SOURCE: “‘Stigmatical in Making’: The Material Character of The Comedy of Errors,” in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 23, No. 1, Winter, 1993, pp. 81-112.

[In the following essay, Lanier explores “the question of how the material conditions and practices of self-display in Elizabethan England relate to crises of self-display faced by Shakespeare’s characters,” by examining The Comedy of Errors.]

'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forc'd breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected haviour of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passes show,
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

(Hamlet 1.2.77-86)

What constitutes Shakespearean character? To the extent that Shakespeareans have continued—with various degrees of discomfort—to labor in the shadow of A. C. Bradley, we have persisted, like Hamlet, in locating Shakespearean character in the workings of an inner self, the elusive “that within” which lies beneath, exceeds or evades its outward “show.” Notwithstanding the roses that have periodically been strewn on its grave, this notion of character shows every sign of health. Even the post-structuralist critique of the subject has had the odd effect of redoubling critical attention upon interiority. For although Shakespeareans may no longer be comfortable with unqualified theoretical claims about the autonomy, unity, intentionality, and agency of characters (or, for that matter, people), there remains within much of our critical practice a persistent longing for a not-wholly-demystified self, a subjectivity on or off the stage that is somehow not gaps within signification or offered and accepted hegemonic subject-positions. That longing can be glimpsed in a growing impatience in some circles with a critical practice that, so the story goes, again and again unmasks the culturally determined nature of human character: hence the current backlash against the Althusserian determinism of some New Historicist readings. In response, some feminist and political critics have sought to reformulate the private self as a genuine (if nonetheless qualified) site for political resistance.¹ That Shakespearean interiority persists, even in diminished form, in an age of post-essentialist criticism should come as no surprise, for the unique “depth” of Shakespeare's characters has long been one of the centerpieces in his claim to a special place of literary honor. Without the notion of an interiority that “passes show” and prompts our inferences, we would be forced to abandon a long history of audiences’ responses, however implicated in ideology those responses might be. Perhaps even more unsettling, we would risk putting ourselves out of critical business.

For that reason, even now Shakespeareans have in large measure continued to give pride of place to those moments where characters seem to give us special access to the depths of the private self in soliloquies, asides and passionate declamations. In the case of genre, this means a continuing stress on the “mature” tragedies. Where that access to interiority has been conspicuously barred or obscured—as in, say, Antonio's pointedly motiveless melancholy at the opening of The Merchant of Venice or Leontes' savage jealousy in The Winter's Tale—we still set about crafting an explanatory private self from the smallest of textual suggestions. Often, we paper over the gaps by supplying some barely evidenced motive or desire. A longstanding casualty of this procedure has been Shakespeare's early comedies, which, to parrot what has become received doctrine, lack the complex characterization that marks Shakespeare's later achievements. It is a judgment that renders these early plays of interest primarily for what they point toward, not for what they are.² One very conspicuous mark of their marginal status is the persistent and damning label “farce.”³

For the actor, what constitutes Shakespearean character is quite a different matter. For the actor, the problem of character is first and foremost a material one: how to craft and display a set of physical marks—gestures, postures, sounds, costumes—that are legible to an audience and, if not entirely individualizing, at least distinctive. Within the context of performance, character becomes, we might say, a matter of the mechanics of exteriority. Of course, this idea of theatrical character is hardly new: the term “character” itself springs from “χαραττ-ειν,” to inscribe or wound. Indeed, a glance at the concordance reminds us that Shakespeare typically understood the word as a distinctive external mark, conceived most often as a kind of inscription, that identifies its bearer's nature, wittingly or not.⁴ We owe to the study of acting as a craft and, more recently, to performance studies a renewed appreciation of character's origin in the material mark, something Bradley famously dismissed as inconsequential to a reader's proper understanding of character.⁵ This contempt for the study of theatrical character as it makes itself bodily manifest has a long pedigree. Its terminus a quo can be found perhaps in Aristotle's disparaging remarks in the Poetics about recognition scenes built around physical tokens or marks….⁶ Yet even though studies of theatrical craft and of performance have focused new critical attention on historical details of gesture, costume, and spectacle, such studies have rarely considered the parallel history of how identities are physically produced and displayed within Renaissance culture.⁷ Although we have come to appreciate that Elizabethan acting is governed by the visual and gestural rhetoric, only relatively recently have we begun to explore the question of how the material conditions and practices of self-display in Elizabethan England relate to crises of self-display faced by Shakespeare's characters.⁸ Those crises are, we might observe, often duplicated in the technical challenges posed by performing those roles. In the essay that follows I want to pursue two goals: first, to sketch out in very broad strokes one problematic of self-presentation in Elizabethan England; second, to suggest how Errors, by staging disruptions of identity-effects, is preoccupied with interrogating the curious material logic of Renaissance self-presentation. But in addition to these, I will have a third quarry in mind: to suggest how attention to the materiality of Shakespearean character might help us challenge the traditional notion of Shakespeare's artistic “development” and reevaluate the place of the early comedies within his canon.

II

One of the more powerful lessons we have learned from recent accounts of Renaissance culture is the power of display in the construction of Renaissance subjectivity. Because Renaissance hierarchies of being depended upon—indeed were maintained and policed by—rituals of public display, traditionalist interests within Elizabethan culture were particularly uneasy about the public marks of character. In theory, a stable presentational rhetoric of clothing, gesture, mode of address, and style of speech charted one's place in the social matrix. Thomas Elyot locates authority in “majesty,” and “majesty” in “a beauty or comeliness in his countenance, language and gesture apt to his dignity, and accommodate to time, place, and company; which, like as the sun doth his beams, so doth it cast on the beholders and hearers a pleasant and terrible reverence.”⁹ Elizabethan conduct manuals and sumptuary legislation, to take two examples, tended to classify status-coded behavior and clothing with ever more nuance and precision, indicating a larger cultural drive to determine identities by determining the range and meanings of their material manifestations. The aim was, put simply, to insure that who you saw was who you got. In the case of sumptuary distinctions, ideally the cost of a fabric would “naturally” govern its relationship to its corresponding social status, for only a nobleman could afford the sumptuous clothing appropriate to his rank. But, notoriously, the aristocratic burdens of conspicuous consumption and inflation, combined with the wealth of the nouveau riche, seemed to undermine that “natural” relationship. Those who were traditionally entitled to the signs of rank increasingly found them a difficult financial burden; those who could not afford them before, could now purchase them. This, coupled with the opportunities for imposture provided by urban London's exploding size and wealth, rendered the exterior marks of character less reliable, open to quotation and simulation. As Philp Stubbes points out in his disquisition against ostentatious dress in The Anatomy of Abuses, who you saw was no longer reliably who you got:

But now there is such a confuse mingle mangle of apparell in Ailgna [i.e., England], and such preposterous excesse therof, as every one is permitted to flaunt it out in what apparell he lust himselfe, or can get by anie kind of meanes. So that it is verie hard to knowe, who is noble, who is worshipfull, who is a gentleman, who is not: for you shall have those, which are neither of the nobylitie gentilitie nor yeomanry, no, nor yet anie Magistrat or Officer in the common welth, go daylie in silkes, velvets, satens, damasks, tafeties and such like, notwithstanding that they be both base by byrthe, meane by estate, & servyle by calling.¹⁰

It is no coincidence that in his Anatomy Stubbes also castigates the theater, for no small part of the anxiety in anti-theatrical polemics sprang from the fact that playing entailed the citation of behavior and thereby opened a space between the self fashioned and the self doing the fashioning.¹¹ In short, play in its various forms disrupted the logic of Elizabethan display. If the general Elizabethan paranoia about dissembling and conspiracy recently chronicled by Lacey Baldwin Smith is any guide, such indeterminacy in the marks of character was felt to be not only epistemologically disorienting but also politically subversive.¹²

In his study of Elizabethan courtesy theory¹³ Frank Whigham has argued that, as the socially mobile became increasingly adept at counterfeiting patrician behavior, defenders of aristocratic privilege sought to reassert a monopoly over the display of social rank. They redoubled their efforts to exercise control over public marks of nobility, an impulse obvious in the detailed distinctions of class and clothing in Elizabethan sumptuary laws. As well, they sought to reconfigure a taxonomy of social types and to coordinate those types with stable sets of identifying marks: thus Jonsonian characterization of humours and the revival in the early seventeenth century of the character as a literary genre.¹⁴ Ironically this attempt to subject behavior to detailed classification provided arrivistes with the very material they needed to fashion even more effective simulations of status. In response to the threat of simulation, Whigham argues, defenders of traditional privilege took two steps. First, they subjected displays of character to even more nuanced analysis, looking for the unwitting mistake or telling remark. We can glimpse this emphasis in the challenge Ben Jonson issues in Timber, “Language most shewes a man: Speake that I may see thee,”¹⁵ or in the anxiety about rhetorical missteps indicated by Henry Peacham's category “Cautions,” included with nearly every rhetorical figure he lists in his Garden of Eloquence.¹⁶

