion seems to be on a purely material level—mistaken persons and mislaid goods. Shakespeare is keeping to the spirit of his source, the Menaechmi of Plautus, where the action takes place in a hard southern daylight and the issues are all practical ones.

But at the end of this first scene of confusion, Shakespeare introduces a new note. In Plautus, Epidamnum is seen as a place of danger, but danger of a prosaic and familiar kind:

For assure your selfe, this towne Epidamnum, is a place of outragious expenses, exceeding in all ryot and lasciviousness: and (I heare) as full of Ribaulds, Parasites, Drunkards, Catchpoles, Cony-catchers, and Sycophants, as it can hold: then for Curtizans, why here's the currantest stamp of them in the world. Ye may not thinke here to scape with as light cost as in other places.

(II. i. p. 17)¹

Antipholus of Syracuse sees Ephesus in quite a different way:

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,
Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,
And many such-like liberties of sin.

(I. ii. 97-102)

The sleight of hand that deceives the eye, the cunning of the confidence trick, shades into something deeper and more sinister, deception and shape-shifting that attack not merely the purse but the body and soul. There are no such overtones in Plautus. Nor is there much sense of wonder in the characters; only a temporary bewilderment that is easily explained away. Shakespeare's Antipholus of Syracuse, addressed by name by a woman he has never seen before, asks, ‘How can she thus, then, call us by our names, / Unless it be by inspiration?’ (II. ii. 165-6). In the parallel incident in Menaechmi, the courtesan's cook addresses Menaechmus by name, and an explanation (wrong, but reasonable) is immediately forthcoming:

These Courtizans as soone as anie straunge shippe arrive at the Haven, they send a boye or a wench to enquire what they be, what their names be, whence they come, wherefore they come, &c. If they can by any meanes strike acquaintance with him, or allure him to their houses, he is their owne.

(II. i. p. 19)

No such reassuring explanations are offered to Shakespeare's characters. At times even the audience is left in the dark, for Shakespeare takes fewer pains than Plautus to give a logical under-propping to his comic fantasy. There is nothing improbable in identical twins, but identical twins with the same name take some explaining, and Plautus is ready with the answer: ‘When it was tolde us that you and our father were both dead, our Graundsire (in memorie of my fathers name) chaunged mine to Menechmus’ (V. i. p. 38). Shakespeare provides two sets of twins with the same name, and not a word of explanation.

The Roman comedy of confusion takes place in a practical world, where nothing is inexplicable, and where the issues at stake are largely the material ones of who owns what and where the next meal is coming from. The play has a single vision and a uniform texture. But Shakespeare gives us a play in a more mixed dramatic idiom. The market-place atmosphere of Plautus is still present, but it no longer monopolizes the play; it is varied by suggestions of fantasy and mystery, and the result is a mixture of styles that goes much deeper than changes from prose to verse, or the varying of metres. It is a mixture of different ways of viewing the world, of which different dramatic styles are ultimately a reflection. Nor is the decision to mix idioms in this way artificially imposed; it springs from Shakespeare's own fresh and imaginative meditation on the central idea of Plautus, the idea of confusion. The Comedy of Errors is unusual in that mistaken identity is itself the primary motif, not (as in As You Like It or Twelfth Night) a technical device to aid the presentation of some other issue. Perhaps Shakespeare, before he could use mistaken identity as an instrument, had to give it a thorough examination. And in exploiting the situations arising from it, Shakespeare demonstrates that confusion, the gap of understanding between one mind and another, can exist at a deeper level than who's-got-the-chain or which-twin-is-it-this-time. These questions are important to the action, and much of the play's immediate comic life depends on them; but they are also signals of a deeper breakdown of understanding; the characters seem at times to inhabit different worlds, different orders of experience.

