SOURCE: “The Significance of Shakespeare's ‘Classical’ Comedy,” in Shakespeare, Plautus and the Humanist Tradition, D. S. Brewster, 1990, pp. 198-211.

[In the essay that follows, Riehle argues that The Comedy of Errors reflects a classically “pagan” orientation, in which the fantastical elements enhance rather than hinder the coherence and intensity of the drama.]

Errors is a play in which a number of themes that were to become increasingly important in Shakespeare's work are dramatized. Very early in the play, the ‘cosmic order’, the ‘cosmic reality behind appearance’¹ is envisaged, and the contrast between appearance and reality becomes fundamental. H. F. Brooks has rightly maintained that ‘At the centre is relationship: relationship between human beings, depending on their right relationship to truth and universal law.’² The necessity of justice as well as of mercy is emphasized. All this, except for the theme of cosmic order, is fully in line with the spirit and tone of Menandrian New Comedy, which centres around the humanism of true relationships. There is, of course, no denying the impact of English late medieval drama on Shakespeare, yet as far as Errors is concerned, it is wrong to argue that, rather than being a play inspired by classical comedy, it is firmly rooted in the popular tradition of the Mystery and Morality Plays.³Errors is the result of Shakespeare's intensive study of the classical tradition, and this is what makes the play so important.

Not only is it wrong to see major reflections of the Mystery Plays and Moralities in Errors, the play is also less Christian in tone than is generally assumed. The Christian elements, rather than being essential, have the primary function of providing colour and a touch of realism; they make the audience feel that they are in a familiar world. If Antipholus S calls himself a ‘Christian’, then he does it merely in the context of an oath-like emphasis: ‘As I am a Christian’ (I, ii, 77), and when, at the appearance of the Courtesan, Dromio asks whether she is ‘mistress Satan’ (IV, iii, 47), such a reference remains entirely on the surface and cannot be taken as proving a specifically Christian outlook. The notion that husband and wife are ‘incorporate’ as one flesh, is, of course, a common Christian concept, yet in Errors it is not emphasized in a specifically Christian way. Of course, there are a number of allusions to Hell; they occur most frequently in Dromio's report of Antipholus E's imprisonment (IV, ii, 32-40). Yet, as we saw in an earlier context, their function is not so much to produce comic effects as to reinforce the element of threat. As the motifs of Hell and Satan are among the most common Christian notions and at the time when Shakespeare wrote were almost omnipresent, they can certainly not be seen as proving Shakespeare's alluding to the hell scenes and the presentations of Satan in the medieval Mystery Plays, as a recent interpretation would have it.⁴ Nor should we overlook the fact that Dromio begins his series of hell metaphors by a reference to the classical Tartarus, calling this place ‘worse than hell’ (IV, ii, 32). The only reference, and a very brief one at that, to the medieval theatre which I can find in the play is Egeon's report of his adventurous life, the structure of which resembles a de casibus tragedy. There is nothing else in the play to medievalize its atmosphere in any essential way. That the play was performed on Holy Innocents' Day in 1594, and a second time at Court, exactly ten years later, certainly should not be seen as reflecting a connection between the supposed baptismal theme of Errors and this Christian feast;⁵ on the contrary, the Gray's Inn report of this performance and the audience's response to it shows very clearly that the play was used as part of the Christmas Revels.⁶

A further argument put forward in order to prove the supposedly Christian quality of the play is the fact that Shakespeare chose Ephesus as its locality. It is claimed that he made this choice deliberately because this city was familiar to the Elizabethan audience from its description in the Acts of the Apostles, where its superstitious and mercantile atmosphere is evoked; and it is further argued that this gave Shakespeare the chance to include St Paul's admonition to husbands and wives in his Letter to the Ephesians.⁷ At first sight, these arguments seem to be more substantial than the ones first mentioned, yet they, too, are deceptive. It is, of course, very likely that Shakespeare reckoned with the Elizabethans' being ‘familiar’ with Ephesus and its reputation of being a place of witchcraft and superstition, yet I would like to suggest that this was not the major reason for his choice of locality. This lies rather in the fact that Ephesus was a favourite and important locality for the plots of New Comedy which already made use of its mercantile atmosphere, as in Bacchides or in the famous Miles Gloriosus. Merchants are among the more prominent characters of the plays of classical comedy, and this points to the circumstances which gave rise to Greek New Comedy, the new shift in interests from the common concerns of the Athenian people to private life in Athenian society.⁸ It is very interesting that in Errors Shakespeare preserves something of this original background, or rather he adapts it to the conditions of his own time when, particularly in the second scene of the play, he creates a specifically ‘mercantile’ atmosphere. It would therefore be wrong to claim that this business world was meant to show the Marxist ‘alienation’ among the play's major characters.⁹