At the same time, Whigham argues, defenders began “to emphasize manner rather than matter: others may be found that can do the things a gentleman does, but they cannot do them properly” (p. 34). Thus the irony of Peacham's counsel in The Complete Gentleman about ostentatious dress, where he instructs his reader to choose “that moderate and middle garb [clothing that is neither ostentatious nor parsimonious] which shall rather lessen than make you bigger than you are; which hath been and is yet observed by our greatest princes, who in [sic] outside go many times inferior to their grooms and pages” (p. 150). Striking in this passage is the studied loosening of the one-to-one correspondence between clothing and rank. Peacham's counsel is but one manifestation of a larger turn in how Renaissance culture conceived of the materiality of identity: a turn toward an interiorization of nobility and value. The link between character and marks of character is reinforced (essential selves still remain determinable from their outward marks), but it is at the same time radically reconceptualized (display comes to reveal rather than to constitute identity). In Peacham's hands the refusal to engage in the magnificence to which one is entitled becomes a visible sign of one's superior status: the true ”prince” displays that his identity does not depend upon ostentatious display. This presentational strategy appears inimitable, since only those who are already “greatest” can afford the luxury of eschewing visible greatness. Nonetheless Peacham clearly opens it to those who are not “our greatest princes.” In fact, the passage seems directed toward precisely that mode of self-mystification that demands “the effacement of the traces of production on the [noble subject].”¹⁷ The anxiety is of over-dressing, over-speaking, over-doing, for to overact is to betray that aristocratic character, and authority depends upon counter-theatrical techniques that are nonetheless fundamentally theatrical.

Precisely this anxiety informs Hamlet's declaration that he has, despite his elaborate display of melancholy, “that within that passes show.”¹⁸ He contrasts his inviolate and at some level unrevealed character to those “actions that a man might play.” Yet how to make “that within” manifest? The paradox is that Hamlet can manifest his interiority only by engaging in a display from which he then must display an inward distance, and he registers this paradox in his opening qualifier, “ 'Tis not alone.” The vehemence with which Hamlet denies “seeming” betrays his recognition that through “seeming” he becomes subjected, opened to Claudius' devices. His visibility reduces him to a fully readable and iterable character, emptied of his secrets and potential. We might locate Elizabethan interiority not only in emergent regimens of hegemonic control (as Francis Barker has argued) but also in essentializing strategies marshalled against self-presentational practices that run the danger of being mimicked or usurped.¹⁹ Yet, as Hamlet's anxiety about his “suits of woe” suggests, there's the rub: this strategy resolves one instability in Renaissance self-display, but in so doing it renders any given characterological mark all the more unreliable. Self-presentation—a condition of being, as Hamlet recognizes, that one can never evade—becomes all the more self-conscious and potentially self-betraying. When all the world's potentially a stage, what is the epistemological status of characterological marks?

III

This cultural crisis of self-representation, if I may inaugurate yet another Renaissance “crisis,” clearly fascinated Shakespeare throughout his career.²⁰ Barry Weller's observation that “much of the action of Shakespearean drama [might be seen] as a struggle, not so much for self-awareness, as for self-representation” (p. 342) is particularly appropriate for the early comedies. Shakespeare's Plautine adaptation The Comedy of Errors, for example, takes as its focus the discontinuity between identities and the external marks that display, support, and confirm them. Despite the play's Christian overlay and its extensive references to witchcraft, what has impressed most critics is not its metaphysics so much as its physiques.²¹ That is, Errors stresses the marks and rituals—faces, clothing, beatings, warts and moles, meals,²² rings and gold chains—that make characters recognizable, and it demonstrates in copious variety how reliance upon this material evidence leads to unpredictable identity-effects. Like many commentators before and after him, Harold Brooks observes that the play's central issue is relentlessly “made visible, audible, and tangible by ‘business’ … the gold chain seen, the blows seen and heard, make double the effect they would in narrative.”²³ Near its center is an emblem of the play's thoroughgoing focus on corporeality: the grotesquely fat kitchen wench Nell, whose sweating, greasy, swarthy body parts Dromio of Syracuse lavishly details and matches to appropriate countries on the globe.²⁴ And, as many commentators have noticed, Shakespeare has changed the setting to Ephesus, a commercial center, and obsessively returns to details of trade such as the ubiquitous mart, several merchants added as minor characters, the central place of exchanges of money and goods in nearly all relationships. Taken together, these changes mark the essentially materialist premises of this world.

Significantly, the plot is set in motion by the duplication of characterological marks, which Shakespeare foregrounds by doubling the single set of twins he found in Plautus's Menaechmi. The two Antipholi and Dromios pose a kind of limit case: how might identity be disrupted when the public marks of that identity are not merely counterfeited but exactly duplicated and possessed by someone else? Once doubled, those marks become nightmarishly iterable, physically the same but signifying differently, open to a wild variety of preposterous supposes and ultimately leading to near social breakdown. Out of that iterability springs the play's much-remarked imagery of shape-changing. Once Antipholus and Dromio's faces can point to identities not their own, the play breaks the seemingly necessary correspondence between outer and inner character; a certain self may not necessarily take a certain shape and form.²⁵ For a culture that places such weight on stable characterological display, the danger to selfhood registers in a threat both spiritual and physical.

In her introduction to The Comedy of Errors, Anne Barton raises the central “naive” question, largely dodged in critical discussions, that shapes a viewer's experience of this play: why don't these characters conclude that their myriad confusions are caused not by wandering affections, demons or madness, but by the presence of twins?²⁶ Their blindness points not, as Crewe has argued (p. 216), to a general failure of reason, nor is it, as Coleridge asserted, simply a donnée we must grant his farce. Rather, it makes palpable an ideological blind spot within a particular kind of logic that governs the construction of Elizabethan identity: these characters don't come up with the solution “twins” because, as Emilia notes, they all make the same “sympathised one day's error” (5.1.397). They assume that distinct identities are manifest in distinct marks. Crucial to this “local” logic is the role of the viewer, who recognizes those marks and upon whose recognition the character's sense of identity depends. Shakespeare signals the importance of this confirming gaze as early as Egeon's tragic tale of shipwreck in the opening scene, where Egeon tells us that in the midst of a tempest he and his wife Emilia tied their twin sons and servants to a mast:

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

(1.1.78-85)

Egeon and Emilia bind their twins in this way, it seems, so that each parent might gaze upon the child he or she loved better, “Fixing our eyes on whom our care was fix'd.”²⁷ Presumably, each child might do likewise. This odd chiastic arrangement of parent and child is prompted by the logic of the reassuring, recognizing gaze, and it results, with just a little push from Fortune, in the potentially tragic “unjust divorce” of these three pairs. Without understanding their significance, Egeon underlines the importance of paired gazes when he goes on to describe the sun's gaze upon the earth, which literally changes the features of the obscured “face” it looks upon:

At length the sun, gazing upon the earth,
Dispers'd those vapours that offended us,
And by benefit of his wished light
The seas wax'd calm, and we discovered
Two ships from far

(1.1.88-92)

The demand for another's gaze—for a constant witness—is not Egeon's alone. Antipholus of Syracuse underscores that his quest for his twin brother is motivated by a search for his confirming other:

I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
(Unseen, inquisitive), confounds
himself.
So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.

(1.2.35-40, emphasis added)

Although critics have traditionally (and rightly) understood this passage as evincing a latent fear of self-dissolution (or “weak ego boundaries”), Antipholus' interjected “unseen” suggests a rather precise formulation: the single gaze of his “fellow,” a gaze in which he might find himself, is set against the engulfing gaze of the world, a gaze that fails to see him.²⁸ (His musings, we might remember, follow his declaration that he intends to “view the manners of the town, / Peruse the traders, gaze upon the buildings” [1.2.12-13], pointedly as the viewer rather than the one viewed.) Only after recalling his lost brother does he designate Dromio “the almanac of my true date” (1.2.41), as if his servant were a text—the last he has left—in which he can confirm his being. As the confusions mount, Dromio of Ephesus too seeks to confirm who he is by pointing to his apparently rocky relationship with his master. His central exhibits are the bruise marks that function as Antipholus' characteristic signature: “That you beat me at the mart I have your hand to show. / If skin were parchment and the blows you gave were ink, / Your own hand-writing would show you what I think” (3.1.12-14). Here subjectivity (“what I think”) becomes quite literally black-and-blue characters on the white flesh. The joke is that the wrong Antipholus does not recognize those “self-evident” marks and so ironically he adds a few of his own.

