[In the essay that follows, Scott claims that the success of the farcical form of The Comedy of Errorsdepends heavily on its structure.]

The Comedy of Errors is a farce and as such belongs to an art form relying for its strength and theme on the ingenuity of its structure. From Plautus to Ayckbourn farce has exploited social archetypes and institutions so as to entertain its audiences by laughing at the world and its absurdities. The process is naturally thematic, the social, moral or psychological content being an integral part of its dramatic form and balance.¹ Thus the aesthetic success of good farce depends on its structure and it is from this viewpoint that any criticism must begin its evaluation. So it has been in recent years with The Comedy of Errors where scholars have focused upon two principal issues, the introduction in the final scene of the Abbess as a structural device to reconcile the ‘errors’ of the plot, and the sentence of death passed on Egeon at the beginning of the play and foreshadowing all the festivities.

To the fore of those criticizing the ‘clumsy’ introduction of Emilia has been Bertrand Evans:

When we learn that there is an Abbess in Ephesus and that this Abbess is no other than old Aegeon's lost wife, the play is within eighty lines of the end. Had we been told of her existence at the outset, we would have been assured, even while recollection of Aegeon's desperate plight shadowed the hilarious scenes, that all would finally be well. As the play stands, with only half of the frame—Aegeon's plight—presented to us at the outset, it is plain that the dramatist has simply deceived us. He makes us believe our view complete when it is only partial … By introducing Aemilia early in the action, Shakespeare could have added another level to the structure of awareness and thus have increased the complexity of our responses.²

Although arresting, such criticism is not altogether correct, since through allowing the audience to realize Emilia's role of reconciliation too early in the work Shakespeare might well have over-simplified his play and thus reduced rather than increased the complexity of response. Further such action would have naturally upset the structural-thematic balance of the play which, as will be shown, largely depends on the audience being unaware of Emilia's healing presence until the final act. Professor Evans however does point us in an interesting direction since he correctly implies that there is some form of correspondence between Egeon's ‘desperate plight’ and Emilia's therapeutic role.

This becomes more evident when the second structural issue of the work is examined, that of Egeon's sentence of death in the first scene. Leo Salingar has admirably illustrated the precise tone set by this serious opening to the play. It is not one of tragedy but of romance:

The experienced playgoer at an early performance would not have been misled … He could hardly have anticipated the fast and funny movement of the rest of the play, but he could have recognised in the opening scene the distinctive notes of romance rather than tragedy; in the speaker's inclination towards pathos rather than aggressiveness, for example, and in Egeon's reference to Fortune, which had left him something ‘to delight in’ as well as something ‘to sorrow for’.³

Salingar continues by showing the work's relationship to established romance conventions thus enabling him to assert ‘that from the outset, both forms of the story of family reunion, the romantic and the farcical, were present to [Shakespeare's] mind together’ (p. 67). It is this fusion of the romance and the farce which helps the play build on its Plautine and romance models in establishing a thematic structure around the marriage convention.

Egeon in the first scene is a pathetic old man, isolated in an alien land divorced from wife and children through the dictates of wealth and Fortune:

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

(I. i. 36-43)⁴

This incident was eventually to isolate Egeon from wife and children so that now in Ephesus he has no will to live, his only wish being to know whether his family are still alive:

… here must end the story of my life,
And happy were I in my timely death,
Could all my travels warrant me they live.
Hopeless and helpless doth Egeon wend,
But to procrastinate his lifeless end.

(I. i. 137-9, 157-8)

The ‘procrastination’ of his death implies that Egeon has spent the last five years, at least, of his life in the despair of isolation, searching for his family, his roots which are his identity. It is this loss of self-identity not only for Egeon but for all his relations which is to form the kernel of the play; a simple idea at first only proposed by the old man's pathetic tale but soon stated explicitly as a theme, by Antipholus of Syracuse:

He that commends me to mine own content
Commends me to the thing I cannot get.
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.