Among the Christian aspects of the play, there is, of course, the character of the Abbess. Yet it is quite remarkable that, apart from her position, there is no specifically Christian quality to be found in her. She never refers to the Christian God (nor, by the way, does any other character). She mentions, it is true, her ‘holy prayers’ (V, i, 104) and she refers to her ‘oath’ (106), but these are the only indications of her spiritual life, which she gives. When she teaches the Duke the superiority of mercy over justice, we are inclined to interpret this as a Christian theme, and yet the ‘clementia’ of a governor had been a humanist virtue ever since classical antiquity—we need only think of Cicero, Seneca and Stoicism in general, or, as we have seen, of Solinus.¹⁰ If Shakespeare had wished to make the Abbess a Christian character, and to introduce questions of Christian belief in his play, he would certainly have used this opportunity in a different way. (Let us remember that the Act of Parliament which forbade the use of the name of God was not passed until 1606.) The constant repetition of critics that the Ephesian Abbess pronounces views on marriage which St Paul first addressed to the Ephesians does not add credibility to their claim. We remember our comparison in the last chapter between Adriana's dialogue with the Abbess and the Erasmian Colloquy On Marriage. The interesting difference between the two lies in the fact that, while Erasmus (who is himself an undogmatic Christian humanist) directly mentions St Paul's teaching on marriage, Shakespeare does not. The view expressed by Luciana that the wife has to submit herself to the authority of her husband is part of a brief sketch of the Elizabethan view of the cosmic order and cannot therefore be interpreted as specifically Pauline. We should further note that the Abbess never adopts St Paul's idea of female subordination; on the contrary, she argues from the point of view of female self-assertion and first suspects that Adriana has not ‘reprehended’ her husband ‘rough enough’ (56f.). In any case, the Abbess's advice to Adriana is based on common sense or reason, rather than on any specifically Christian principles. The way in which she tackles Adriana's problem is simply motivated by her desire to make Adriana aware of her possessive jealousy.

The fact that Aemilia and her family had been separated for 33 years has reminded one critic of the 33 years of Christ's life.¹¹ But what point could there be in any such association? Since in the entire play there is nothing which directly refers to Christ's redemption, an attempt of this kind to prove the medieval and Christian spirituality of this comedy is well-nigh absurd, and one is almost forced to say that criticism of Shakespeare's Errors is, to some extent, itself a ‘comedy of errors’. But what are we to make of the fact that, after the unravelling of the plot and after the various mutual recognitions, the Abbess invites all to a ‘gossips’ feast' (405), where the family reunion is to be celebrated? First, it has to be seen that the emphasis is clearly on ‘feast’ rather than on ‘baptism’. Then, the theme of rebirth is not an exclusively Christian one. In fact, it has been subtly prepared for by including the motif of the Phoenix, which, as we have seen, is the appropriate name for Antipholus's house. (In The Winter's Tale Shakespeare shows another classical ‘rebirth’—Hermione's reunion with her husband.) At any rate, the ‘gossips’ feast' in Errors is alluded to in a metaphorical way, and Shakespeare deliberately avoids any ‘sacramental’ or ‘liturgical’ associations. Let us remember the fact that both Antipholi retain their names, whereas in Menaechmi the traveller Menaechmus becomes Sosicles again after he has found his twin.¹² What bring about the final reunion are the humanist qualities of love, patience, and endurance, rather than divine interference. Is it not strange that the Abbess, before she invites the newly-found family members, omits all references to the godhead? Instead she suggests the human solidarity of sympathizing (397) as the prerequisite of the final reunion.¹³ Whereas in Shakespeare's late plays the belief in divine guidance becomes a central theme, in Errors the idea of providence is, as it were, only subliminally present in the frequency with which characters experience situations they cannot account for, so that they think they are dreaming.¹⁴ Again, this sense of wonder is developed much further in the later plays.

The Egeon overplot, of which the Abbess is a part, and which is based on the Apollonius of Tyre, has usually been taken as a specifically medieval element, or to be more precise, as an element of medieval romance. This again is a misunderstanding of Shakespeare's intentions. The Apollonius story is not just a typical example of a medieval romance, not even if it is Gower who retells it. True, in Gower the hero is called a knight, and Apollonius's wedding is described as a courtly feast, but Gower uses this tale of antiquity, in which Diana and Neptune dominate the world, as a deterrent against the sexual aberration of incest. Chaucer refused to include sujets of this kind because he considered them too distasteful¹⁵. Not so Shakespeare: incest occurs in his work in a number of forms; we think, apart from Pericles, above all of Hamlet, where Gertrude's remarriage is considered incestuous. And in Errors, as Ralph Berry has observed, incest becomes a ‘theatrical possibility’¹⁶ in the very pivot of the play: if Adriana had ‘marital’ intercourse with the twin, she would have unwittingly committed the sins of both adultery and incest. It is certainly true that not much is made of this theme in Errors, but its presence as a dramatic possibility cannot be denied; it certainly does not contribute to the allegedly ‘Christian tone’ of the play. Hence it really makes no difference whether Shakespeare read the Apollonius in Gower's version or as a late classical romance. Egeon, far from being a Christian character, tells his romance story not so much in a medieval but rather in a classical tone, and Shakespeare seems to wish to emphasize this point because Egeon is the only character in the play who refers to ‘the gods’ (whom he calls ‘merciless’) (I, i, 99).