Some of this effect is created by the mingling—and, at times, the collision—of dramatic styles. In II. ii Adriana, meeting the man she thinks is her husband, attacks him passionately for straying from her, urging him to recognize that as husband and wife they are bound together in a single being, and that consequently she shares in his corruption. Taken out of context, the speech is passionate and earnest, idealistic in its view of marriage and urgent in its emotional response to the breaking of that ideal. But the context is all-important. Adriana's speech follows immediately—with no transition whatever—a racy comic turn between Dromio and Antipholus on time, falling hair and syphilis; she breaks in on two characters who are operating in quite a different dramatic world. And any chance we might have of making the transition from one mode to another and taking Adriana's speech seriously is killed by the fact that all her high talk about the closeness of the marriage bond is directed at the wrong Antipholus, who—after listening to about forty lines on how closely he and Adriana are bound together—asks innocently, ‘Plead you to me, fair dame?’ (II. ii. 146). Or consider the following passage:

antipholus s: The fellow
is distract, and so am I;
And here we wander in illusions.
Some blessed power deliver us from hence!
                                        [Enter a Courtezan.
courtezan: Well met, well met,
Master Antipholus.
I see, sir, you have found the goldsmith now.
Is that the chain you promis'd me to-day?
antipholus s: Satan, avoid! I charge
thee, tempt me not.
dromio s: Master, is this Mistress
Satan?
antipholus s: It is the devil.

(IV. iii. 37-45)

Here, the attitude of each character is comically dislocated. The courtesan is simply living her casual, material life, while Antipholus is struggling between heaven and hell, in a metaphysical nightmare where even a call for ‘some blessed power’ is met by (for him) a fresh appearance of evil, and (for the audience) a comic anticlimax. The contrast is driven home, once again, by the different styles of speech—the casual chatter of the courtesan, the explosive horror of Antipholus and, on the side, Dromio's more familiar recognition of the powers of evil. This introduces us to a device we will see Shakespeare using throughout his comedies: a speech is comically dislocated by being placed in the wrong context, usually through being addressed to an unsympathetic or uncomprehending listener. The comic value of this device is obvious, and is exploited throughout the play. Yet, as with many such devices, it requires only a twist of emphasis, or a new situation, to make the effect pathetic or disturbing. The gaps of understanding between us are not always amusing. While we laugh easily enough when Adriana fires a long, emotional speech at the wrong Antipholus, it is not so funny when, later in the play, Aegeon pleads with his son to save his life, and his son refuses to acknowledge him.

The effect is to show how frail and vulnerable our attitudes and assumptions are, to bring into sharp focus the incompleteness of anything we may say or do, the fact that, however serious or important it may seem to us, there is always another viewpoint from which it is wrong, or trivial, or incomprehensible. The collisions of different minds that take place throughout The Comedy of Errors help to suggest this. When, for example, Adriana strikes a posture of languishing grief, Luciana's sharp comment deflates it immediately:

Since that my beauty cannot please his eye,
I'll weep what's left away, and weeping die.
luciana: How many fond fools serve
mad jealousy!

(ii. i. 114-16)

The triple rhyme clinches the point: Adriana is not even allowed the neat finality of a concluding couplet. But one might say that Luciana is getting her revenge, for earlier in the same scene she had delivered a lecture to Adriana on the necessity of order in marriage, urging that a wife should submit patiently to her husband, only to receive this reply:

A wretched soul, bruis'd with adversity,
We bid be patient when we hear it cry;
But were we burd'ned with like weight of pain,
As much, or more, we should ourselves complain.
So thou, that hast no unkind mate to grieve thee,
With urging helpless patience would relieve me;
But if thou live to see like right bereft,
This fool-begg'd patience in thee will be left.

(ii. i. 34-41)

One of the most persistent comic points in Shakespeare is the disparity between theory and reality, the breakdown of philosophy in the face of experience—particularly when the experience is yours and the philosophy is someone else's. Throughout the play, Antipholus of Ephesus is (like his wife) the recipient of much good (III. i. 85-106), from the officer who arrests him (IV. iv. 18)—in short, from people who do not really share his problems. He obviously hears this good advice once too often, and retaliates by giving Pinch an object lesson in the difficulties of philosophy: ‘My master preaches patience to him, and the while / His man with scissors nicks him like a fool’ (V. i. 174-5).