(I. ii. 33-40)

It is misleading to see this statement as an insight to Antipholus's characterization. We are not watching a comedy dealing in such terms but rather a farce which negates characterization in favour of simple archetype. Antipholus's speech therefore naturally becomes a clarification of Egeon's opening statement. In this respect the play operates very similarly to a musical score which may begin with an orchestral embellishment before the theme is simply stated by a single instrument, to be then followed by an intricate set of variations.⁵ Thus Egeon's exposition is simply clarified by Antipholus before we are presented with the complexities of the variations, which in this case we call the ‘errors’ on the theme of the loss of identity. We soon find therefore that the three principal characters, Antipholus of Syracuse, Antipholus of Ephesus, and Adriana are comically portrayed as separated from any relationship with another person. All are searching, striving, enquiring and yet getting nowhere since there seem to be no answers. In both philosophical and dramatic terms, in the twentieth-century, this depiction of separation and utter loneliness has found expression in the farcical theatre of the absurd, Adamov for example crying out:

What is there? I know first of all that I am. But who am I? All I know of myself is that I suffer. And if I suffer it is because at the origin of myself there is mutilation, separation.

I am separated. What am I separated from—I cannot name it. But I am separated.⁶

Thus the absurd theatre presents the modern audience with empty stereotype figures waiting, sleeping, collecting, eating, babbling, raging, emptily explaining, falsely reasoning. Shakespeare in this farce is not greatly concerned with what we now might see as the absurdists' metaphysical ethic⁷ but his dramatic score in The Comedy of Errors does employ similar vacuous activities in order to illustrate the loneliness of man devoid of roots whether they be in the context of father, mother, brother or wife. The individual's separation from the family is his absurdity and it is this which finds central expression in the play's portrayal of the Antipholus of Ephesus-Adriana relationship.

To understand fully the complexity of their marriage in the context of the dramatic structure it is necessary to be aware of the correspondence between the twin brothers. Although, in line with Aristotelean principles, there is only one action in The Comedy of Errors there are within it two sets of adventures, those of Antipholus of Syracuse and those of Antipholus of Ephesus. For them Empson's concept of correspondence is operative, ‘once you take the two parts to correspond, any character may take on mana because he seems to cause what he corresponds to or be Logos of what he symbolises’.⁸ The fact that the Antipholuses are twins immediately signifies that we are meant to understand a correspondence between them and similarly between the two Dromios. Further because of the relationship between the Dromios and Antipholuses there is also some form of correspondence implied between all four characters born ‘That very hour, and in the self-same inn’ (I. i. 53). Each of the four by correspondence represents or reflects certain facets of the other's personality, aspirations and difficulties.⁹ This is particularly so of the Antipholuses in relation to Adriana since as with farce throughout the ages, much of the play's humour depends on marital problems and intrigues. Quite correctly the marriage debate in the work has often been stressed by critics¹⁰ but perhaps what has not been emphasized enough is the way in which both of the twins reflect Adriana's difficulties with her husband. The wife's first appearance sees her complaining of her lot as a woman:

Why should their liberty than ours be more?

(II. i. 10)

A valid question especially for a twentieth-century audience which would no doubt find Luciana's placating replies to be repellently anachronistic. It would be wrong however to take that moral issue as the central element of their discussion, since the dramatist's main concern here is to illustrate Adriana's frustration which is derived from her love for her unresponsive husband. We are presented by her complaints with a form of negative positivism. By railing about her husband she illustrates her attachment to him. It is a common device, Shakespeare for example, employing it to great effect later in his career with his portrayals of Cleopatra and Lady Macduff. Like them therefore at the end of all the railing Adriana admits her life is totally bound up with that of her husband:

… he's master of my state.
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 …

(II. i. 95-9)

By the end of II.i. therefore the audience is convinced of Adriana's sincerity towards her man. Yet what the audience does not know is whether her husband is as bad as she makes out. The confrontation soon comes between the couple, Adriana making her passionate plea to him:

How comes it now, my husband, O, how comes it,
That thou art then estranged from thyself?—
Thyself I call it, being strange to me,
That undividable, incorporate,
Am better than thy dear self's better part.
Ah, do not tear away thyself from me;
For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall
A drop of water in the breaking gulf,
And take unmingled thence that drop again
Without addition or diminishing,
As take from me thyself, and not me too.

(II. ii. 119-29)

Adriana here dwells on the identity of their personalities as individuals and as part of their married union. She speaks directly therefore to the essence of their very being. But he replies:

Plead you to me fair dame? I know you not.

(II. ii. 147)

In a different play such a reply would prove heart-rending as when Hal turns to Falstaff after the latter's profession of love, and disowns him;

I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.