A further reason why the Egeon overplot produces a classical impression is the intertextual links between Apollonius and the world of the New Comedy tradition, as it is reflected in the refined Plautine Rudens. A brief consideration of these texts must suffice here because we shall have to return to them in our final chapter. In both texts, family members are separated and happily reunited through divine providence as well as through the virtue of human piety (pietas), a virtue which, as we have seen, Erasmus also strongly emphasized in his own work. In the Apollonius this piety causes the protagonist's wife to become a priestess in the temple of Diana, while in Rudens a priestess of the temple of Venus helps to bring about the final reunion. Just as in Rudens the virtue of pietas has a central role—and its importance is strongly emphasized as early as the Prologue—so Egeon, by his piety and patience, is able to withstand his tragic fate. This theme of human piety is, as it were, made to replace a specifically Christian attitude.¹⁷

The final piece of evidence usually adduced by those claiming that there are essential medieval constituents in Errors is, of course, the ‘romantic’ love between Luciana and Antipholus. However, if we look closely at scene III, ii, we observe clearly that this situation is very different from the typical romantic wooing scene. The sooner we give up the common notion that Shakespeare's romantic comedy originated in his early Errors, the better. It seems that the sheer poetry of the scene has distracted critics from observing what is really going on. Before we begin our analysis, we must bear in mind two things: first, that Shakespeare wanted us to experience the scene from the point of view of Antipholus as the central character, and, second, the fact that, from first to last, Luciana believes that she is addressing her own brother-in-law.

What happens in this scene is indeed a far cry from a genuine romantic wooing. Whereas normally the active part in a wooing scene is assigned to the wooer, the initiative here clearly lies with Luciana, who opens the scene by addressing Antipholus in a speech comprising almost 30 lines. We are, of course, to assume that he had already spoken to her in Adriana's house, and that she is now responding to his ‘advances’. But in a play it is what we see on stage that has the decisive effect. And we are shown Antipholus not so much as an active wooer, but as one responding to Luciana's suggestions and to the signs of encouragement which she gives him. The first thing he says is that he acknowledges her as his teacher: she is to teach him ‘how to think and speak’ (III, ii, 33). He then goes on to say that she has charmed him and that he has come entirely under her spell, so much so that he is speaking as though in a state of rapture; his adoration culminates in his claim that his identity and hers are one: ‘I am thee’ (66). He feels so attracted to her that he forgets the quest for his brother. One might argue that there are other romantic lovers who react in a manner similar to Antipholus. The point, however, is that Antipholus himself very early on experiences his falling in love with Luciana not as being enchanted by her beauty, but rather as succumbing to the bewitching temptations of a ‘siren’.

What can hardly have escaped the notice of either Antipholus or the Elizabethan audience is the bafflingly immoral tone of Luciana's initial advice to him. It is most strange that nevertheless almost all critics admire the alleged wisdom of her advice;¹⁸ she is even called an impersonation of ‘virtue’ as opposed to the ‘vice’ of the Courtesan.¹⁹ And one critic surprises us with a most daring inversion of what we find in the text: whereas Luciana advises Antipholus to ‘become disloyalty’, he ventures to claim that one of her qualities is ‘loyalty’!²⁰ Occasionally, a critic has felt some uneasiness about her words but has made light of it; her ‘slightly disconcerting’ moral views were, on one occasion, explained away as reflecting the influence of Ovid's Amores.²¹ In our production of the play, the actress who played Luciana became more and more uneasy about her role during rehearsals, and gradually the evasive ambiguity of Luciana's character emerged. Her advice is indeed difficult to account for: she suggests to the supposed husband of her sister that he should betray her by ‘stealth’ (III, ii, 7). The advice she gives here corresponds exactly to that of Folly in Erasmus's Praise of Folly on achieving peace in marriage: ‘Goodness me, what divorces or worse than divorces there would be everywhere if the domestic relations of man and wife were not propped up and sustained by the flattery, joking, complaisance, illusions, and deceptions provided by my followers!’²² Luciana, as we have seen in an earlier context, is herself a typically Lucianic character who, in advising her partner to be foolish-wise, reveals her own folly because she mistakes Antipholus S for her brother-in-law. At the end of the situation she is prepared to ask her sister for her ‘good will’ (70). For what? one must ask. Even for a present-day audience with their much more liberal moral standards, Luciana's views are rather daring. It is therefore all the more difficult to understand that critics have been ‘caught’ by the poetry of this love situation and have even claimed that the purpose of the scene is to enable Antipholus to find a new identity in Luciana.²³