The gap between different understandings of the world is centred on the two Antipholus brothers. In Menaechmi the twin brothers inhabit the same prosaic, domestic world and undergo basically the same kind of experience; in The Comedy of Errors not only are their characters more sharply distinguished,² but the difference between their experiences is more emphasized. In the words of A. C. Hamilton, Antipholus of Ephesus ‘endures a nightmare’ while his brother ‘enjoys a delightful dream’.³ One is showered with gifts, money and women; the other is locked out of his house, arrested for debt and tied up as a lunatic. The difference in their experiences is signalled by a difference in style. The scene in which Antipholus of Ephesus is locked out of his house (III. i.) is noisy, raucous and farcical, full of spluttering threats and bawdy insults; it is immediately followed (III. ii.) by his brother's courtship of Luciana, a quiet scene of romantic feeling shot through with more subtle comic irony, a scene in which the focus is on emotional rather than on physical problems. The contrast is not rigid throughout, for Antipholus of Syracuse is involved in a good deal of knockabout farce, but it is significant that as soon as his brother appears (III. i. is the latter's first scene) we are made aware of this disparity between them.

They seem to inhabit two different towns. For Antipholus of Ephesus, as for the rest of the native population (and initially for the audience) Ephesus is the familiar seaport town of Plautine comedy, a small world of commerce and domesticity, where, as E. M. W. Tillyard puts it, ‘everyone knows everyone else's business, where merchants predominate, and where dinner is a serious matter’.⁴ Shakespeare even sharpens the commercial interests of the town, giving them a distinctly unflattering emphasis. A dispute over the Duke of Syracuse's treatment of Ephesian merchants has led to ‘mortal and intestine jars’ (I. i. 11), and to a sentence of death on any merchant from one town who visits the other. This is the predicament in which Aegeon stands in the first scene. According to the Duke, he is condemned

Unless a thousand marks be levied,
To quit the penalty and to ransom him.
Thy substance, valued at the highest rate,
Cannot amount unto a hundred marks;
Therefore by law thou art condemn'd to die.

(I. i. 22-6)

Though the point is not much developed, this crude measuring of human life in financial terms anticipates the inhuman legalism of Shylock;⁵ and throughout the play there are several small touches conveying the Ephesians’ narrow concern with money. The merchant who talks with Antipholus of Syracuse in the second scene is kind enough to warn him against the law; but he refuses an invitation to keep him company and join him for dinner, on the grounds that he is already engaged ‘to certain merchants, / Of whom I hope to make much benefit’ (I. ii. 24-5). The officer who arrests Antipholus of Ephesus refuses to release him, even when told he is mad and needs treatment:

adriana: What wilt thou
do, thou peevish officer?
Hast thou delight to see a wretched man
Do outrage and displeasure to himself?
officer: He is my prisoner; if
I let him go,
The debt he owes will be requir'd of me.

(IV. iv. 111-15)

In this commercial world, Antipholus of Ephesus appears to have occupied, when the action begins, a solid and respectable place. Angelo the goldsmith describes him as ‘Of very reverent reputation … / Of credit infinite, highly belov'd’ (v. i. 5-6). His marriage, whatever its internal difficulties, is eminently respectable, having been arranged by the Duke himself (v. i. 137-8, 198). In the commercial and domestic spheres he inhabits, disruption may be fun for the audience, but it is unsettling and unpleasant for the victim. As we see throughout Shakespeare's comedies, love seems to thrive on irrationality and confusion, and emerges from it strengthened, renewed and satisfied: the experience of Antipholus of Syracuse is roughly parallel to that of Demetrius, Orlando and Sebastian. But the world of commerce simply goes crazy when an irrational factor is introduced, and the only satisfaction is for chains and ducats to be restored to their original owners, as though the confusion had never taken place. Nothing is gained in the process, for the transactions of business are barren and limited, incapable of the sudden, spontaneous enrichment that we see in the transactions of love. What is enchantment and enrichment for one brother is simply confusion for the other, a confusion that must be put right. The only party to gain something is the audience: since commercial life has been depicted in such unflattering terms, we are bound to take a special, mischievous delight in seeing it disrupted.