With Adriana, thoroughly changed from her Plautine source, our attention shifts to yet another mutual relationship. This time the focus falls upon how completely a wife's sense of self depends upon her husband's recognition of her beautiful features:

His company must do his minions grace,
Whilst I at home starve for a merry look.
Hath homely age th'alluring beauty took
From my poor cheek? then he hath wasted it.
Are my discourses dull? barren my wit? …
What ruins are in me that can be found
By him not ruin'd? Then is he the ground
Of my defeatures: my decayed fair
A sunny look of his would soon repair

(2.1.87-91, 96-99)

In a very important way his look constitutes her sense of identity. As she observes in a later comparison, the enamelled jewel, protected from another's gaze and touch, loses its beauty, yet “the gold bides still / That others touch, and often touching will / Wear gold” (2.1.109-11), a “wearing” that paradoxically produces gold's lustre.²⁹ With her husband's look and “touch” withdrawn, Adriana's physical features become “defeatures,” suddenly susceptible to ruin and unrecognizability.³⁰ Her insistence upon the “undividable, incorporate” (2.2.122) union of husband and wife, imaged with talk of drops mingled in the ocean and the more traditional image of elms entwined with vines, derives less from the Plautine character-type of the shrew than from the self-presentational symbiosis Adriana needs. She tells Antipholus that he need only “look strange and frown” and “I am not Adriana, nor thy wife” (2.2.110, 112). Egeon, Antipholus, and Dromio have nearly identical moments. It would seem that supposedly self-evident physical distinctions (accounts of faces, warts, bruises, chains, rings) and events (dinners, promises, arrests, beatings) need constantly to be rehearsed and re-rehearsed in order to maintain who's who. Given such characterological instability, it is little wonder that well over a third of the play is taken up with narrating events that have already occurred before the audience's eyes.³¹

This logic of recognition leads to a further uncanny identity-effect: instead of the twins possessing their distinctive marks and thus their identities, those marks (and the identities they carve out) come to possess them. More precisely, because their outward characters are not exclusively their own, identities can be projected upon them from without, an operation that feels to the twins like being inhabited by a spirit. Dromio of Syracuse announces this ubiquitous link between being “defined” and being demonically possessed. When Nell (mis)recognizes the “privy marks I had about me, as the mark of my shoulder, the mole in my neck, the great wart on my left arm” (3.2.141-43), Dromio speaks of her as “one that claims me, one that haunts me, one that will have me” (3.2.80-81). And although he dashes onto the stage seeking confirmation from Antipholus that he is in fact Dromio—“Do you know me, sir? Am I Dromio? Am I your man? Am I myself?” (3.2.72-73)—he later claims that if he had not relied upon an unmanifest manly interiority (his breast of faith and heart of steel) Nell would have transformed him into a “curtal dog,” her emasculated beast of burden. Through knowledge or possession of a self's outward marks, he fears, that self can be possessed, and so he urges his master not to give the courtesan the ring or chain she demands: “Some devils ask but the parings of one's nail, a rush, a hair, a drop of blood, a pin, a nut, a cherry-stone; but she, more covetous, would have a chain. Master, be wise; and if you give it her, the devil will shake her chain and fright us with it” (4.3.69-73). For Antipholus of Ephesus, this trope of possession is literalized to great comic effect. Observing “his heart's meteors tilting in his face” (4.2.6), fiery and sharp looks, ecstatic trembling and propensity to strike, all products of his considerable frustration, Adriana, Doctor Pinch and company all conclude that Satan is “hous'd within this man” (4.4.52). In fact, once Pinch's diagnosis takes hold, Antipholus’ protests and grimaces only serve as further “objective” evidence of his demonic possession, a point stressed by Pinch's and Luciana's knowing comments about his “pale and deadly looks” (4.4.91, 106). Here we might notice that the “metaphysics” of this play emphatically does not establish some stable supernatural frame of reference. Rather, the allusions to demons, witchcraft, and God's protection are all part of yet another false supposition, generated by the desperate need for these characters to save appearances. In Ephesus the law of the characterological marketplace rules: “possess or be possessed.” Indeed, because the twins do not own exclusive rights to the marks of their characters, or to the proliferating interpretations that become attached to those identical yet differing marks, they find themselves again and again self-dis-possessed.

Given such premises and such unpredictable effects, what's a person to do? Antipholus of Ephesus' experience is that resisting only makes matters worse. Near the center of the play, Luciana voices a second and unexpectedly Machiavellian alternative: accept the identity others seek to project upon you and fashion from it a facade that serves your own interests. If Antipholus must carry on an affair (an erroneous supposition on Luciana's part), then, she declares, he should at least preserve the illusion of his fidelity by faking for Adriana the sunny looks she so craves:

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.
Let not my sister read it in your eye;
Be not thy tongue thy own shame's orator;
Look sweet, speak fair, become disloyalty;
Apparel vice like virtue's harbinger;
Bear a fair presence, though your heart be tainted;
Teach sin the carriage of a holy saint;
Be secret-false: what need she be acquainted? …
'Tis double wrong to truant with your bed,
And let her read it in thy looks at board;
Shame hath a bastard fame, well managed

(3.2.5-15, 17-19)

On its surface, especially considering its source, Luciana's advice has an unexpectedly moral ring: this would save Adriana's fragile sense of self. But the passage invokes the very distinctions that would thereby become erased, distinctions between false and true, becoming and being, bearing and heart, saints and sinners, virtue and vice. Such a world of well-managed simulacra, another version of Stubbes's “confuse mingle mangle,” would obliterate the world she proffered earlier to Adriana, a world of “natural” distinctions and hierarchies where “there's nothing situate under heaven's eye / But hath his bound” (1.2.16-17). It is a world where, we should notice, those bounds are maintained by public rituals of obeisance. As the scene progresses, Shakespeare twice underscores the dangers of Luciana's counsel, first by having Antipholus misread it as a siren-like come-on to which he instantaneously succumbs, and, second by having Dromio rush onstage to recount his tale of Nell, a tale that terrifyingly illustrates the consequences of accepting a projected identity—castration, servility, beastliness. Just in the nick of time, Antipholus resists becoming “traitor to myself” (3.2.161). Yet Shakespeare cannot leave the scene without also returning our attention (and Antipholus') to the attractions of pretense for profit. For even as Antipholus utters his intention to “stop mine ears against the mermaid's song,” Angelo the goldsmith enters and, mistaking him for the other Antipholus, hands him a gold chain. The central scene ends on a note of extraordinary ideological poise, suspended between rejecting and embracing this other-directed world gone wild.

Anxiety about the effacement of one's distinguishing features reaches a climax in the final scene. There Egeon, who has himself mistaken one Antipholus for another, seeks his son's recognition:

I am sure you both of you remember me. …
Why look you strange on me? you know me well. …
O! grief hath chang'd me since you saw me last,
And careful hours with time's deformed hand
Have written strange defeatures in my face

(5.1.292, 296, 298-300)

Figuring his unrecognized face as a text rendered illegible by the ill-formed over-scribblings of Time, Egeon seeks desperately for some other distinctive mark of who he is, drawing attention next to his voice. When Dromio and Antipholus shrug that they still just don't recall him, Egeon is thrown into anguished self-doubt:

Not know my voice? O time's extremity,
Hast thou so crack'd and splitted my poor tongue
In seven short years, that here my only son
Knows not my feeble key of untun'd cares?
Though now this grained face of mine be hid
In sap-consuming winter's drizzled snow,
And all the conduits of my blood froze up,
Yet hath my night of life some memory;
My wasting lamps some fading glimmer left;
My dull deaf ears a little use to hear—
All the old witnesses, I cannot err,
Tell me thou art my son Antipholus.

(5.1.308-17)

Here Egeon's unrecognized visage runs perilously close to extinguishing him, both figuratively (“all the conduits of my blood froze up”) and literally (he can only be saved if his son recognizes him and pays his ransom). Egeon backs away from this death by unrecognition by entertaining an alternate possibility: “but perhaps, my son, / Thou sham'st to acknowledge me in misery” (5.1.321-22). Nonetheless, Egeon's persistent reliance upon “these old witnesses” fuels this crisis, for Antipholus can offer equally authoritative “witnesses”: “The duke, and all that know me in the city, / Can witness with me that it is not so” (5.1.323-24). We see an earlier indication that these characters occupy different interpretive universes in this exchange between Dromio of Syracuse and Adriana:

Adr. Tell me, was he arrested
on a band?
Dro. Not on a band, but on a stronger
thing:
A chain, a chain, do you not hear it ring?
Adr. What, the chain?
Dro. No, no, the bell, 'tis
time that I were gone,
It was two ere I left him, and now the clock strikes one.
Adr. The hours come back; that did
I never hear.
Dro. O yes, if any hour meet a sergeant, 'a
turns back for very fear.
Adr. As if time were in debt; how
fondly dost thou reason!
Dro. Time is a very bankrupt, and
owes more than he's worth to season. …
If'a be in debt and theft, and a sergeant in the way,
Hath he not reason to turn back an hour in a day?