It is important for a more profound understanding of Errors to see that here, in contrast to later comedies, especially Twelfth Night, a young man does not find his identity in his love for a woman or in the love for a female partner together with the friendship with a male friend. Errors is solely concerned with a young man's search for his social integration in his family and especially for his male counterpart. Finding each other, the twins become a symbol of male friendship because they best embody the way in which true friendship is defined by classical authors, above all by Cicero as well as by Renaissance humanists.²⁴ Love between friends is seen as an attraction between two similar minds, between two people of similar qualities and feelings, so that the friend is considered as the alter ego, the ‘other I’, as Sir Thomas Elyot directly translates it.²⁵ Antipholus finds himself by transcending himself through his love for his twin. The Duke hints at this by using a word with particularly classical and humanist connotations: when he sees the twins together, he observes that ‘one […] is genius to the other’ (V, i, 332). The implications of this term have not been fully recognized; it is not just that the one is the ‘attendant spirit’²⁶ of the other; the term ‘genius’ also meant the personification of the higher self to which one aspires.²⁷

Antipholus S wants to find his mother and in particular his brother in order to discover who he is himself. Adelman was on the right track when she claimed that ‘the love plot exists largely to add to the confusions of identity’²⁸ except that there is in fact no love plot, but just one scene; thereafter, the motif of courtship is dropped. In the final situation the idea of Luciana and Antipholus becoming a couple is only very vaguely hinted at and does no more than serve a convention. What we do see is that Antipholus, while he is alone on stage, suddenly realizes that he has been on the point of abandoning his essential task, his quest for his twin as his alter ego. As a consequence, he immediately revokes his behaviour towards Luciana; it appears to him that he was about to commit a serious mistake by succumbing to the charms of a ‘mermaid’ (163). He says that her ‘enchanting presence and discourse, / Hath almost made me traitor to myself’ (160f.). The word ‘traitor’ in Shakespeare has to be taken very seriously; we are by no means justified in passing over it lightly. The sentence suggests nothing less than that Antipholus, by being ‘seduced’ by Luciana's charms, almost gave up his quest for his brother and thus, implicitly, for his real self, too. Just as he thinks that he has met a ‘witch’ (143), so Antipholus in retrospect thinks that he was enchanted by witches. Antipholus, in his rapture, asks Luciana to ‘transform’ him (40), while Dromio believes that he was ‘transformed’ by the ‘witch’ Nell (145). Karen Newman thus comes very near the truth when she states that ‘Words such as dote, siren, mermaid and the like seriously undermine a wholly positive interpretation of the twin's love at this point.’²⁹ Indeed, Shakespeare here deliberately inserts references to the Odyssey, as Ralph Berry has recently observed.³⁰ When Antipholus stops his ears ‘against the mermaid's song’ (III, ii, 163), he has the Calypso episode of Book XII in mind. As Ulysses later encounters Circe, so Antipholus next meets the Courtesan whom he thinks to be another siren. The last direct allusion to the Odyssey occurs immediately before the situation of anagnorisis, when the Duke says of the total confusion: ‘I think you all have drunk of Circe's cup’ (V, i, 271).

However, Antipholus, although he has become aware of the powers which, as he thinks, are distracting him from his quest, nevertheless loses himself ever more deeply in a labyrinth of confusions. The same happens to his brother; he has first to taste the fear of being murdered and to approach the verge of insanity before he finally finds himself through the recognition of his brother. By means of Adriana's subtle name, which, as we have seen, is a variant of Ariadne, Shakespeare alludes to the famous Renaissance (and particularly mannerist³¹) concept of the labyrinth and opens up a further mythological perspective. These mythological associations provide the play with a universal, symbolic significance. At the same time the critical view of Adriana is reinforced: she does not possess the perfection of Ariadne, and consequently, rather than helping her husband out of the labyrinth, she in fact causes him—and indirectly his twin brother, too—to become more and more entangled in a maze.