One may even question whether the disruption of Antipholus's marriage leads to any good result for the characters. The disorder produced by mistaken identity is linked to a more familiar disorder, a longstanding unhappiness between husband and wife. Adriana tells the Abbess that her husband has not been himself all week, though his rage has only broken out that afternoon (V. i. 45-8). And when she confesses that her nagging has disrupted the normal rhythms of his life, the Abbess lectures her:

In food, in sport, and life-preserving rest,
To be disturb'd would mad or man or beast.
The consequence is, then, thy jealous fits
Hath scar'd thy husband from the use of wits.

(V. i. 83-6)

We know, of course, that his ‘madness’ depends more on the mistaken-identity confusion than anything else (we have seen him cheated of a meal for reasons other than his wife's scolding tongue). But the Abbess's speech reminds us there are other, more familiar ways a man's life can be disrupted, and with similar results. It is clear enough that not all of Antipholus's problems stem from the fact that his brother is in town, and we may wonder if these problems can all be cured by the discovery of his brother. One curious feature of the ending is that, while the problems of the marriage have been thoroughly aired, there is no explicit reconciliation between husband and wife. The director may contrive a forgiving embrace, but nothing in the text requires it. At the end of Menaechmi, the wife is curtly dismissed as one more piece of household goods to be auctioned off as her husband leaves town to live with his brother (V. i. p. 39). Shakespeare does not give us that, either; he leaves us, instead, with a silence that the performers have to fill by some decision of their own.⁶ For the critic, with only the text before him, the final state of this marriage must remain an open question. But we may suggest that in the domestic, commercial world of Ephesus there are no miracles.

No miracles, at least, for the native population. For the outsider, Antipholus of Syracuse, Ephesus is a different kind of town altogether, a place of magic and enchantment. His wonder and bewilderment remind us of the town's reputation as a centre of magic,⁷ a reputation to which none of the native population ever refers. And while—if we shake ourselves—we may remember that nothing supernatural actually takes place, we see the town to a great extent through the eyes of the outsiders, for they are given more dramatic prominence than the natives, and treated, on the whole, more sympathetically. Viewed from the special angle of the outsider, even the normal intercourse of life becomes bizarre and unsettling:

There's not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend;
And every one doth call me by my name.
Some tender money to me, some invite me,
Some other give me thanks for kindnesses,
Some offer me commodities to buy;
Even now a tailor call'd me in his shop,
And show'd me silks that he had bought for me,
And therewithal took measure of my body.
Sure these are but imaginary wiles,
And Lapland sorcerers inhabit here.

(IV. iii. 1-11)

The prosaic, day-to-day business of a commercial town becomes something strange and dreamlike, because it is all happening to the wrong man.

Each brother's experience of the confusion of mistaken identity is matched by the more familiar experience of being unsettled by a woman. Antipholus of Ephesus has his domestic routine disrupted by an unseen brother and a nagging wife; Antipholus of Syracuse is enchanted by a strange town, and suddenly bewitched by love (the curious name given him in the Folio, ‘Antipholus Erotes’, suggests both wandering and love). Even when addressed by Adriana, he sees himself as in a dream, a dream to which he is willing to surrender:

Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell?
Sleeping or waking, mad or well-advis'd?
Known unto these, and to myself disguis'd!
I'll say as they say, and persever so,
And in this mist at all adventures go.

