SOURCE: Shaw, Catherine M. “The Conscious Art of The Comedy of Errors.” In Shakespearean Comedy, edited by Maurice Charney, pp. 17-28. New York: New York Literary Forum, 1980.

[In the following essay, Shaw evaluates The Comedy of Errors as Shakespeare's eclectic adaptation of Latin sources, and considers the playwright's recasting of classical dramas by Plautus and Terence into an Elizabethan idiom that highlights the contrast between “stage representation and audience expectation.”]

The Comedy of Errors holds a place unique in the Shakespearean canon because it shows at once the most direct derivation from Roman comedy and, at the same time, an awareness of contemporary audience and occasion. This does not mean that the drama of the intervening years, particularly that of Renaissance Italy and the native English tradition, does not show its influence. Rather, there is something to be gained by looking at either end of a creative process—the pressure of Latin comedy at the beginning and the demands of occasion on performance at the end. If we can assume that this play as we have it in the Folio text shows signs of catering to an audience at least as learned as the playwright, then awareness of specific audience and perhaps also of the specific occasion of the Christmas revels at Gray's Inn in December, 1594, encouraged Shakespeare to indulge in authorial virtuousity; perhaps even to show off a little. Many critics have dealt with The Comedy of Errors as a serious expression of Shakespearean sentiments even though they are couched in Plautine farce—no doubt they are there. What my interest is, however, is in viewing the play as an artistic performance whose comic success depends upon an awareness of its deliberate eclecticism and of a craft expressly designed to set up a confrontation between stage representation and audience expectation.

We might note, for example, that no other Shakespearean play has so few prose lines (230 or 1/8 of the total), and of these, as we might expect, 2/3 (165) are spoken by the Dromios and almost all the rest (58) by Antipholus of Syracuse when he engages in badinage with his servant in Act 2, scene 2 and Act 3, scene 2. This should lead us to speculate on the comic effect of the farcical sequences of mistaken identity, particularly those in which either Dromio takes a drubbing, in which the dialogue is in blank verse, or in the dinner scene mid-play (the only one except for the finale with all the major characters on stage), in which the characters caterwaul in rhymed couplets. Surely, the couching of such Plautine buffoonery in blank verse and rhyme suggests a conscious dichotomy for comic effect. Perhaps in this Shakespeare is following the lead of the courtly John Lyly, whose influence in the play shows elsewhere; but if he is, then his audience would recognize the technique of imitation as well as the deliberate juxtaposition of action and speech pattern.

Shakespeareans are indebted to editors and scholars such as T. W. Baldwin, R. A. Foakes, and Geoffrey Bullough for their investigations into Shakespeare's narrative sources for The Comedy of Errors, for it is upon such knowledge that we can base our assessment of the freedom with which Shakespeare adapted and added and also come to recognize when he broke with direct or indirect Plautine influence to adopt other dramatic methods and style, particularly those of Terence. T. W. Baldwin has dealt in detail with The Comedy of Errors and the five-act Terentian formula for play construction.¹ More recently, Richard Levin has drawn our attention to a fact about Latin comedy too often ignored. “Of the eighty-odd plays that have survived from classical antiquity, only those of Terence contain a fully developed double plot.”² On this subject George E. Duckworth says, “Since the double plot appears in all of Terence's comedies except The Mother-in-Law but is scarcely ever used by Plautus, and since Terence handles the two plots with greater skill in his later plays, it seems probable that he himself developed this feature and in many cases altered the Greek originals to make his own comedies more intricate.”³ I would like to suggest that Shakespeare, whose knowledge of Plautus and Terence was at least as great as theirs had been of Menander and Apollodorus, took the same liberties with Plautine narrative and with Terence's interlocking double plots as Terence had done with his Greek forebears and that this freedom opened the way for an even greater expansion of that “comic complication” and character illumination of which Levin speaks.⁴ The result is that in Shakespeare's play there are not two, but three levels of dramatic sensibility, each projecting a distinctive tone.

The Terentian double plot is based on the adventures of two young lovers: one more serious and romantic, the other tending toward practicality and somewhat less respectable. Little stage time is given to slapstick. Even though Menaechmi is almost pure farce, however, Shakespeare found the beginnings of a Terentian bifurcation in the Plautine twins. Syracuse is more impressionable and idealistic. His response to Erotium's hospitality is, “Ye immortal gods! Did ye ever in a day bestow more blessings on a man who hoped for less.”⁵ Epidamus is somewhat more cynical and more of a sexual adventurer. The idea of stealing from his wife to buy favors for his mistress appeals to his sense of justice, and he appears to have been on close terms with Erotium's maid as well. The character distinction is relatively undeveloped in Plautus, but Shakespeare takes advantage of it to make over the twins into Terentian heroes whose differences in personality and in their relationships with added or adapted characters, particularly their respective women, provide the distinction in tone between the high and middle comedy of the play.