To a Renaissance audience the problem of the confusing and transforming of identities was not, however, confined to the world of poetry or mythology; it could become a fact in real life too, and we find it even in the guise of a practical joke. There is an Italian anecdote according to which the famous Brunelleschi once tried to convince a fat carpenter that he had changed into another person, a certain Matteo. Some of Brunelleschi's friends, including Donatello, who were present, all ‘confirmed’ to the poor carpenter that he had become Matteo until he finally believed it and asked himself: ‘What shall I do now, since that I have become Matteo?’³² In a superstitious age, the carpenter has become the victim of his own credulity.

Here Shakespeare's Errors reveals, as it were, an additional level of meaning. Because of his own prejudiced credulity, Antipholus S interprets all the hindrances on his quest as dangerous ‘mermaids’ and ‘sirens’. His brother, too, is almost ruined by the Ephesian belief in witchcraft. Shakespeare not only makes a laughing-stock of exorcism, but he is also concerned about the inhuman effects which may arise from superstition. Just as Antipholus E is taken to be possessed, just as the Courtesan and the other women are taken to be witches, so in Elizabethan everyday reality innocent men and women were condemned as real witches. In both cases the same mechanism of misinterpreting ‘reality’ through a prejudiced imagination is at work. It seems to me that we have not considered seriously enough the fact that, on one level of meaning, Errors also reflects the witch craze, which reached a first climax in the last decades of the 16th century.³³Errors is written in the same spirit as Erasmus's and Lucian's fight against superstition and exorcism, against the blinding of man's reason by foolish credulity. Shakespeare's intention can in particular be compared to that of Erasmus in his Colloquy Exorcismus sive Spectrum and of Lucian in his Philopseudes, which we examined in the previous chapter. The play, narrated in the Erasmian dialogue, shows a character who is made a dupe, and as a result suffers such ill effects that he ‘would have been close to real insanity, had not relief come through a quick cure.’³⁴ Erasmus tries to show that calling a person a witch or considering someone to be possessed by a demon is not merely a matter of human misjudgement, but may even, as in the case of Shakespeare's Antipholus E, destroy the victim's very identity.

There is, then, even a satirical level in the complex play of Shakespeare's Errors. All the major characters are made fools of because they are deceived into accepting appearance for reality. We have already seen that even Luciana is satirized as a fool because she is totally mistaken about the real identity of the traveller Antipholus, and he in turn becomes a fool when he allows himself to be ruled by the common prejudice against Ephesus and sees witches in all the women he meets. When, towards the end of the great second scene of Act II, he decides to act the man all the others take him for: ‘I'll say as they say and persever so, / And in this mist at all adventures go’, then this counsel might easily have been suggested to him by Erasmus's Folly.³⁵ And then there is the critical light cast on Adriana's problematic relationship with her husband and the way in which the Abbess tries to cure it. Let us recall that in Menaechmi the theme of routine in marriage and the problems arising from it are also articulated, and Menaechmus is seen to struggle for freedom until finally the game of the auction is announced; yet these problems are simply mentioned as the cause of a turbulent action, and no attempts are made to overcome them. In Errors, the Abbess tries to correct Adriana's exaggerated jealousy, which is a clear symptom of her possessiveness. As we have seen, even Shakespeare's early comedy is, among other things, ‘corrective comedy’.³⁶

This corrective aspect is already fully developed in New Comedy. For example, in the Menandrian play Perikeiromene the jealousy of a character is exposed to laughter.³⁷ The comedy of Menander is concerned with a right sense of values and with the ‘educational problem’ to propagate these values in a play which does not totally dispose of satire.³⁸ Although Menander's plays were unknown in the Renaissance, there was a collection of his moral sentences which Erasmus frequently quoted.³⁹ ‘Error’ in New Comedy is, then, not only a matter of identities being concealed by disguise, and confusions resulting from deceit or the vicissitudes of life; it also implies misguided attitudes towards life or towards one's inner self. As early as the comedies of Menander we find the admonition of … by the Delphic Apollo.⁴⁰ The dramatic process of Menandrian comedy from agnoia to knowledge also comprises the losing and finding of one's self, the achieving of self-knowledge. Although Shakespeare can have had only a vague notion of Menandrian comedy, he nevertheless became familiar with practically all the dramaturgic and thematic possibilities which this tradition had to offer because, as we have seen, some of Plautus's comedies have faithfully preserved Menander's comic dramaturgy. In some plays of Plautus too, the problem of identity is made dramatic use of, as in Miles Gloriosus (169). In Menaechmi we have the quest of Menaechmus S for his alter ego; ‘he knows in some fashion that his own true identity is dependent upon the discovery of his brother’,⁴¹ yet in this play, the problem is entirely made subservient to the achieving of comic effects. However, in Amphitruo, this theme is treated in a much more profound way. Here the loss of identity brings the human characters on the verge of tragedy, and comic as well as tragic emotions are released in a ‘tragicomoedia’, which has now been recognized as Plautus's original creation.