(II. ii. 211-15)

But this surrender is still somewhat tentative; he offers himself to Luciana more recklessly: ‘Are you a god? Would you create me new? / Transform me, then, and to your pow'r I'll yield’ (III. ii. 39-40). Earlier in the play, there was discontent in his words, ‘So I, to find a mother and a brother, / In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself’ (I. ii. 39-40). But now he is eager to lose himself in a more profound way, transformed by love.⁸

There is certainly a transformation in his understanding. As the market-place and the tailor's shop acquire an aura of mystery for him, so too does Luciana. Here the special perspective of the outsider fuses with the special perspective of the lover, whose view of his lady is a transforming vision, comically at odds with reality. In their scene together, we note the practical, worldly manner of Luciana's advice:

If you did wed my sister for her wealth,
Then for her wealth's sake use her with more kindness;
Or, if you like elsewhere, do it by stealth;
Muffle your false love with some show of blindness …
Then, gentle brother, get you in again;
Comfort my sister, cheer her, call her wife.
'Tis holy sport to be a little vain
When the sweet breath of flattery conquers strife.

(III. ii. 5-8, 25-8)

Her words appear cynical; but there is an undercurrent of sadness in them, as she tries to make the best of a difficult situation. Above all, she is realistic: there are no appeals to higher feelings, and she does not attempt to revive a dead love. But for Antipholus this rueful, worldly, but perfectly clear advice is transformed into a divine, oracular pronouncement, veiled in mystery:

Sweet mistress—what your name is else, I know not,
Nor by what wonder you do hit of mine—
Less in your knowledge and your grace you show not
Than our earth's wonder—more than earth, divine.
Teach me, dear creature, how to think and speak;
Lay open to my earthy-gross conceit,
Smother'd in errors, feeble, shallow, weak,
The folded meaning of your words' deceit.

(III. ii. 29-36)

But the comic disparity between Luciana as we see her and the lover's special vision, though clear enough, is less drastic than it might have been. The alternate rhyme they both use gives a heightened, formal quality to her speech. Despite its worldly content there is something oracular in its manner, and the result is a subtler comic effect than we might have expected. The double vision of Luciana is not just a matter of contrasting our reactions with the lover's; it is built into the presentation of Luciana herself—so that, while laughing at the lover, we can see his point of view. Though romantic love is a secondary motif in this play, the balance between mockery and sympathy, characteristic of later comedies, has already been struck.

This surrender to a special vision is placed ironically against Adriana's very different view of the transformations of love as they occur in marriage. Here the woman surrenders to the man (in courtship it is the other way round) and the surrender can be not life-enhancing but ruinous:

Do their gay vestments his affections bait?
That's not my fault; he's master of my state.
What ruins are in me that can be found
Not by him ruin'd? Then is he the ground
Of my defeatures. My decayed fair
A sunny look of his would soon repair.

(II. i. 94-9)

And she later insists that her husband's corruption will spread inevitably to her (II. ii. 118-45). In the speeches of the lover, the idea of surrender is still innocent and uncomplicated, unbruised by reality. In the speeches of the wife, it has become tinged with self-pity and resentment, as we move from the idealism of courtship to the tensions of the sex war.⁹

The idea of enchantment and transformation—including surrender in love—is seen from a third angle, that of Dromio of Syracuse, and there is a contrast between master and servant, as there is between brother and brother. What is normal life for the Ephesians and a dream for Antipholus of Syracuse is a folktale horror story come true for Dromio: ‘This is the fairy land. O spite of spites! / We talk with goblins, owls, and sprites!’ (II. ii. 188-9). In place of his master's exotic ‘Lapland sorcerers’, Dromio imagines Ephesus as a town full of more familiar bugbears—fairies and devils. When his master (as he thinks) is arrested for debt, he spins elaborate fantasies about the sergeant as a devil (IV. ii. 31-46; IV. iii. 12-18). (His brother, characteristically, spins smaller fantasies out of the more prosaic business of being beaten—II. i. 82-5; IV. iv. 26-37.) And while Antipholus is eager to surrender himself to a woman and be transformed by her, Dromio's view of this surrender is (like the woman) radically different, and expressed in a comically contrasting style. A few lines after Antipholus has addressed Luciana as ‘mine own self's better part; / Mine eye's clear eye, my dear heart's dearer heart’ (III. ii. 61-2), Dromio enters, fleeing in panic from the fat kitchen wench, and exclaiming, ‘Do you know me, sir? Am I Dromio? Am I your man? Am I myself? … I am an ass, I am a woman's man, and besides myself’ (III. ii. 73-8). He fears that she would have ‘transform'd me to a curtal dog, and made me turn i'th'wheel’ (III. ii. 144). The transformations of love can be comically humiliating as well as exalting.