(Henry IV Part Two V. iv. 47)

Antipholus's reply however causes great hilarity since unknowingly Adriana is talking not to her husband but her husband's brother. Yet it is implied, though not stressed, in the context of the play that this is exactly the reply which Adriana would have received from her husband, Antipholus of Syracuse comically corresponding to and thus in part being his twin brother. Shakespeare's farce comically distances a social problem but thereby makes it as poignant, for example, as Pinter's absurd distancing in a play such as The Birthday Party where Petey and Meg are shown through verbal ineptitude to be in the stagnation of the marriage:

Meg Is that you, Petey? (Pause). Petey, is that you? (Pause). Petey?
Petey What?
Meg Is that you?
Petey Yes, it's me.
Meg What? (Her face appears at the hatch.) Are you back?
Petey Yes.
Meg I've got your cornflakes
ready. (She disappears and reappears.)
Here's your cornflakes. (He rises and takes the
plate from her, sits at the table, props up the paper and begins to eat.)
(Meg enters by the kitchen door.) Are they
nice?
Petey Very nice.
Meg I thought they'd be nice.
(She sits at the table.)

¹¹

Neither Shakespeare nor Pinter need be overtly didactic since the conversations within the context of the play's individual dramatic structure allow the thematic point to exist. With Pinter through the vacuous nature of the conversation we are able to laugh at and yet understand the corresponding nihilism of the figures' existence. Similarly with Shakespeare we laugh at the comic misunderstanding of Adriana and her unknown brother-in-law, but instinctively accept the poignancy of the true marital situation presented through the correspondence principle.

Shakespeare does not allow himself to neglect such issues once he has suggested them, and although in a farce he has no intention of over-emphasizing the serious implication of the situation he does permit himself the liberty of taking his variations on the identity-marriage theme a little further. Thus Antipholus of Syracuse decides to play along with Adriana's game, resolves that is to humour the woman as a husband might humour his wife:

Syr. Ant. [Aside.] To me she
speaks, she moves me for her theme;
What, was I married to her in my dream?
Or sleep I now, and think I hear all this?
What error drives our eyes and ears amiss?
Until I know this sure uncertainty,
I'll entertain the offer'd fallacy.

(II. ii. 181-6)

Surprisingly the situation is not far here from Adamov and the absurdists. Antipholus in his ‘dream’ gropes for answers and is forced to make pretences of acceptance. Harry Levin notes that in his mouth, as in others in this play, ‘The customary rhetorical questions of comedy … become questions of existential bewilderment or expressions of comic vertigo.’¹² Striving for a self-recognition of an identity which all others seem to know:

If everyone knows us and we know none,
'Tis time to trudge, pack and be gone.

(III. ii. 151-2)

Antipholus of Syracuse attempts to grasp anything which to him appears to have substance or validity. He keeps the gold chain, since at least that exists, and he attempts to woo Luciana with professions of his own identity:

Luc. Why call you me love?
Call my sister so.
Syr. Ant. Thy sister's sister.
Luc. That's my sister.
Syr. Ant. No,
It is thyself, mine own self's better part,
Mine eye's clear eye, my dear heart's dearer heart,
My food, my fortune, and my sweet hope's aim
My sole earth's heaven, and my heaven's claim.
Luc. All this my sister is, or else
should be.
Syr. Ant. Call thyself sister, sweet,
for I am thee;
Thee will I love, and with thee lead my life;
Thou hast no husband yet, nor I no wife—
Give me thy hand.
Luc. O, soft sir, hold you still;
I'll fetch my sister to get her good will.

(III. ii. 59-70)

Yet almost simultaneously he doubts the tests which he provides for himself. What is his identity? Who is he and who are they?

… 'tis high time that I were hence;
She that doth call me husband, even my soul
Doth for a wife abhor. But her fair sister,
Possess'd with such gentle sovereign grace,
Of such enchanting presence and discourse,
Hath almost made me traitor to myself;
But lest myself be guilty to self-wrong,
I'll stop mine ears against the mermaid's song.