It is, I think, Shakespeare's greatest triumph in Errors that he fulfils the ‘educational’ task of comedy by brilliantly combining the Menaechmi with the Amphitruo. The latter play, almost more than Menaechmi, inspired him to write his own ‘classical’ comedy about identity without ever becoming didactic in a non-dramatic sense. In his mixing of tragic and comic emotions he went far beyond Amphitruo and he, too, for the first time, experimented with the possibilities of tragicomedy.⁴²

Since Errors is a most accomplished achievement, it is improbable that it is a very early play or even Shakespeare's very first comedy. He obviously completed his Errors under the fresh impact of William Warner's translation of Menaechmi, although Shakespeare also worked with the Latin text of the play.⁴³ If Errors will not have originated before 1594, it becomes possible and even likely that it was specially written for Gray's Inn, where it was performed on December 28, 1594. It is tempting to speculate here a little and to assume that there might have been an additional reason for the connection between Errors and Gray's Inn. In 1594 Shakespeare dedicated his Rape of Lucrece, an epic poem based on a classical myth, to Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton, who is possibly the male friend to whom Shakespeare also dedicated his Sonnets.⁴⁴ It may well be that Henry Wriothesley, who had been a student of Gray's Inn, requested Shakespeare to write a ‘classical’ comedy for ‘his’ Inn.

It is particularly remarkable that there is a close thematic connection between Errors and the Sonnets (which, in the view of modern scholarship, were also written in the first half of the nineties).⁴⁵ First, some very unusual phrases are to be found in both works. Adriana reminds her supposed husband that her body is ‘consecrate to thee’ (II, ii, 132); similarly, in sonnet LXXIV the speaker assures his friend that his life was ‘consecreate to thee’ (6). Adriana complains to her sister that she ‘at home starves for a merry look’ (II, i, 88), while in sonnet LXXV the speaker speaks of himself as ‘clean starved for a look’ (10). Most of the parallels, however, are between Antipholus S and some of the sonnets. In his dialogue with Luciana his language reminds us not only of the Elizabethan love lyric in general, but particularly of Shakespeare's sonnets; yet, interestingly enough, of those addressed to his male friend. When he declares his ‘love’ to Luciana, he says that he is calling her ‘love’ because ‘It is thyself, mine own self's better part’ (III, ii, 61); in a similar way, the speaker of sonnet LXXIV assures his male friend that ‘My spirit is thine, the better part of me’. (8). In these sonnets to the male friend the speaker expresses the idea that he finds his identity because it is revealed to him in his male partner as in a mirror, and that it is by him that he becomes capable of conquering his ‘sin of self-love’, as in Sonnet LXII:

Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye,
And all my soul, and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account,
And for myself mine own worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount.
But when my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopp'd with tann'd antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
          ’Tis thee (myself) that for myself I praise,
          Painting my age with beauty of thy days.

As we know, it is this idea that lies behind Antipholus's quest for his brother, yet he commits the temporary ‘error’ (a leitmotif in the Sonnets, too) of looking for ‘his glass’ in an unknown woman, before finding it by the recognition of his male twin. This theme is subtly and beautifully echoed in the play's coda, where Dromio E addresses his twin as ‘my glass, and not my brother’ (V, i, 417), because he is able to see his own image in his brother.

Shakespeare has been blamed for increasing the improbability of the confusions by doubling the twins; nevertheless, he has admirably succeeded in achieving credibility, a quality which the humanists demanded from art. In a sense, it could be maintained that with his Errors Shakespeare created a kind of Utopia through art, a concept so dear to the humanists: in this utopian world it becomes possible for an impending tragedy—Egeon awaiting his execution and Antipholus E about to lose his identity—to be averted at the last moment and for four twins and two parents to be reunited on one and the same occasion. This relatively early play seems to anticipate the intrinsic utopian quality of all great art, which Shakespeare then realizes in much more complex ways in his mature and late plays.

It should have become clear from our close comparison between the Roman and the Elizabethan comic playwrights that Shakespeare's greatness is by no means diminished through the recognition of how he was familiar with the art of Plautus and its humanist reception. Only a superficial view of his achievement could lead one to say, as a recent critic has done, that Shakespeare's drama is lacking in greatness because by its concern with moral ‘wholesomeness’ it loses the quality of ‘fantasy’⁴⁶, of presenting the world upsidedown and defamiliarizing the familiar. Quite the contrary is true. It is this very quality of fantasy⁴⁷ which manifests itself in Shakespeare's almost incredible intensification and transformation of the New Comedy tradition. It is critics who have tried to make Shakespeare more morally ‘wholesome’ than he really is: we have seen in Errors elements of an antique ‘paganism’ to which we should not be blinded by the recognition of the play's general moral soundness. And the familiar world could scarcely be more completely defamiliarized than it is in this ‘classical’ play. In his process of transformation Shakespeare reaches into the deep recesses of human existence, and even Errors, which has so often been considered as a mere farce, becomes a document of his inexhaustible richness.