One of the touching minor effects in the play is the way Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse listen to each other, and sympathize with each other's point of view. When he hears what his servant has endured in the kitchen, Antipholus concludes, ‘There's none but witches do inhabit here’ (III. ii. 154) and decides, despite his love for Luciana, to ‘stop mine ears against the mermaid's song’ (III. ii. 162). (He had addressed her, earlier in the scene, as ‘sweet mermaid’—III. ii. 45.) He yields to Dromio's pleas, and decides to leave town that night. But Dromio can also sink his own fears and recognize how his master is profiting from Ephesus:

Faith, stay here this night; they will surely do us no harm; you saw they speak us fair, give us gold; methinks they are such a gentle nation that, but for the mountain of mad flesh that claims marriage of me, I could find in my heart to stay here still and turn witch.

(IV. iv. 149-53)

To be cast adrift in a town of magic is both exhilarating and frightening; and the interplay between Dromio and Antipholus on this point conveys this dual quality subtly and even movingly. The interest of the play goes deeper than the farcical one of wondering what will happen next; we do wonder that, of course, but we also watch to see how the characters will react to what happens.

At the centre of the play, then, is a farcical comedy of situations that gives rise to a more subtle comedy based on contrasting the characters' responses to their situations. The interest springs from a series of immediate, ad hoc effects—collisions of style, confrontations of character—and we live from moment to moment, unconcerned, for the most part, with the larger sweep of the story. But there is a larger story in the background, and a very different kind of story from the farcical tale of confusion that occupies our attention for most of the play. The story of Aegeon is a tale of wandering, shipwreck and separation, more in the tradition of romance than the tradition of drama.¹⁰

Aegeon represents yet another area of experience, isolated from the other characters—an isolation signalled dramatically by the fact that after his long opening scene he is virtually forgotten until the end of the play. Even in that first scene, we seem curiously detached from him. His long account of his misfortunes is literary, clever and rhetorical in a way that prevents a full emotional engagement:¹¹

In Syracusa was I born, and wed
Unto a woman, happy but for me,
And by me, had not our hap been bad.

(I. i. 36-8)

So that, in this unjust divorce of us,
Fortune had left to both of us alike
What to delight in, what to sorrow for.
Her part, poor soul, seeming as burdened
With lesser weight, though not with lesser woe,
Was carried with speed before the wind …

(I. i. 105-10)

Shakespeare restrains our interest in Aegeon's problems in order to focus more sharply on the problems of his children, thereby reversing what might be the natural response—to feel greater concern for loss and suffering than for the confusion of mistaken identity. He keeps the story of wandering very much at a distance, as something faintly literary, related rather than experienced; and concentrates instead on the more obviously dramatic material of immediate confrontations between characters. Later, in Pericles, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale, stories like Aegeon's will be made fully dramatic; but in The Tempest Shakespeare returns to the method of The Comedy of Errors.

At the end of the play, however, 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 dissolve and the different worlds they inhabit begin to fuse. A stage image and a joke connect the sufferings of Aegeon, condemned by the laws of Ephesus, to the more comic sufferings of his son:

aegeon: I am sure you both
of you remember me.
dromio e: Ourselves we do remember,
sir, by you;
For lately we were bound as you are now.
You are not Pinch's patient, are you, sir?

(V. i. 291-4)

And as the knots are (figuratively and literally) untied, some of the wonder experienced by Antipholus of Syracuse begins to touch the more practical Ephesians. When the Duke sees the twins together he exclaims:

One of these men is genius to the other;
And so of these. Which is the natural man,
And which the spirit? Who deciphers them?