(III. ii. 156-63)

Correspondingly, Antipholus of Ephesus discovering the displacement of his identity through the prohibitions from his own house, resorts to assurances of his own masculinity and power—the crow-bar, the rope's end, the prostitute paid for by the chain. The very name of Antipholus whether he be of Ephesus or Syracuse has been usurped. Once again through a different context Shakespeare only a little later in his career was to turn such a theft into tragedy, Richard II crying out to relentless Northumberland:

No lord of thine, thou haught insulting man;
Nor no man's lord. I have no name, no title;
No, not that name was given me at the font,
But 'tis usurp'd …

(Richard II IV. i. 254-7)

Both in comedy and tragedy the loss of the name signifies the insecurity of man's rationality and being and becomes an expression of the absurdity of his existence. The comic distance in Shakespeare's farce however, is continued over this crucial issue through the use of the second level of correspondences, that of the Dromios.

The creation of the double set of twins is not just the result of combining two Plautine plays, the Amphitruo and the Brothers Menaechmi, but a necessary expression of the structural theme which without the clowns' reflection of the main image would become to bold and/or simplistic. Consequently it is Dromio of Ephesus rather than his master who comically expresses the indignation over the loss of their names:

Eph. Ant. What art thou that
keep'st me out from the house I owe?
Syr. Dro. The porter for this time,
sir, and my name is Dromio.
Eph. Dro. O villain, thou hast stol'n
both mine office and my name;
The one ne'er got me credit, the other mickle blame;
If thou hadst been Dromio to-day in my place,
Thou wouldst have chang'd thy office for an aim, or thy name for
an ass.

(III. i. 42-7)

Through the clowns, the complexity of correspondence allows the variations on the identity-marriage theme to form an intricate aesthetic pattern of comedy. Central to their existence therefore has to be Nell who proves to be a reflective, though physically distorted, image of Antipholus's Adriana:

Syr. Ant. What woman's
man? and how besides thyself?
Syr. Dro. Marry, sir, besides myself,
I am due to a woman, one that claims me, one that haunts me, one that will
have me.
Syr. Ant. What claim lays she to
thee?
Syr. Dro. Marry sir, such claim as
you would lay to your horse; and she would have me as a beast, not that I
being a beast she would have me, but that she being a very beastly creature
lays claim to me.
Syr. Ant. What is she?
Syr. Dro. A very reverend body; ay,
such a one as a man may not speak of, without he say ‘sir-reverence’;
I have but lean luck in the match, and yet is she a wondrous fat marriage.
Syr. Ant. How dost thou mean, a fat
marriage?
Syr. Dro. Marry, sir, she's
the kitchen wench, and all grease, and I know not what use to put her to but
to make a lamp of her, and run from her by her own light.

(III. ii. 77-96)

Dromio has to accept Nell for what he sees her to be and then run from her by her own light, just as Antipholus must ‘entertain’ the ‘offered fallacy’ in order to escape back to a concrete existence. That fallacy however involves a situation whereby temporarily accepting the negation of one's identity one becomes as a beast; a predicament which the woman has unwittingly forced on the man and yet cannot herself accept. This is true within the concept of the comic structure and by implication through the correspondence of two Antipholuses, in the thematic context of the Antipholus of Ephesus-Adriana marriage. She wishes her husband to be what Dromio comically calls ‘a beast’, that is something which he is not, an identity totally alien to him. Her love therefore is portrayed as desiring to transform the identity of her partner, a desire which evolves from her natural possessive instincts. It is this expression of possessiveness which becomes yet another implication of the structural theme.

From the opening moments of the play an equation is drawn between possession and existence. At first possession finds its metaphor in gold; Egeon's sentence of death will be repealed only on the ransom of ‘a thousand marks’ (I. i. 21). We learn too, as we have seen, that his misfortunes accrued because of financial expediency. We discover furthermore, through constant references to the chain, that in Ephesus love, sex and respect are bought with gold, and that without money only punishment and misfortune are to be found. Thus the two Dromios who themselves were bought and are owned by their masters are continually punished for not bringing the correct sums of money to their respective lords. It is not surprising therefore that in this gold-orientated land Adriana sees herself as owning her husband, possessing him as he possesses money whilst he, it is implied, rates her love behind his financial affairs:

Adr. Say, is your tardy master
now at hand?
… I prithee, is he coming home?
It seems he hath great care to please his wife.
Eph. Dro. Why, mistress, sure my
master is horn-mad.
Adr. Horn-mad, thou villain?
Eph. Dro. I mean not cuckold-mad,
But sure he is stark mad.
When I desir'd him to come home to dinner,
He ask'd me for a thousand marks in gold;
‘’Tis dinner-time,’ quoth I; ‘my gold,’
quoth he;
‘Your meat will burn,’ quoth I; ‘my gold,’ quoth
he,
‘Will you come?’ quoth I; ‘my gold,’ quoth he,
‘Where is the thousand marks I gave thee, villain?’
‘The pig,’ quoth I, ‘is burn'd,’; ‘my
gold,’ quoth he;
‘My mistress, sir …’, quoth I; ‘hang up thy
mistress;
I know not thy mistress, out on thy mistress …’
Luc. Quoth who?
Eph. Dro. Quoth my master;
‘I know,’ quoth he, ‘no house, no wife, no mistress’, …
Adr. Go back again, thou slave, and
fetch him home.

(II. i. 44, 55-71,75)

Dromio of course had been to the wrong Antipholus but the correspondence holds good; the wife being weighed by the gold, the husband being commanded to leave the gold for her companionship.

Identity, marriage, possession are the three issues expounded in the opening scene, clarified as themes by Antipholus of Syracuse's arrival in Ephesus and embellished in an intricate pattern of variations throughout the work leading to a final coda in which the Abbess appears. But does she really, as Evans implies, disrupt the aesthetic pattern?

The concept of the convent and monastery as places of retreat from the complexities of an inexplicable and cruel world was to become a major symbol in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Sometimes it was to be employed with startling effect as in the conclusion of Marston's Antonio's Revenge or in Hamlet's vicious instructions to Ophelia, but whether here or as in the more conventional use in The Winter's Tale, the symbol derived its power from its restorative associations. When all is confusion this archetypal place of retreat allows rest and safety. The priory is the final resort for Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant. Its introduction instructs the audience that the confusions have become so great that all rationality is about to be lost to chaos, unless a traditional answer is found to restore order. The abbess appears and takes control. Instead of entering the debate by concerning herself with the husband, she overtly attempts to change the direction of everyone's thought in order to clarify the true reason for all the problems. Thus instead of condemning Antipholus for his sins she turns to Adriana to instruct her about her judgements and jealousy;

And thereof came it that the man was mad.
The venom clamours of a jealous woman
Poisons more deadly than a mad dog's tooth.
It seems his sleeps were hinder'd by thy railing,
And thereof comes it that his head is light.
Thou say'st his meat was sauc'd with thy upbraidings;
Unquiet meals make ill digestions …
Thou sayest his sports were hinder'd by thy brawls;
Sweet recreation barr'd, what doth ensue
But moody and dull melancholy,
Kinsman to grim and comfortless despair,
And at her heels a huge infectious troop
Of pale distemperatures and foes to life? …
The consequence is then, thy jealous fits
Hath scar'd thy husband from the use of wits.

(V. i. 68-74, 77-82, 85-6)

In one sense only, is the Abbess in as much error as anyone else, the Antipholus she is protecting is not Adriana's husband. Nevertheless her words are valid in iterating the truths which the comic structure has portrayed. If she is believed, all will be restored. The acceptance, however has necessarily to come through the structure itself and it is here by instigating a conventional recognition scene that the Abbess performs the second aspect of her therapeutic role. If not particularly subtle the scene is quite conventional in the Aristotelean context of anagnorisis and as such tends to allow a satisfactory and harmonious conclusion to the farce. It may not be that throughout the play we expect the appearance of Egeon's wife in the end but we foresee the necessity of some restoring agent and are not disappointed in the event at finding it to be Emilia. She proves to have been the obvious missing link and her words together with her role of discovery are quite consistent with the progress of the play.

It has been in recent years only that the true implications of farce as an art form have begun to come to light. The very complexity and ingenuity of a premier drama of this kind, which The Comedy of Errors inevitably is, illustrate the thematic, social and psychological concerns underlying the artefact. Shakespeare's early comedy is a masterpiece of its peculiar genre and consequently demands to be treated with respect by scholarship and the theatre.¹³ If this occurs then its true comic value and potential are realized thus allowing the play to perform its function of joyously and hilariously entertaining its audiences. It is interesting that over the past two decades there have been two major revivals of the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company. But perhaps mention should be made first of an interesting production at Stratford, Connecticut in 1963. This as Harry Levin reports, was notable in that a single actor played both Antipholuses. In the light of the thematic concerns of the structure such an idea appears immediately attractive but in reality must cause difficulties.¹⁴ If, in farce, the theme depends so much on the structure then an alteration as radical as reducing the two principal parts to one, by employing one actor, forces the theme outside the dramatic form, thus making a directorial thematic commentary on the original play rather than allowing it to develop as it was intended. Shakespeare did not, it seems, want or at least envisage a commentary since he did not include one of his own, as he was later to do with, for example, Feste in Twelfth Night. A criticism of this kind about a production naturally treads a sensitive minefield since we find ourselves in the delicate debate concerning the propriety of directorial influence over and interpretation of an established classical text.