Notes

1. H. F. Brooks, ‘Themes and Structure in “The Comedy of Errors”’, in: Early Shakespeare (London, 1967), p. 67.

2. Ibid.

3. Cf. especially A. F. Kinney, ‘Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors and the Nature of Kinds’, Studies in Philology, 85 (1988), 29-52.

4. Kinney, op. cit., p. 47-48.

5. Kinney, op. cit., p. 32.

6. Cf. the recent study by M. Knapp and M. Kobialka, ‘Shakespeare and the Prince of Purpoole: The 1594 Production of The Comedy of Errors at Gray's Inn Hall’, Theatre History Studies, 4 (1984), 71-82.

7. This argument is contained in most interpretations of Errors.

8. Cf., for example, S. M. Goldberg, The Making of Menander's Comedy (London, 1980), p. 1ff., and [L.] Salingar, [Shakespeare and the] Traditions of Comedy, [(Cambridge, 1975),] p. 105.

9. For a Marxist interpretation cf. A. Schlösser, ‘Das Motiv der Entfremdung in der Komödie der Irrungen’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 100/1 (1964/5), 57-71.

10. Cf. Cicero, De Re Publica, e.g., II, 14 (27); Seneca, De Clementia. On the opposition between law and the Church as discussed at the Inns of Court, cf. W. R. Prest, The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts 1590-1640 (Totowa, New Jersey, 1972), p. 209. I fail to see the ‘Christianity’ and ‘inner life’ of which A. Barton speaks (The Riverside Shakespeare, [ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974),] p. 81).

11. B. Freedman, ‘Egeon's Debt: Self-Division and Self-Redemption in The Comedy of Errors’, English Literary History, 10 (1980), 379.

12. This has been rightly observed by D. Haberman, ‘Menaechmi: A Serious Comedy’, Ramus, 10 (1981), 136.

13. I am inclined to assume with Foakes that the Folio line ‘After so long grief, such Natiuitie’ (V, 406) erroneously repeats the term ‘nativity’ from two lines above and that Hanmer's emendation to ‘felicity’ is convincing and even brilliant. ‘Felicity’ is the appropriate and expected contrast to grief: ‘After so long grief, such felicity’; ‘felicity’ is even preferable to ‘festivity’, yet not ‘only because it does not simply echo the word “feast”, ll. 405 and 407’ ([R. A.] Foakes [ed. The Comedy of Errors, New Arden Ed. [London, 1962]]), but because ‘felicity’ is an eminently characteristic humanist term, which not only occurs frequently in English humanist drama; it also occupies a central position in a work like Thomas Morus's Utopia, where it expresses the final stage of human well-being, which Man achieves if he lives in harmony with himself and if he enjoys the support of human solidarity (Utopia and a Dialogue of Comfort, ed. J. Warrington [London, ²1951] p. 39.

14. Cf. W. Babula, ‘If I dream not: Unity in “The Comedy of Errors”’, South Atlantic Bulletin, 38 (1973), 26-33.

15. Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Introduction to Man of Law's Tale, 80ff.

16. R. Berry, Shakespeare and the Awareness of the Audience [(London, 1985)], p. 40.

17. This has been overlooked by J. L. Sanderson, ‘Patience in The Comedy of Errors’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 16 (1975), 610.

18. Tillyard, for example, called her ‘worldly wise’ (The Nature of Comedy and Shakespeare, The English Association, Presidential Address 1958 [Oxford, 1958], p. 8).

19. Freedman, op. cit., p. 380.

20. B.O. Bonazza, Shakespeare's Early Comedies. A Structural Analysis (London, 1966), p. 42.

21. S. Wells, ed. The Comedy of Errors [(Harmondsworth, 1972)], p. 27, 153.

22. The Praise of Folly, transl. B. Radice, in: Collected Works of Erasmus, 27. Literary and Educational Writings, 5, p. 97 (italics mine).