(V. i. 331-3)

To some extent the denouement is a practical, Plautine unravelling of the knots: the right people finally come together in the same place, and the various Ephesians who have lost money and property have it restored to them. But there are also strong suggestions that the denouement is an act of destiny (picking up Aegeon's concern with Fortune) and a miracle (recalling Antipholus of Syracuse's view that Ephesus is a town of magic). Certainly it cannot be brought about by institutional authority: the cry of ‘justice’ with which the Ephesians appeal to their Duke is a confused babble that produces no result, since everyone's idea of ‘justice’ is different and the Duke has no idea what the problem is.¹² In the last scene the Abbess, not the Duke, is the real figure of authority, remaining calm and clear-headed while he struggles to make sense of the matter. She alone registers no surprise, accepting the strange events as easily as if she had expected them to happen all along. And she presides over the final feast, suggesting in her invitation that what has taken place is a new birth—thus linking the miracle of the ending with the normal processes of life:

Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail
Of you, my sons; and till this present hour
My heavy burden ne'er delivered.
The Duke, my husband, and my children both,
And you, the calendars of their nativity,
Go to a gossip's feast, and joy with me;
After so long grief, such nativity!

(V. i. 399-405)¹³

As the Abbess takes centre stage away from the Duke, so the fussy legalism he has represented is swept away by a deeper authority, the spontaneous force of life. The Duke himself brushes aside the Ephesian law, on being offered the ransom for Aegeon: ‘It shall not need; thy father hath his life’ (V. i. 389). And at the end the Dromios, after debating the question of precedence, conclude that the question is irrelevant: ‘We came into the world like brother and brother, / And now let's go hand in hand, not one before another’ (V. i. 423-4).

The emphasis, at the end, is not on the creation of a ‘new social unit’ (as in Northrop Frye's theory of comedy)¹⁴ but on the renewal of an old family unit. Shakespeare is silent about the marriage of Adriana and Antipholus of Ephesus; and Antipholus of Syracuse's (presumably) approaching marriage is politely but firmly put to one side, as something to be discussed later. He says to Luciana:

What I told you then,
I hope I shall have leisure to make good;
If this be not a dream I see and hear.

(V. i. 373-5)

He is still caught up in the wonder of the family reunion. In Plautus, Menaechmus of Epidamnum sells all his household and returns to Syracuse with his brother; Shakespeare softens the emphasis considerably, but the point is the same: the final image of security is not a wedding dance but a christening feast, a family celebration. This may be because of the play's concern with identity: identity is surrendered in love and marriage, but when the original family is recreated, the characters join a comforting social group which asks only that they be their old selves. After the challenges to identity throughout the play the characters—and perhaps the audience—need this kind of comfort, a return to the old and familiar, rather than the start of something new which marriage symbolizes.¹⁵ Even at the end, the characters' disparate lives and experiences are not brought into a total harmony: security is achieved—and this is characteristic of Shakespeare's comedies—by selecting one experience, and fixing on that. Marriage is not brutally dismissed, as in Plautus; but it is quietly placed in the background, and no great hopes are pinned on it.