(4.2.50-58, 61-62)

The puns on “band/bond,” “on/one” and “hour/whore”—duplicated sounds, yet distinct meanings—and the confusion of referents such as the ambiguous “it” in 1.52 leads to a confusion about objective clock time. By the end of the passage the objective world seems to mime Dromio's final punning line.³² In the final scene of the Menaechmi, one brother, despite the visible evidence before his eyes, must be convinced in an extended comic barrage of personal names and remembered details that his twin brother stands before him; the interpretive universes are eased into synchronism. In Errors, Shakespeare prunes this set piece. In this case the recognition occurs nearly instantaneously, in a glance rather than through persuasion. Only when the two twins are seen standing side by side is some normative frame of reference reestablished, with all its reassuring social determinations of kinship and rank.

Or is it? Undeniably, the characters' “original” identities have snapped back into place but, I want to argue, with a crucial difference. Especially noteworthy is the extent to which these characters' faith in that final perspective has become much more provisional. The Duke hardly supplies an authoritative perspective, for even his lordly eye cannot sort out the myriad errors. Even after the twins stand side by side before him, the Duke remains confused: “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?” (5.1.333-35, emphasis added). The Duke does establish who's who by publicly recalling the tale of Egeon's broken family, but he still continues to misidentify Antipholus, and he has to command the twins to “stand apart, I know not which is which” (5.1.364). This touch of comic byplay offers a serious blow to those readings that champion the Duke as an agent and guarantor of order. As the remaining characters unravel their tangle of misrecognitions, their stress is on “if,” “I think,” and they entertain the possibility that they are dreaming, echoing earlier moments of supposed transformation (for example, 2.2.195-96, 212-15):

Abbess. Speak old Egeon, if thou be'st the man
That hadst a wife once call'd Emilia,
That bore thee at a burden two fair sons?

(5.1.341-43)

Egeon. If I dream not, thou art Emilia;
If thou art she, tell me, where is
that son
That floated with thee on the fatal raft?

(5.1.352-54)

Ant.S. [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.
Angelo. That is the chain, sir, which
you had of me.
Ant.S. I
think it be, sir, I deny it not.
Ant.E. And you, sir, for this chain
arrested me.
Angelo. I think I did, sir, I deny it not.

(5.1.374-80, emphasis added)

The Abbess' conventional invitation to a feast signals, as many have observed, the reestablishment of a community and, presumably, each person's place within it. At the same time she signals a symbolic rebirth of her sons: “After so long grief, such Nativity” (V.i.406).³³ Particularly amplified by the context of Holy Innocents' Day (on which the play was twice staged, in 1594 and 1604),³⁴ the obvious resonance of the Nativity, that unique historical moment in which flesh and ineffable spirit were mysteriously united, serves as an absolute standard of presence. Measured against it, the characters at the play's end come up short. The same ideological poise that closes 3.2 also closes the play as a whole.

As if to clarify this poise, Errors is rounded off with a double coda that adds small but unmistakable notes of irresolution to the play's very conventional closure devices. In the fist coda Dromio of Syracuse misrecognizes Antipholus of Ephesus. Like the Duke's mistaking of Antipholus earlier in the scene, this moment demonstrates how the characterological conditions and logic that led to the errors in the first place are still in force. Once again errors seem ready to begin anew, implying that the “certainty” about who's who established by this anagnorisis may be less definitive than it first seems. The second coda, a conversation between the Dromios, focuses at first on the relational nature of character. Dromio of Ephesus' comment about his brother underlines how the other serves to verify and provide an ideal shape for the I: “Methinks you are my glass, and not my brother: / I see by you I am a sweet-fac'd youth” (5.1.417-18). The conversation quickly turns to the issue of natural rank, coordinates crucial to Renaissance identity that have supposedly just been resecured:

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

(5.1.419-26)

The perspective offered here differs remarkably from that in the first act. There Egeon had distinguished between his sons apparently on the basis of order of birth, Antipholus of Syracuse had been incensed to blows when Dromio seemed to flout his superior rank, and Luciana could speak (however naively) of the natural pre-eminence of some creatures over others. As the play opens characters typically invoke fixed hierarchies of rank to chart their identities and actions. Here, however, hierarchy is invoked precisely so that it might be made a matter of chance, not of God or nature (“We'll draw cuts for the senior”), and then it is postponed (“till then, lead thou first”). For the moment at least, these twins dwell in a world where distinctions of degree have not yet been established definitively: “let's go hand in hand, not one before another” (emphasis added). In the opening scene the potentially tragic determinism of fate hung over events, a determinism signalled by Egeon's grim punning on “hap,” “happy,” and “hope,” and his shaping of the narrative of shipwreck. Here in the final scene, it is as if “hap” has become the principle by which characters are (re)created, not destroyed.

My point here is not that the play adopts a kind of social egalitarianism in its final lines. After all, Shakespeare chooses not to use the two Antipholi for this exchange, where the drawing of lots for the senior among men of rank would imply profound, perhaps even revolutionary, social consequences. Rather, the play's final perspective and the identities it supports are subtly but persistently de-essentialized, made pointedly inconclusive and arbitrary. Chance and not any intentional action of the characters initiates the play's scene of recognition. Character, as it emerges from this play, is not co-extensive with its outward marks, but neither is it “that within that passes show.” With something of the relentlessness of a nightmare, Shakespeare demonstrates that character is in effect an ongoing inference we make from outward marks, a hypothesis that demands constant interpretive support. And because the marks of character are multivalent, that hypothesis is always vulnerable to competing hypotheses. Of course, by play's end the characters no longer dwell in an infinitely mutable world where identity seems as it does to Antipholus of Syracuse, “Known to these, and to myself disguis'd” (2.2.214). But neither, the Dromios stress, do they dwell in a fully stable world where distinctions of degree are conclusively God-given or where erroneous inferences about identity are no longer possible. Although Shakespeare does not yet locate character in interiority, he keeps before our eyes, even after the errors have been sorted out in the play's final scene, how the materiality of character troubles self-presence.

This conclusion may seem hard to accept, particularly since it would appear that the audience has had a privileged, indeed the definitive, frame of reference throughout the play. Jonathan Crewe, for example, stresses “the existence of an omniscient perspective on the action, a perspective that the audience is allowed to share up to the final moments and that confers upon the audience a happy invulnerability to the ‘errors’ by which those onstage are plagued. Only within such a perspective is it possible to characterize as errors—that is to say, as wholly illusory—the predicaments of those onstage.”³⁵ This notion of an “omniscient perspective,” which reduces onstage action to a kind of “pseudo-action”³⁶ dispelled in the final scene, accounts for one way the play has been seen: as “sterile,” our sympathy or identification with the characters blunted by our God's-eye view. The final frame of reference—the doubled twins—seems all the more “solid” because we as an audience have accepted it as authoritative from the first and the characters have come to share it with us in the end. But there is, I think, reason to believe that this perspective is more complicated than Crewe and others have suggested. This is particularly so if we turn our attention to the most obvious staging problem this play presents: the doubled twins. If we can believe William Drummond's report, Ben Jonson refused to stage Plautus' Amphitryo because “he could never find two so like others that he could persuade the spectators they were one.”³⁷ Even though we have no reason to believe that Jonson had Errors in mind when he made this observation,³⁸ it does make clear, even if we allow for his notorious critical idiosyncrasies, the special demands this play makes upon its audience's capacity for suspended disbelief. These demands Shakespeare deliberately exacerbated with his decision to double the twins. He could not dodge the problem of verisimilitude by having his actors wear masks (as would have been the case in Roman comedy or commedia dell'arte). It is extremely unlikely that he would have had access to two pairs of twins.³⁹ If the differences between the actors playing the twins were perceptible (and the relative intimacy of the Elizabethan stage almost assures that to be the case), then the problem of suspended disbelief, the gap between the visual evidence before us and the supposition we are encouraged to entertain about it, cannot help but constantly be before our eyes. And it is never more so than when the two sets of twins stand side by side at the play's end. As in the recent movie Twins, the obvious differences in appearance would be played for laughs, particularly when the Duke and Dromio continue to misrecognize the Antipholi or Dromio tells his brother “Methinks you are my glass.”⁴⁰ This discrepancy, certainly significant in a play about mistaken appearances, works to distantiate the “authoritative” perspective from which we view the play's action. Although Crewe is correct that we need that perspective in order to judge the errors as errors, we are not as “happily invulnerable” to perceptual error as might first appear. For our “authoritative” perspective itself depends upon a provisional theatrical illusion particularly visible as an illusion. It is an error whose erroneousness the audience is simultaneously encouraged to forget and to recall. The gap between what we see and what we take it to mean draws attention to our own necessary engagement in “supposes” (at a different level of theatricality) and to the aleatory possibilities within the visual logic of character. In Errors Shakespeare powerfully interrogates the materiality of character by pushing its logic to its limits. He leaves the characters and the audience in what Peter Berger has called “ecstasy,” a state of standing outside oneself looking at one's own social reality, knowing it is real, but knowing also that one has created it.⁴¹ Certainly Errors is from first to last a “play of effects.”⁴² But it would nevertheless be an error to think that the effect of such an entertainment, for an audience that notoriously went to the theater to be seen as much as to see, was not also disturbing and profound.