23. Cf., for example, Foakes, op. cit., p. xliii.

24. Cicero, De Amicitia, ed. W. A. Falconer (London/Cambridge, Mass., 1964), p. 160: ‘nihil esse quod ad se rem ullam tam illiciat et tam trahat quam ad amicitiam similitudo.’ On this idea in Erasmus cf. his Adagia transl. M. Mann Phillips (‘Simile gaudet simili’), Collected Works of Erasmus, 31 (Toronto, 1982), p. 167f., and especially De Ratione Studii, transl. B. McGregor in: Collected Works of Erasmus, 24, Literary and Educational Writings 2: ‘Friendship can exist only among similar people, for similarity promotes mutual good will, while dissimilarity on the other hand is the parent of hatred and distrust […] the greater, the truer, the more deeply rooted the similarity, the firmer and closer will be the friendship.’ (p. 683-4); ‘The deepest form of love coincides with the deepest resemblance […] each is drawn to nothing other than his own character as reflected in another person, that is, to himself in another form.’ (p. 686).

25. The Book Named the Governor (London, 1962), p. 134.

26. Foakes, op. cit., p. 103, n.332.

27. On the significance of ‘genius’ cf. D. T. Starnes, ‘The Figure Genius in the Renaissance’, Studies in the Renaissance, 11 (1964), 234-244.

28. J. Adelman, ‘Male Bonding in Shakespeare's Comedies’, in: Shakespeare's Rough Magic, ed. P. Erickson and C. Kahn (Newark/London/Toronto, 1985), p. 75.

29. K. Newman, Shakespeare's Rhetoric of Comic Character (New York/London, 1985), p. 143, n. 10.

30. R. Berry, Shakespeare and the Awareness of the Audience, p. 32-33.

31. Although Shakespeare's art greatly excels mannerism, there are some interesting points of contact which have been discussed in a number of publications; cf. e.g. A. Hauser, Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art (London, 1965).

32. Quoted in P. Burke, Die Renaissance in Italien (München, 1988), p. 230.

33. This claim has also been made by T. Hawkes, ‘Shakespeare and new critical approaches’, in: The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. S. Wells (Cambridge, 1986), p. 297.

34. The Colloquies of Erasmus, transl. by C. R. Thompson (Chicago, London, 1965), p. 230-237.

35. ‘A man's conduct is misplaced if he doesn't adapt himself to things as they are, has no eye for the main chance […] and asks for the play to stop being a play.’ (The Praise of Folly, op. cit., p. 103).

36. This point has also been made by S. Wells, The Comedy of Errors, p. 28.

37. Perikeiromene in Menander, ed., N. Miller (London, 1987), p. 113f.; cf. Sandbach, The Comic Theatre of Greece and Rome (London, 1977), p. 81. Jealousy is also attacked by Lucian, e.g. in his Charon, or The Inspectors in: Lucian, ed. A. M. Harmon, II,429.

38. Cf. T. B. L. Webster, Studies in Menander (Manchester, ²1960), p. 116f.

39. Cf. J. C. Margolin in: Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami (Amsterdam, 1917), I,ii,115, n.11.

40. Cf. Daos in Aspis, Menander, ed. W. G. Arnott (Cambridge, Mass./London, 1979), p. 35.

41. Haberman, op. cit., p. 133.

42. If Shakespeare opens his comedy with a tragic scene, so does Menander in his Aspis. There, too, the audience are first confronted with the narration of the tragic event. The slave Daos reports that the shield which he has brought back from battle has not saved his master from a tragic fate; then he narrates in detail the battle in which he believes his master to have died, and tragic emotions are released. But then suddenly the stage is cleared and Tyche appears, telling the audience that Daos and the others have been deceived into believing that the owner of the shield is dead; since he is in fact still alive, the comedy can take its course. The difference between Menander's and Shakespeare's opening is important: whereas in Aspis the tragic beginning gives way to an entirely comic development of the plot, in Errors comic and potentially tragic developments run parallel, or rather they appear as either comic or tragic according to the perspective from which they are viewed.

43. For a further argument that Errors may have originated in 1594, cf. K. Tetzeli v. Rosador, ‘A Suggestion for Dating The Comedy of Errors’, Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen and Literaturen 217 (1980), 347-49.

44. On Shakespeare's Patron cf. C. Carmichael Stopes, The Life of Henry, Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare's Patron (Cambridge, 1922).

45. Cf. on this problem L. Fiedler, ‘Some Contexts of Shakespeare's Sonnets’, in E. Hubler, The Riddle of Shakespeare's Sonnets (New York, 1962), p. 52-90; W. T. McCary, ‘The Comedy of Errors: A Different Kind of Comedy’, New Literary History, 9 (1977/8), 525-536; M. Krieger, A Window to Criticism. Shakespeare's Sonnets and Modern Poetics (Princeton, 1964), p. 86f.

46. G. Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare. A Cultural History, From the Restoration to the Present (London, 1989), p. 395-404.

47. Cf., for example, A. Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London, 1973), p. 18, and R. Berry, Shakespeare and the Awareness of the Audience, p. 37.