In the rejoining of the broken family, there is—as in most comic endings—a clear element of wish fulfilment. The play itself is a special, artificial ordering of experience, and, while we are not given the sort of distancing epilogue we find at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream or As You Like It, the manner of the play throughout is sufficiently stylized to remind us that it is a work of literary and theatrical artifice.¹⁶ The play is, even for a Shakespearian comedy, unusually full of rhyme, of jingling verse and of comic turns and set pieces—such as the debates on time and falling hair (II. ii. 63-107), and on the respective merits of cheer and welcome (III. i. 19-29); or Dromio of Syracuse's grand description of the fat kitchen wench in terms of European geography (III. ii. 113-37). And the play presents a story starting from a fantastic premise and moving to an almost equally fantastic conclusion. But at the same time, for all its artificiality, it deals with the most normal and intimate relations of life—wives and husbands, parents and children. In comparing the different worlds the Antipholus brothers inhabit, we saw an intersection of the special and fantastic with the normal and everyday—Ephesus as a town of sorcerers, and as a town of merchants. The same intersection of the fantastic and the normal becomes part of the audience's own experience as it watches the play—a strange and stylized fable built out of the most familiar relationships of life. The result of this interweaving of the fantastic and the everyday is to make us see each kind of experience from the perspective of the other—just as Antipholus of Syracuse is brought to see ordinary tradesmen as ‘Lapland sorcerers’, or the Abbess sees the coincidental rejoining of a long-sundered family as an event as natural as childbirth. The comic strategy of the play is one of dislocation, forcing us to see experiences from a fresh perspective, reminding us that no one understanding of life is final. The mixed dramatic mode gives shading and variety to what could have been a one-note, mechanical farce; but it also embodies a comic vision of the instability of life itself.

Notes

1. References to Menaechmi are to William Warner's translation, in Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, I (London, 1957). On the likelihood that Shakespeare knew and used this version, see Bullough's introduction, pp. 3-4.

2. The difference between the characters is summarized by Marion Bodwell Smith, Dualities in Shakespeare (Toronto, 1966):

   Antipholus of Syracuse is the milder and less rash, the more courteous and considerate of the two. Where Antipholus of Ephesus meets obstacles head-on and is with difficulty persuaded by his friends to make the best of a bad situation, Antipholus of Syracuse is more inclined to go with the tide rather than fight against it (p. 22).

3. The Early Shakespeare (San Marino, 1967), p. 96.

4. Shakespeare's Early Comedies (London, 1965), pp. 54-5.

5. See Smith, Dualities in Shakespeare, p. 24.

6. There is a similar silence at the end of Measure for Measure, when Isabella says nothing to Claudio, and is given no chance to reply to the Duke's proposal of marriage.

7. See R. A. Foakes, introduction to his Arden edition of The Comedy of Errors (London, 1962), p. xxix.

8. For a detailed discussion of the loss of identity as a theme in the play, see Harold Brooks, ‘Themes and structure in The Comedy of Errors’, in John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (eds.), Early Shakespeare (London, 1961), pp. 55-71.

9. The contrast between lover-and-mistress and wife-and-husband is reviewed by Charles Brooks, ‘Shakespeare's romantic shrews’, Shakespeare Quarterly, XI (summer 1960), p. 355. He takes a more sanguine view of Adriana's marriage than I have.

10. Bullough, in Narrative and Dramatic Sources, includes a passage from Gower's Confessio Amantis as a probable source for Aegeon's story.

11. Here I take issue with the frequently expressed view that Aegeon's account of his misfortunes carries a nearly tragic emotional impact. See, for example, H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Comedy (London, 1966), p. 71; and Derek Traversi, William Shakespeare: The Early Comedies (revised edition: London, 1964), p. 12.

12. According to Marion Bodwell Smith, ‘In Shakespeare's plays the cry for “Justice!” is seldom heard without the accompaniment of some sort of irony’ (Dualities in Shakespeare, p. 23). Cf. also R. A. Foakes, Arden introduction, p. xlviii.

13. This idea is taken up in the final romances. Pericles refers to his newfound daughter as ‘Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget’ (V. i. 194) and Cymbeline, reunited with his children, exclaims ‘O, what am I? / A mother to the birth of three?’ (V. v. 238-9).

14. ‘The argument of comedy’, English Institute Essays, 1948 (New York, 1949), p. 60.

15. Stanley Wells has pointed out the importance of non-sexual love as a ‘driving force’ in the play: see ‘Shakespeare and romance’, in John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (eds.), Later Shakespeare (London, 1966), p. 60.

16. As Clifford Leech points out, ‘the multiplication of farcical incident’ also achieves a sense of distance. See the introduction to his Arden edition of The Two Gentlemen of Verona (London, 1969), p. lxix.