Of course, the sexual dealings found in both Roman dramatists had to be dropped or at least left ambiguous. Neither Plautus' bawdy and farcical exploitation of licentious situations nor even Terence's more sophisticated attitudes toward extramarital sex would please the Elizabethan audience unless they were kept subtle or dropped into the buffoonery of the low comic plot. So Shakespeare complies by adding the Dromios and relegating much of the farce to these servants. It is true that each Antipholus beats his Dromio, or one whom he supposes to be his servant, but the emphasis in these farcical scenes is on the victim and his bewilderment. Or, in the bawdy anatomizing of the “spherical” Nell, Antipholus of Syracuse is merely the ear; the low humor is Dromio's.⁶ Although the name Dromi is derived from Terence by way of Lyly (Mother Bombie), the idea of identical servants came from Mercury and Sosio in Amphitryon, from which Shakespeare also borrowed the feast scene in Act 3. In this, Shakespeare is practicing the technique known in Terence as contaminatio;⁷ as Terence did with Menander's plays, so Shakespeare intrudes into one Plautine play characters and episodes from another.

The other characters of the farcical level are not the result of contaminatio but rather of accommodation. Plautus' doctor becomes “the hungry, lean-faced” (5.1.238) Dr. Pinch, the first of Shakespeare's comic pedants. Erotium, called amica in Menaechmi, a word often used by Plautus and Terence to mean concubine, becomes in Shakespeare's play merely a nameless “courtesan,” whose profession is left ambiguous and from whom Antipholus of Ephesus seeks “excellent discourse” (3.1.109) only when his wife locks him out. Her cook, a male in Plautus' comedy, not only becomes a skivvy in Adriana's household, but is translated into a female and occupies the low comic position in a hierarchal triad of feminine figures: Luciana, Adriana, and Nell (or Luce). Nell, it is true, appears only briefly on stage, but her insistent demands on her brother-in-law are rehearsed by Dromio of Syracuse and parallel those made by Adriana on her master in the middle comedy. Interestingly enough, Antipholus of Syracuse is again the brunt of chastisement in the high or romantic level of the play when Luciana also scolds him for unhusbandly behavior. This kind of Shakespearean asymmetrical sophistication of a comic situation is unparalleled in Roman comedy—the Syracusan men stand the assaults from the women on all three levels of the play, while the Ephesians for whom they are mistaken get off almost scot-free.

Comedy in which the innocent suffer the most abuse is certainly not new, but it is when superimposed upon a familiar dramatic base that relies for its farcical effect solely upon a balanced repetition of absurd confrontations. The Menaechmian pattern of repeated and bizarre situations arising from mistaken identity is an example of the kind of comedy that Henri Bergson refers to as having been repeated so often (even by Shakespeare's time) that it had reached “the state of being a classical type or model.” And Shakespeare takes advantage of the “comic de facto” in The Comedy of Errors. By superimposing his own, different pattern upon the original model, however, he doubles the comic effect and achieves additional and new “de jure comedy.”⁸ A second and more sophisticated level of laughter results from the dichotomy between the original Menaechmian farce imprinted on the audience's imagination and the Shakespearean palimpsest that it sees before its eyes on the Renaissance stage.

“EXTRACONTAMINATIO”

At the upper level of the comic scale, Shakespeare practices what might be called “extracontamination,” or the addition of characters and their situations from a completely different and, in this case, a nondramatic and anachronistic source: Egeon and the Abbess who, with Luciana, are totally alien to the farcical laughter usually connected with Plautine comedy. Egeon's name, from Aegeus, may have come from the father of Theseus, whom Shakespeare would have come across in his reading of Plutarch or, more likely, as R. A. Foakes suggests, from Cooper's Thesaurus or from The Excellent and Pleasant Works of Julius Solinus Polyster (1587), which would also explain the name of the Duke of Ephesus, although a Solinus also appears in Lyly's Campaspe.⁹ The tale that Egeon tells, however, was borrowed from that of Apollonius of Tyre as it was related by John Gower in Confessio Amantis, which Shakespeare used again some fifteen years later for Pericles. This version also accounts for Emilia's being an abbess.

Shakespeare's opening of his comedy with the threat of death may have been an allowance suggested by Mercury's joking acceptance of tragicomedy in Amphitryon, but I think it more likely that an expansion of Menaechmi's narrative and psychological limits to encompass a whole family appealed to the apprentice dramatist anxious to outdo Plautus' “very granary” (p. 367) of comic situations. Shakespeare does not, however, interweave Egeon's precarious position into the main narrative as he does with the addition of the Dromios but uses it as a time frame for the dramatic action, which begins in separation and melancholy and ends in reconciliation and joyousness. Nonetheless, by adding characters at either end of the central Plautine progression, he elongates the spectrum of dramatic coloration.

The introduction of Egeon effectively begins the separation of the two Antipholi into distinct Terentian types. The old man's tale of the tribulations that have beset his family is also his son's, and its pathos and gravity carry over to Antipholus of Syracuse when he appears in the second scene. The son is, like the father, under threat from Ephesian law, but, unlike Egeon who has a one-day reprieve and may move freely about the city, Antipholus must lose himself in an alien world to find that part of himself which is his brother. Various critics have dealt with the whole problem of identity in The Comedy of Errors; the point here is to recognize that at the end of Act 1 the dramatic prognosis for Antipholus of Syracuse is anything but comic. He is an alien in a bewildering world—a world that seems to be forcing an identification upon him that he does not recognize—in which his servant acts mad and the thousand marks that are his security against death have disappeared.