IV

It is an odd historical coincidence that the first recorded performance of Errors, at Gray's Inn on December 28, 1594, provided counterpoint and perhaps unwitting commentary for a very different sort of “performance.”⁴³ The Gray's Inn revels seem to have been designed on the model of court ceremonial, the tone (as Philip Finkelpearl notes) uncertainly situated between reverence and gentle mockery. Because such revels were officially justified as part of the Templers' education in aristocratic decorum, it is useful to think of the festivities as a kind of cultural dress rehearsal, in which the revellers strove to (re)produce, often before an audience of actual notables, the ceremonial texture of courtly society, its oratorical style, visual spectacle, ritualized actions, and management of diplomatic challenges. Although the content of that “texture” was of course largely student in-joke and parody, its purpose was apparently not—at least in the early 1590s—to undermine respect for authority or to demystify ceremony. In fact, parody served precisely the opposite goal, that of appropriation: the revels were “intended to be for the credit of Gray's Inn.”⁴⁴ This structured space of license seems to have encouraged the students to enact the ceremonial forms they were mastering all the more studiously and enthusiastically, and it also placed quotation marks around the entire ritual, blunting its force by explicitly marking it as “non-serious,” mere play. Even so, these ceremonial revels were not without consequences, not least because many of the participants expected to take up genuine places at court.⁴⁵ The first night's festivities focused on the presentation of the Prince of Purpoole, Henry Helmes, chosen, the narrator stresses, because he was “fit for so great a dignity.” At the center of this presentation was the display of the Prince's coat of arms, an elaborate emblem which had as its center the helmet of Pallas. Significantly, this blazon was an elaboration of Helmes's own family arms, which prominently featured three helmets, so that his personal honor and aristocratic identity—quite literally, his name—was thereby linked to his conduct as the Prince of Purpoole. The narrator's explication of Purpoole's arms makes clear that, despite the ceremony's arch tone, Helmes's acts were to have a certain genuine force: “The Conceit hereof was to shew, that the Prince, whose private arms were three Helmets, should defend his Honour by Vertue, from Reprehension of Malecontents, Carpers and Fools … The Words, Sic virtus honorem, that his Vertue should defend his Honour, whilst he had run his whole Course of Dominion, without any either Eclipse or Retrogradation” (p. 15). Helmes's identity, both as a potential courtier and as a gentleman, was bound up in his revels performance, as was the honor of Gray's Inn.

Perhaps for that reason this anonymous account of the Gesta seems curiously preoccupied with performative errors or strains. The “Parliament” that should have culminated the opening evening never met, because of “some special Officers that were by necessary Occasion, urged to be absent, without whose Presence it could not be performed” (p. 20). Later, when the Prince returns after Candlemas from his mock diplomatic mission to Russia, the narrator notes in some detail why his welcoming ceremonies were not performed as first conceived:

the Purpose of the Gentlemen was much disappointed by the Readers and Ancients of the House, by reason of the Term; So that very good Inventions, which were to be performed in publick at his Entertainment into the house again, and two grand Nights which were intended at his Triumphal Return, wherewith his Reign had been conceitedly determined, were by the aforesaid Readers and Governors made frustrate, for the Want of Room in the Hall, the Scaffolds being taken away, and forbidden to be built up again (as would have been necessary for the good Discharge of such a Matter) thought convenient; but it shewed rather what was performed, than intended.

(p. 70)

Material exigencies seem to intrude at nearly every step of the way. Conversely, the narrator seems most delighted when the performance comes closest to the real thing, as in the progress to the Lord Mayor's house and back, a “Shew” that “was very stately and orderly performed” (p. 57). The Prince's progress back home actually fooled some bystanders: “Dinner being ended, the Prince and his Company … returned again the same Way, and in the same Order as he went thither, the Streets being thronged and filled with People, to see the Gentlemen as they passed by; who thought there had been some great Prince, in very deed, passing through the City” (p. 57, emphasis added). This extraordinary moment seems offered to stress the transformative potential of the proceedings, providing they are performed correctly. The comments offered to explain the small plot of the concluding Masque of Proteus, performed at the Queen's behest, evince an awareness that peppers the narrative. The sports were brief “that Tediousness might be avoided, and confused Disorder, a thing which might easily happen in a multitude of Actions” (p. 76). This account of Gesta is informed throughout by the fear of misfires in performance, that anxiety magnified in the last example by the Queen's presence and the potentially catastrophic political consequences.⁴⁶ As a cultural rehearsal, Gesta focuses the revellers' energies on mastering the arts of courtly display. Through play they learn how to perform the formalities properly and how to improvise deftly over their mistakes.

Errors makes its appearance in this kind of ceremonial space. Apparently, Errors served as an on-the-spot substitute for elaborate “Inventions and Conceipts” that were never performed, probably a masque of friendship addressed to the evening's guest of honor, the Ambassador of the Inner Temple. Gesta records that in expectation of “some notable Performance,” “the multitude of Beholders” which included “a great Presence of Lords, Ladies, and worshipful Personages” became “so exceeding great” (p. 29) that they crowded the performers off the stage. Eager to behold the display of magnificence—the Prince of Gray's Inn and the visiting Ambassador were “very gallantly appointed, and attended by a great number of brave Gentlemen” (p. 29)—and eager themselves to be beheld, the audience at Gray's Inn stole the show. The effect was to blur the line between theater and reality, between an enthusiastic reverence for majesty and a tumultuous disregard for proper decorum, so much so that the audience was “able to disorder and confound any good Inventions whatsoever” (p. 31). To control the crowds, perhaps to impose some sort of visual order on the now chaotic proceedings, and to reserve the sports originally intended “especially for the gracing of the Templarians,” those in charge resolved only to offer such inconsequential sports as “Dancing and Revelling with Gentlewomen” and “a Comedy of Errors (like to Plautus his Menechmus)” (p. 31). In the meantime the Ambassador was prompted to leave the evening's genuinely disorderly revels in a huff before these sports even began. Notwithstanding the lightly mock heroic nature of the Gray's Inn Christmas revels, the damage to honor and reputation, the Gesta makes clear, was quite real: “This mischanceful Accident sorting so ill, to the great prejudice of the rest of the Proceedings, was a great Discouragement and Disparagement to our whole State.” In fact, in the mock charges read two evenings later against the master of these revels, the playing of Errors was presented as the crowning indignity of the evening: “And Lastly, that he had foisted a Company of base and common Fellows, to make up our Disorders with a Play of Errors and Confusions.” (“To make up” introduces a tantalizing ambiguity in the passage, for it means both “to atone for, recompense” and “to complete.”) It is difficult to discern how seriously these charges are intended or, if serious, what precisely the indignity is: was it that the players were “base and common,” not gentry? that the play was playhouse fare, not the scheduled “Inventions and Conceipts”? that the subject matter was, given the occasion, poorly chosen? What is clear is that those assembled were scrambling to improvise some ceremony to save appearances.

Shakespeare's play seems to have supplied a kind of gloss to this disruption of ceremonial display: the night was ever afterwards called “The Night of Errors.” In fact, two nights later, in a vocabulary strikingly reminiscent of Antipholus' anxious conjectures about witches and shapechangers, the Clerk of the Crown read mock judgments “thick and threefold” against a “Sorcerer or Conjurer that was supposed to be the Cause of that confused Inconvenience” (p. 32). The accused answered those judgments, after some conventional mockery of legal knavery, in this way: “that those things which they all saw and preceived [sic] sensibly to be in very deed done, and actually performed, were nothing else but vain Illusions, Fancies, Dreams and Enchantments, and to be wrought and compassed by the Means of a poor harmless Wretch, that never heard of such great Matters in all his Life” (pp. 33-34). Remarkably, the accused restores a sense of order to the revels by drawing the real ceremonial breach two nights earlier back into the realm of the theatrical and non-serious. He redefines it as one of many “vain Illusions,” a description that applies equally well to the throng of “worshipful Personages” and Shakespeare's play. Recast as “mere” play, both Shakespeare's and the aristocratic audience's errors simply do not count. Yet whereas Errors in the final scene seems to embrace the operations of chance and theatricality in human affairs, in the Gesta the concatenation of theatrical frames and rehabilitative mock “supposes” unsettles the Prince's authority rather than reestablishes it.