Trevor Nunn's production in 1976 met this problem squarely. Realising that farce demands improvisation and the extension of comic business Nunn embellished the work with songs, dances and comic ingenuity so as to realize the vitality behind the original text. At one hilarious moment, for example, Adriana (Judi Dench) appeared at her balcony, stared at the wrong Antipholus below and melodramatically signalled him to her chamber. He and Dromio looked dumbfounded whilst the audience roared. Action here had correctly complemented the text. Trevor Nunn however went further. Although in an interview with The Times he asserted that the play had ‘no intellectual pretension’¹⁵ he cleverly allowed his musical interpolations to emphasize the drama's key thematic issues whilst the audience sat back to enjoy the songs. Thus between I. i. and I. ii. he introduced a song concerning the need of Egeon for a ransom:

Chorus Beg thou or borrow
to make up the sum, make up the sum, make up the sum,
Thou art welcome to try.
Bring not the money by set of sun, by set of sun,
Then … old man you die, old man you die, old man you die.
Girls Try all the friends thou hast
in Ephesus,
Proprietor of the Porpentine Or else
your story must end in Ephesus,
Egeon My comfort when your words
are done
My life ends with the evening sun
Chorus Beg thou or borrow to make
up the sum, make up the sum …
(16)

The lively chorus moved and swayed around the old man as the song developed. Although they were concerned for him he was to discover that in Ephesus none were quite ‘so deaf as us’. The music, the action and the humour naturally allowed the audience to realize that the old man would not die but the words correctly set the tone of the romance. He was in difficulty and so he was to attempt to find friends and save his life although rationally there was little hope of him doing either. The final refrain of the song was ‘Then old man you'll die … so you must try.’ It was an interpretative, sensitive and entertaining moment of theatre as the chorus disappeared and the lonely Egeon was led off by a comically officious jailer. Similarly Adriana taking refuge in Campari and soda, and the bespectacled Luciana, attractively peering round her book at the play's action, were given a lengthy, amusing duet and dance routine concerning ‘A man is master of his liberty’. Dromio of Syracuse likewise presented a vivacious and humorous song based on II. ii. 63-109, developing the theme ‘For there's a time and a season / And for all things / There's a time and a place’ whilst Antipholus of Syracuse was permitted to sing of his existential problems, briefly changing the mood by allowing a meditative pause in the midst of the quick-fired activity:

Am I on earth
In heaven or hell?
Do I exist?
Do I appear?
Sleeping, waking,
Sick or well?
Am I bewitched?
Am I here?

In Act IV Scene iv, Pinch led an exciting, anarchic song and dance routine ‘Satan come forth’, in his attempts to exorcise the devil from Antipholus. This was the magical farce, fun and confusion of Ephesus but within the almost comic chaos the intellectual dimensions of the play were being maintained. Purists might argue that such a course was unnecessary and detrimental to the original text.¹⁷ Audience figures¹⁸ proved however that the show was successful whilst the musical additions remained within the thematic framework of Shakespeare's early farce.

A different kind of interpretative embellishment marked the famous 1962 production in which the director Clifford Williams exploited the comic nature of farce to its physical and intellectual limit. Thus he wrote in a programme note:

When we speak of farce, we commonly think of curates, trousers, French windows, banana skins, laughter, and incredibility. But farce may be given a dimension and a reality which makes it more fruitful than the most painstaking work of naturalism.

… Shakespeare, the dramatist, gives us a crazy though magical Ephesus where men may re-find their brothers and find themselves, and where women may re-find their husbands and learn about themselves. The city and people of Ephesus may be highly improbable, but they are infinitely desirable, a triumph of imagination over life.