The Prisoner's extraordinary deconstructive analysis of the proceedings leads almost inexorably to one conclusion: the trial serves only as an obvious case of ceremonial scapegoating. It is designed to draw attention away from the fact that “the very Fault was in the Negligence of the Prince's Council, Lords and Officers of his State, that had the Rule of the Roast, and by whose Advice the Common-wealth was so soundly mis-governed” (p. 34). The response of those assembled suggests the uneasy relationship between “mere” play and its very real consequences. The Prince of Purpoole and his statesmen, we learn, were “not a little offended at the great Liberty that they had taken, in censuring so far of His Highness's Government,” and the Prince responded by exercising his “royal” power and relegating the “Attorney, Sollicitor, Master of the Requests, and those that were acquainted with the Draught of the Petition” (p. 34) to the Tower (that is, the stocks). Even in this second evening's entertainment, clearly designed to mitigate the breach of decorum and “utter Discredit of our State and Policy,” the ease with which theatricality invades reality and confounds the simple operations of authority is not so much removed as redoubled. What is reestablished is a precarious semblance of order, but at the price of seeing how interpretively fluid those supposedly stable material practices are. As in Errors, there is an end to these “Law-sports,” but not before our perception of the bounds of stage and world, aristocratic ritual and farce, actor and person, has been altered.

And yet the end is not here. After these “Law-sports,” the men of Gray's Inn turned once again to the task of recovering their lost honor. This time the task took the form of political “reform,” better security for performances, and an elaborate ceremony that took as its theme Amity and Friendship. This ceremony, performed before an audience of eminent peers and courtiers, consisted of sacrifices on the altar of the Goddess of Amity, each sacrifice offered by a different pair of famous friends—Theseus and Perithous, Achilles and Patroclus, Pilades and Orestes, Scipio and Lelius. A bright flame and clear smoke signified the Goddess' acceptance of the incense offering. When Graius and Templarius made their offering, however, “the Goddess did not accept of their Service; which appeared by the troubled Smoak, and dark Vapour, that choaked the Flame, and smothered the clear burning thereof” (p. 36). Momentarily it may have seemed to those assembled that a ceremony intended to signify political union had once again been muffed. But the remainder of the ceremony makes the scene clear. For what on first inspection seemed an error is now fully under theatrical control: “Hereat, the Arch-Flamen, willing to pacifie the angry Goddess, preferred certain mystical Ceremonies and Invocations, and commanded her Nymphs to sing some Hymns of Pacification to her Deity, and caused them to make proffer of their Devotion again; which they did, and then the Flame burnt more clear than at any time before, and continued longer in brightness and shining to them, than to any of those Pairs of Friends that had gone before them; and so they departed” (p. 36). “Sorcery” had supposedly distrupted the first ceremony and potentially the relationship between Gray's Inn and the Inner Temple, but now it now serves the purpose of “magically” recasting the past, making the earlier error seem as if it were part of the larger ritual all along.⁴⁷ The Arch-Flamen and his “mystical Ceremonies and Invocations” becomes in this context a metaphor for the resourceful courtier (the Grayan beneath the priestly costume) and the almost supernaturally efficacious art of managed display, here capable of purging a public stigma.

The narrator goes out of his way to stress the ceremony's efficacy and its very real consequences:

Thus was this Shew ended, which was devised to that End, that those that were present might understand, that the Unkindness which was growing betwixt the Templarians and us, by reason of our former Night of Errors, and the uncivil Behaviour wherewith they were entertained, as before I have partly touched, was now clean rooted out and forgotten, and that we now were more firm Friends, and kind Lovers, than ever before we had been, contrary to the evil Reports that some Enviers of our Happiness had sown abroad.

(pp. 36-37)

Considering the Prince's personal honor was on the line, little wonder, then, that the Prince should confide in the Templarian Ambassador “that the Shew had contented him exceedingly” (p. 37). But even here, in the hyperbolic assertion that the former performative error “was now clean rooted out and forgotten,” are we not to see some anxiety that the memory and threat of error nonetheless persisted? Certainly the narrator cannot forget that former Night of Errors, for later in the treatise he returns to it and reminds us once again that it had been thoroughly forgotten: “The Performance of which Nights work being very carefully and orderly handled, did so delight and please the Nobles, and the other Auditory, that thereby Grays-Inn did not only recover their lost Credit, and quite take away all the Disgrace that the former Night of Errors had incurred; but got instead thereof, so great Honour and Applause, as either the good Reports of our honourable Friends that were present could yield, or we our selves desire” (p. 56, emphasis added). The focus on the careful and orderly handling of the ceremonies is certainly linked with the narrator's anxiety in the Masque of Proteus about “confused Disorder, a thing which might easily happen in a multitude of Actions” (p. 76). That anxiety draws our attention once again to what Stephen Orgel has aptly called the illusion of power. Orgel's reversible phrase reminds us, as the narrator of the Gesta needed no reminding, of the extraordinary extent to which Renaissance identity depended upon minutely choreographed displays of magnificent surfaces, displays all too prone to going up in dark and troubled smoke.

V

In discussions of Shakespearean farce, it is the word “merely” that damns: farce is “merely” entertainment, “merely” slapstick, pun and sight gag, its characters “merely” stereotypes or “merely” functions of a “merely” mechanical plot. Farce serves in the critical imagination as the soulless doppelgänger of “true” theater. It portrays a world not of humanist spirit and motive but a world ruled by the collisions and confusions of things, a rigorous and often alien material calculus. Yet as one student of farce has observed, “farce is no mere medley of inane japes and bacchanalian hoots. Its illogicality is most logical.”⁴⁸ Farce's logical illogicality is what has prompted traditional character criticism to set Shakespearean farce at the margins of the canon: it returns us to character's status as a thing⁴⁹ fashioned of bruises or gold chains or crack'd voices or twinned faces or declarations of wifely submission or trappings and suits of woe. It entertains the unsettling possibility that character is perhaps never more (and no “deeper”) than a well-managed stage spectacle, a function of theatricality and the logic of marks. Farce is, in effect, the material unconscious of characterological criticism, troubling intentionality, morality, and ego. It is remarkable, then, that the author whose characters have long been cherished as “uniquely lifelike” and “richly interiorized” apparently began his playwriting career by meditating on the materiality of Renaissance character, the troubling contradictions of which may have led him to glimpse the possibility and perils of another kind of character, tentatively, strategically half-seen beneath the actions that a man might play.⁵⁰

Notes

1. See, e.g., Carol Thomas Neely's “Constructing the Subject: Feminist Practice and the New Renaissance Discourses,” English Literary Renaissance 18 (1988), 5-18, or in a very different vein, Carolyn Porter's “Are We Being Historical Yet?,” South Atlantic Quarterly 87 (1988), 743-85.

2. Ironically, one way to “redeem” these plays has been to attribute to them a depth of characterization that other critics have unaccountably “neglected,” a critical strategy that only confirms the very critical premises that damn these works in the first place. That is emphatically not the approach adopted here.

3. In “Fear of Farce,” Russ MacDonald provides a cogent discussion of the critical reception of Shakespearean farce (in “Bad” Shakespeare: Reevaluations of the Shakespeare Canon, ed. Maurice Charney [Rutherford, 1988], pp. 77-79). For some modern examples relevant to the present study, see Larry Champion, The Evolution of Shakespeare's Comedy (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), pp. 38-39; R. S. White, “Criticism of the Comedies Up to The Merchant of Venice: 1953-82,” Shakespeare Survey 37 (1984), 6-7; and Derek Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare, 2d ed. (London, 1957). In the case of Errors see Arthur F. Kinney's very useful survey in “Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors and the Nature of Kinds,” Studies in Philology 85 (1988), 29-30, esp. 3n; and R. A. Foakes's Arden edition of Errors (New York, 1962), pp. xxxix-xl and li. All citations from Errors are from this edition. For discussions of the nature of Shakespearean farce, see MacDonald, pp. 77-90; Robert B. Heilman, “Shakespeare's Variations on Farcical Style,” in Shakespeare's Craft: Eight Lectures, ed. Philip Highfill, Jr. (Carbondale, 1982), pp. 94-112; and Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), pp. 78-108. See also David Wiles, “Taking Farce Seriously: Recent Critical Approaches to Plautus,” in Farce (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 261-71.