To achieve this vision of the play within production Williams expressed the work's relationship with the contemporary popular drama of the Italian commedia dell'arte. Consequently the performance was enhanced by an unpretentious, non-intruding use of mime which seemed to develop from the play's structure and promote its fluid progress. His opening balletic sequence and the creation of a silent though very active group of figures observing and reflecting the follies of the stage enabled the structural theme to be kept in focus. The production being staged over a ten year period throughout England, Europe and the United States as well as being televised, was a major success. It was critically acclaimed from the start, Harold Hobson among others, commenting on the way in which the undertones of the work had been sensitively exposed:

The wild comedy of irrational recognitions is given consistency and a curious force by the suggestion that there is behind it something vaguely disquieting.

(The Sunday Times, 16 September 1962)

That ‘something’ is the very heart of the play's structure and the dramatist's vision, an ability to see and express the comic absurdity of man in the process of living.

Notes

1. Jessica M. Davis, Farce (London, 1978) has adequately assessed the aesthetic value of farce as an art form depending on the delicate balance achieved between aggression and festivity in the context of its structure, ‘Farce is indeed mechanical and its mechanical manipulations of plot and character distinguish it clearly from other, more flexible comic forms. Like all comedy, farce is both aggressive and festive. At its heart is the eternal comic conflict between the farces of conventional authority and the forces of rebellion’ (pp. 23-4).

2. Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (London, Oxford, New York, 1960) pp. 8-9

3. Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge, 1974) p. 61.

4. References to The Comedy of Errors are to R. A. Foakes's edition, The Arden Shakespeare (London, 1962).

5. A comic piece of music operating in this way is Dohnányi Variations on a Nursery Song where the robust opening exposition is soon clarified by the lone piano simply stating the theme, the nursery song, Ah, vous dirai-je, maman, which in turn is succeeded by the intricacies of the variations on the theme.

6. Arthur Adamov, L'Aveu quoted from Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, Penguin edition (London, 1968) p. 89

7. Adamov, for example, identifies his separation as a loss of what was once seen as God, a rational explanation for existence. See Esslin, pp. 89 ff.

8. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London, 1935) p. 34.

9. It is tempting to suggest that the twins could be seen as two facets of a single personality. Harry Levin, Introduction, The Comedy of Errors. The Signet Classic Shakespeare (New York and London, 1965) p. xxx, disagrees, ‘That way schizophrenia lies … the actual predicament is that of two personalities forced into the same role, rather than of one personality playing two roles, since the resident twin has the contacts and continuities and the roving twin intercepts them, as it were’.

10. Nowhere better than in R. A. Foakes, Introduction, The Comedy of Errors, The Arden Shakespeare, pp. xxxix-li, where in particular he links the ‘loss or change of identity’ of the characters ‘with a disruption of family, personal and social relationships’. See also Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London, 1974) pp. 1-19. Professor Leggatt would disagree however with the conclusions of the present discussion in that he states, ‘One curious feature of the ending is that, while the problems of marriage have been thoroughly aired, there is no explicit reconciliation between husband and wife’ (p. 9).

11. Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party, 2nd edition (London, 1965) p. 9.

12. Levin, op. cit., p. xxxi.

13. R. A. Foakes, Introduction, p. xxxix-xi, proposes a correct critical attitude, ‘Any developed account of The Comedy of Errors is likely to seem portentous in relation to the complexities of Shakespeare's mature drama, and extravagant in relation to the usual classification of the play as early farce. Clearly it is important to keep a critical balance; but it is also important to recognize that, from the beginning of his career, Shakespeare was an artist of unusual power, and that all his work deserves serious attention.’

14. See Levin, op. cit., Introduction, pp. xxx-xxxi.

15. See John Higgins, ‘Trevor Nunn in Search of Fresh Pastures’, The Times (29 September 1976).

16. Quotations are from the original prompt-copy text of the performance, housed in the Shakespeare Centre Library, Stratford-upon-Avon. They are reproduced by kind permission of Trevor Nunn. A full cast list for this and other RSC productions is found in M. Mullin (ed.) with K. M. Muriello, Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. A Catalogue to Productions of the Shakespeare Memorial/Royal Shakespeare Theatre, 1879-1978, 2 vols. (London, 1980).

17. Not all critics were happy with the interpretation. John Barber, Daily Telegraph (1 October 1979), though praising the professionalism of the cast complained that the result was simply not amusing.

18. The production was also televised.