4. The entry for “character” in the OED suggests a general if irregular movement from the notion of a material inscription or mark to a characteristic (and later a moral) interior state and its representation in the abstract or in art. This general shift in meaning seems to have occurred in the course of the seventeenth century. This movement is elegantly traced in Amelie Oksenberg Rorty's “A Literary Postscript: Characters, Persons, Selves, Individuals,” in The Identities of Persons, ed. Amelie O. Rorty (Berkeley, 1976), pp. 301-23. For a useful history of literary character before the Renaissance, see Warren Ginsberg, The Cast of Character: The Representation of Personality in Ancient and Medieval Literature (Toronto, 1983). Jonathan Goldberg has produced several extended meditations on the implications of “character” as inscription in Shakespeare; see his “Shakespearean Characters: The Generation of Silvia,” in Voice Terminal Echo: Postmodernism and Renaissance English Texts (New York, 1986), pp. 68-100, and “Hamlet's Hand,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988), pp. 307-27. On the issue of Renaissance interiority, see, in addition to the works listed in n. 8, Patricia Fumerton, “‘Secret’ Arts: Elizabethan Miniatures and Sonnets,” Representations 15 (1986), and Anne Ferry, The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago, 1983). (See also Katharine Eisaman Maus, “Proof and Consequences: Inwardness and Its Exposure in the English Renaissance,” Representations 34 [1991], pp. 29-52, an article which appeared after I completed this study.) David Bevington, Action Is Eloquence: Shakespeare's Language of Gesture (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), pp. 1-98 and passim, and Alan Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge, Eng., 1984), discuss Shakespeare's “language” of costume, gesture, and expression from more traditional perspectives.

5. For Bradley, Barry Weller observes, the actor is of interest “only insofar as he assimilates the emotional state of the character; as soon as he must find technical means for making his understanding external, for mediating between the text and the theatrical audience, he ceases to be of interest. Readers ‘do not need, of course, to imagine whereabouts the persons are to stand, or what gestures they ought to use’” (“Identity and Representation in Shakespeare,” ELH 49 [1982], 341).

6. The Poetics, trans. W. Hamilton Frye, Loeb Classics Edition (Cambridge, Mass., 1923), p. 62; see also p. 58. For a survey of Renaissance commentary on Aristotle's conceptions of anagnorisis, see Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford, 1988), pp. 55-83; see also his cogent discussion of the “signs of recognition,” pp. 242-55.

7. I have adopted the awkward term “identity-effects” to stress how fully identity depends upon, indeed is largely produced by, its material supports and their recognition by others.

8. This is not to say that such study has not been undertaken; for examples, primarily from cultural materialist circles, see Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (New York, 1985); Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton, Eng., 1983), and Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (New York, 1984).

9. The Book Named the Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London, 1962), p. 99.

10. The Anatomy of Abuses, facsimile edition (New York, 1972), fol. C2v. It is telling that Stubbes ends his list of usurped social positions with magistrates and officers, for not only are status distinctions in danger but also distinctions of legal authority. In her discussion of Stubbes, Jardine notes that this anxiety about the link between usurpation of marks of character and the erasure of hierarchy extends to anxieties about the erasure of gender distinctions and the hic mulier controversy (pp. 151-65). See also N. B. Harte, “State Control of Dress and Social Change in Pre-Industrial England,” in Trade, Government, and Economy in Pre-Industrial England, ed. D. C. Coleman and A. H. John (London, 1976), pp. 132-65.

11. For the context of Stubbes's anti-theatricality, see Jonas Barish's chapter “Puritans, Popery, and Parade” in The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley, 1981), pp. 155-90; for his discussion of Stubbes, see 166-67.

12. This “crisis of self-presentation” has of course been remarked in other works: by Eduardo Saccone in his discussion of “sprezzatura” (“Grazia, Sprezzatura, and Affettazione in Castiglione's Book of the Courtier,” Glyph 5 [1979], 35-51); by Jean-Christophe Agnew in Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge, 1986), a work that explicitly links the competitive marketplace with the theatrical representation of character; by Lacey Baldwin Smith in Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia (London, 1986), in connection with paranoia and distrust at the Tudor court; and most famously by Stephen Greenblatt in Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980).

13. Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley, 1984), hereafter noted parenthetically in the text.

14. Peter Womack sees charactery, rightly in my view, as a technique “for assimilating behavioural difference into the generalised discourse of official culture. The aim in writing is to take the apparently random diversity of observable social behaviours and reduce it to classified gestures which, because once noted they can be seen as repetitive, are able to function as signs … to define a person in this way is to exercise power—either the effective power of quasi-bureaucratic assessment, or the aggressive, unconfirmed power of persuasive rhetoric. To ‘characterize’ a dramatis persona is not to constitute, but to invade, its interiority, to subordinate it to one's own word, to make it thing-like and knowable” (Ben Jonson [London, 1986], pp. 53 and 55, emphasis added). So defined, the seventeenth-century character serves to reconstitute coordinates of social distinction by re-identifying certain marks with certain social types.

15. Works, VIII, ed. C. H. Herford, and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford, 1925-52), p. 625, ll. 2031-32. Jonson here adapts a rhetorical commonplace from Circero and, ultimately, Aristotle. He goes on to stress how attending to the details of another's speech allows one to invade the inner recesses of the self: “It [i.e., language] springs out of the most retired, and inmost parts of us, and is the Image of the Parent of it, the Mind” (Jonson, VIII, 625, ll. 2032-33). One can better sense Jonson's aggressive tone if we compare his remark to a similar passage in Peacham's The Complete Gentleman (in The Complete Gentleman, The Truth of Our Times, and The Art of Living in London, ed. Virgil B. Heltzel [Ithaca, N. Y., 1962], p. 54): “Since speech is the character of a man and the interpreter of his mind, and writing the image of that, that so often as we speak or write, so oft we undergo censure and judgment of ourselves, labor first by all means to get the habit of a good style of speaking and writing, as well English as Latin.” (Peacham's wordplay on “habit” is noteworthy.) Compare to Jonson's much-quoted comment on language, Peacham's dictum on “following the fashion” in The Truth of Our Times: “Ecclesiasticus saith that ‘by gait, laughter, and apparel a man is known what he is.’ Truly nothing more discovereth the gravity or levity of the mind than apparel” (p. 198). The focus on revealing “the gravity or levity of the mind” suggests that by the mid-seventeenth century, apparel offers Peacham access not so much to social identity as to interior intellectual bearings. The comparison with Freudian examination of parapraxes is almost irresistible.

16. See also Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Mind, ed. William Webster Newbold (New York, 1986), particularly the chapters entitled “Concealing and Revealing of Secrets” and “Feigned Secrets.” On p. 166, Wright also discusses the proverb “Speak that I may see thee.” For further reading on the material marks and the interpretation of character, see William J. Bouwsma, “Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture,” in After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter, ed. Barbara Malament (Philadelphia, 1980), pp. 215-46, esp. p. 238; and Margaret Pelling, “Appearance and Reality: Barber-Surgeons, the Body and Disease,” in London 1500-1700: The Making of the Metropolis, ed. A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay (London, 1986), pp. 89-92, esp. the discussion of bodily tokens of witchcraft on p. 89; and Agnew, Worlds Apart, esp. pp. 57-100.

17. Frederic Jameson, “Marxism and Historicism,” New Literary History 11 (1979), 57, cited in Whigham, p. 33.

18. This passage might be compared fruitfully to Hal's rebuke to Falstaff at the end of 2 Henry IV, “Presume not that I am the thing I was” (5.5.56), or his soliloquy on “thou idol Ceremony” in Henry V 4.1.224-70, in which he struggles to conceive of a royal subjectivity which is not solely constituted by ceremonial practice: “And what have kings that privates have not too, / Save ceremony, save general ceremony?” (224-25). See Richard McCoy's superb discussion of this speech and Elizabethan ceremonial practice in “‘Thou Idol Ceremony’: Elizabeth I, The Henriad, and the Rites of the English Monarchy,” in Urban Life in the Renaissance, ed. Susan Zimmerman and Ronald F. E. Weissman (Newark, 1989), pp. 240-66, esp. pp. 257-59.

19. See Erving Goffman's discussion of recuperative tactics in “Remedial Interchanges,” in Relations in Public (New York, 1971), pp. 95-187.

20. On conceptions of “crisis” in Renaissance culture, see Theodore K. Rabb's incisive summary in The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1975), pp. 3-34.

21. There are important exceptions, however. Exemplary of the metaphysical line of inquiry are Kinney, and Glyn Austen, “Ephesus Restored: Sacramentalism and Redemption in The Comedy of Errors,” Journal of Literature and Theology 1 (1987), 54-69.

22. See Joseph Candido's thorough and illuminating discussion of the importance of meals in defining Antipholus' identity as a respected citizen and respectful husband in “Dining Out in Ephesus: Food in The Comedy of Errors,” Studies in English Literature 30 (1990), 217-41.

23. “Theme and Structure in The Comedy of Errors,” in Early Shakespeare, Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies III (New York, 1961), pp. 58, 60.

24. Patricia Parker notes the linkage between Nell's “mountain of mad flesh” and the etymology of the term “farce,” meaning “fattened, stuffed” (Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property [New York, 1987], p. 18).

25. The names of the two inns to which the Antipholi refer—the Centaur and the Phoenix—seem particularly meaningful in this context. Both are cases in which the creature's identity is indeterminate, the Centaur being visibly both man and beast, the Phoenix, because periodically reborn, being creatures both different and visibly the same. See Jonathan Crewe on “The Phoenix and the Turtle” in “God or the Good Physician: The Rational Playwright in The Comedy of Errors,” Genre 15 (1982), 211.

26. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston, 1974), p. 79.

27. I here follow Parker's discussion of this crux (pp. 78-80). In 1.1. Egeon tells us that despite the fact that the two sons “could not be distinguish'd but by names” (52), his wife was “more careful for the latter-born,” himself “like heedful of the other.” Egeon ends up marooned with “my youngest boy, and yet my eldest care” (124), “sever'd from my bliss” (118). His greater care for the elder son no doubt springs from the demands of primogeniture: the elder son is the father's heir and substitute, an image of his authority. Parker notes that the issue of elder and younger returns in the play's final lines.

28. See, for example, the discussion in Ruth Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (New York, 1980), p. 26, of this passage and its matching counterpart, Adriana's speech in 2.2.125-29: “Neither sees him or herself as clearly and distinctly autonomous. Neither possesses the detachment of the drop, and both, in consequence, fear oceanic engulfment.” Nevo assumes here, somewhat anachronistically, I believe, that such autonomy is possible and normative within Elizabethan culture.

29. The linkage Foakes notes with the proverb “Gold by continual wearing wasteth” is potentially misleading, for the sense of the passage hinges on her paradoxical reversal of the adage: here the “wearing” clearly constitutes its beauty. See Gary Taylor, “Textual and Sexual Criticism: A Crux in The Comedy of Errors,” Renaissance Drama 19 (1988), 195-225, for an extended discussion of this interpretive crux.

30. Adriana's fear of the “defeaturing” action of aging finds its counterpart not only in Egeon's speeches in 5.1. about “time's deformed hand” but also in Dromio and Antipholus of Syracuse's witty exchange in 2.2.63-107 over male baldness. That exchange turns on the fact that the link between a man's hairiness and his wit is haphazard. Adriana's mention of Antipholus’ “sunny look” unmistakably and suggestively echoes Egeon's mention of the sun's gaze upon the obscured earth, a gaze that calms the seas and rescues his family at least momentarily from “unjust divorce.”

31. Gāmini Salgādo, “‘Time's Deformed Hand’: Sequence, Consequence, and Inconsequence in The Comedy of Errors,” Shakespeare Survey 25 (1972), 82.

32. See Salgādo's discussion of time, as well as Eamon Grennon, “Arm and Sleeve: Nature and Custom in The Comedy of Errors,” Philological Quarterly 59 (1980), 159-60. Climactic scenes of characters talking past one another are a staple of Plautine comedies.

33. I see no need to emend the Folio reading “Nativitie” to “felicity,” as Foakes does. As others have noted in defense of the Folio reading, the repetition and capitalization of “Nativitie” in the Folio and its placement in the mouth of the Abbess draws attention to its scriptural connotations.

34. See Kinney for a full discussion of the linkages between the liturgical texts for Holy Innocents' Day and the play (pp. 44-51).

35. Crewe, “God,” p. 204. This conception of Errors allows Crewe to argue elsewhere for “a certain canonical logic” at work in Shakespeare's earliest comedies, namely the demonstration of “almost alarmingly ostentatious early mastery—and masterfulness” (Hidden Designs: The Critical Profession and Renaissance Literature [New York, 1986], p. 134).

36. Crewe, “God,” p. 204.

37. Jonson, Works, I, ll. 420-23.

38. Nonetheless, the possibility cannot be wholly discounted, for Shakespeare's name came up long enough for Jonson to insist, famously, that “Shakespeare wanted arte.”

39. For a superb discussion of the issues raised by Jonson's comment, see Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 29-31. Discussions of the play's staging problems rarely focus on this issue: see, for example, Foakes's extensive discussion of staging, pp. xxxiv-xxxix.

40. In Twins, when Arnold Schwarzenegger's character declares that he is Danny DeVito's twin brother, DeVito declares, “The moment I saw you, it was like I was lookin' in a mirror.”

41. Peter L. Berger, Invitation to Sociology: A Humanist Perspective (Garden City, 1963), pp. 136-38.

42. Kinney, p. 51, his emphasis.

43. For a discussion of this episode, see A. Wigfall Green, The Inns of Court and Early English Drama (New Haven, 1931; reissue, Benjamin Blom, 1965), pp. 71-85; Philip J. Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in His Social Setting (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), p. 42; Marie Axton, The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London, 1977), pp. 81ff; and Margaret Knapp and Michal 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), 70-81. See also the mélange of primary materials collected (if not synthesized) by Basil Brown in Law Sports at Gray's Inn (1594) (New York, 1921).

44. Gesta Grayorum, or The History of the High and Mighty Prince Henry Prince of Purpoole Anno Domini 1594, ed. Desmond Bland, English Reprints Series no. 22 (Liverpool, 1968), p. 6. All subsequent quotations will be taken from this text and cited parenthetically. Gesta and the other surviving complete Elizabethan Temple Revels, The Prince d’Amour (by Sir Benjamin Rudyerd and presented in 1599), were published much later, Gesta in 1688 and Prince in 1660. The dedicatory letter to Prince suggests that the motive for publishing was the remystification of the Restoration monarchy and a related nostalgia for Tudor ceremonial: “A Prince for some yeares past in disguise, and a stranger to his Native Soil, is now brought to light; and to you he comes, not for Patronage, but welcome. You will not be backward in giving him an Honourable Reception, when you understand that he is your Prince, one that owes to you his very Creation, and has no other Historiographer than an eminent personage of your own Society. His Raign was short, but prosperous; the Genius of the Nation being then heightened by all the accesses of peace, plenty, Wit, and Beauty, in the exact perfection. They who have been borne as it were out of time, and under the sullen influence of this latter ill-natured Age, who look on the past innocent and ingenious pleasures and divertisements wherewith your Honourable Society used to entertain it self and the whole glory and grandeur of England as Romance and Fabulous, may here reade that exaltation of Wit, wherewith all eares were charmed, and wish for the return of those blessed days” (Le Prince d'Amour, or the Prince of Love: With a Collection of Several Ingenious Poems and Songs by the Wits of the Age [1660], fol. A2-A3).

45. Marie Axton, The Queen's Two Bodies, esp. pp. 150-53. As Axton and other commentators have noted, the Temple revels also served as a practice ground for discretely offering advice to the monarch. Indeed, the much earlier Revels play Gorboduc takes this right and art as its theme.

46. Gesta shares with The Prince d'Amour some concern to distinguish the mock governments and their ceremonies from the genuine court. Gesta ends on this note: “But now our Principality is determined; which, although it shined very bright in ours, and other Darkness; yet, at the Royal Presence of Her Majesty, it appeared as an obscured Shadow: In this, not unlike unto the Morning-star, which looketh very chearfully in the World, so long as the Sun looketh not on it: Or, as the great Rivers, that triumph in the Multitude of their Waters, until they come unto the Sea. Sic vinci, sic mori pulchrum” (pp. 88-89). In the case of Prince, the comparison between the Prince and Elizabeth structures the first day's ceremony: the challenge of the Prince d'Amour's champion is met by that of the Queen's champion, who rises to declare three times that the Prince is an usurper and to “let him herein be as absolute as he can be; yet know, all Lovers are servants; 'tis the beloved hath the Soveraignty; Let him account then his glory to consist in obeying” (pp. 12-13). Both passages offer royal compliments, but both also seem to suggest by way of these seemingly superfluous denials that such mere sports might—as if by ceremonial ipse dixit—lapse inadvertently into subversive earnest. Thus the final lines of the Gesta in which the play spectacularly erases itself, leaving Elizabeth and her genuine “aura” in its place:

    And cullors of false Principallity
    Do fade in presence of true majesty …
    The Lyons skinn that graict our vanity
    Falls down in presence of your Majesty.

    (86-87, ll. 30-31, 5-6)

47. Precisely this sort of theatrical skill leads Leslie Hotson in Mr. W. H. (London, 1964), p. 50, to conclude erroneously that the falling out between Gray's Inn and the Inner Temple was not real but simulated, a calculated prelude to a ceremonial renewing of love between the two societies. This conclusion, I would argue, is precisely what the Grayans are seeking to construct with this ritual.

48. Jessica Milner Davis, Farce (London, 1978), p. 23.

49. I am here reversing Albert Bermel's observation in Farce: A History from Aristophanes to Woody Allen (New York, 1982), pp. 25-34, that within farce objects function as characters.

50. I wish to thank the participants of the 1991 SAA seminar, “Reconstructing Character,” and my colleague Elizabeth Hageman for their encouragement and suggestions for revision.