Luciana is the only character in The Comedy of Errors for whom Shakespeare clearly practices what is called, again with reference to Terence, “auto-contamination,”¹⁰ the addition of a character of his own creation. Her name probably stuck in the playwright's mind from the details borrowed from the travails of Apollonius of Tyre for the Egeon-Emilia frame, although the name Lucina also occurs in the anonymous Soliman and Persida (c. 1592). Her position in the play is to introduce into the serious plot a kind of romantic love common to Terence (and through him to Lyly) but not to Plautus. Kathleen M. Lea suggests that she is provided to be a confidante for Adriana and as a “consolation prize for the deserving stranger.”¹¹ Juxtaposed as she is to Adriana, however, Luciana makes even clearer the distinction between the romantic quality of the high comic level and the bourgeois or realistic comedy of which her sister is a part.

Adriana is neither borrowed nor created; neither is she an accommodation to a dramatic composition more sophisticated than the Plautine farce in which Shakespeare found her. Rather she is a transformation! Gone is the mere “matrona” of Menaechmi, and in her place stands a fully developed woman who stands at the head of a long line of Shakespeare's remarkable heroines. Luciana pales by her as Hero does by Beatrice. In fact, although Shakespeare has shifted the narrative interest in The Comedy of Errors to Antipholus of Syracuse, it is Adriana who prevents the serious concerns from swamping the whole play, not her husband. She even has more lines than he has. Plautus' virago may end up as the nagging wife in Jacobean city comedy, but Shakespeare's Adriana, with her spirit and independence and womanliness, goes on to become Rosalind and Kate and Beatrice and perhaps even Cleopatra. Her husband, on the other hand, never becomes other than a stock type from domestic comedy.

This view of Adriana should lead us to consider with a somewhat less serious eye the disputation on husband-wife relations in which she engages with Luciana. Adriana is clearly a crowd-pleaser, and perhaps her considerations of marriage are designed to titillate a sophisticated mixed audience. Attention has been drawn to the closeness of Luciana's argument to that of St. Paul's. L. Boronski, on the other hand, would see the whole exchange as patterned deliberately as a euphuistic dialogue.¹² There is no reason, of course, why it cannot be both or, indeed, assimilate even a third possibility. The position that Luciana takes is remarkably similar to that of Micio in Terence's The Brothers, in which the debate is on how to raise a son. In Terence's play, Micio and his brother, Demeo, present opposing views: Micio advises that a father be generous and patient; Demeo, that he be sparing and hard. The same opposed extremes are presented in the marriage debate in The Comedy of Errors, a subject that must have been of topical interest because Shakespeare comes back to it in Love's Labor's Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, and Much Ado About Nothing. Luciana insists that a man be “master of his liberty” and the wife patient and agreeable (2.1.7-9). Adriana takes a firm view; a man is “unruly” and “feeds from home” (2.1.101-2) and, therefore, a wife should be demanding and keep a tight rein. The joke is that Micio's position does not score a victory in The Brothers. In a clever and surprising conclusion, Terence shows that the wisest course avoids the weakness of either extreme, and surely this is what Adriana represents at the end of Shakespeare's play and, regardless of what scripture says, the position that would most delight an audience at once aware of the stylistics of the argument and of the Terentian compromise—to say nothing of its relationship to the topoi from Cicero through The Marriage of Wit and Science (1568), A Marriage Between Wit and Wisdom (1570), and The Marriage of Mind and Measure (1579), and the like.

Indeed, in the scene before the priory, Adriana's more worldly position ultimately converts even Luciana, for when the Abbess reproaches Adriana for causing her husband's distraction, it is the formerly Pauline Luciana who insists that her sister's behavior was but sauce for the gander:

She never reprehended him but mildly,
When he demeaned himself rough, rude, and wildly.

(The Comedy of Errors, 5.1.87-88)

With this encouragement, Adriana opposes the holy woman's judgment and asserts her rights in the office of wife. This is not “merely possessive love,” as John Russell Brown somewhat chauvinistically suggests, but a statement of her legal conjugal rights certain to draw approval from Shakespeare's mixed audience, particularly one versed in the law and aware, as Shakespeare so often proved himself to be, of the conflicts between secular and spiritual statutes.

Professor Brown attempts to present Adriana's love as “taking” as opposed to “giving.” He says, “Adriana sees love as a system of promises, duties, and bonds,”¹³ and he is quite right. By the marriage contract Antipholus of Ephesus became, as Adriana says, “Lord of me and all I had” (5.1.137). The “giving” part, both of herself and her possessions, had come much earlier, and now her demands within the marriage bond are valid and understandable. This does not, however, diminish her love and willingness to care for him nor her promptness as a practical helpmeet to “take order for the wrongs” (5.1.146) she thinks he has committed. Much more the victim of the confusions in identity than her sister or the kitchen wench, Adriana has a position at once sympathetic and admirable and entirely in keeping with the realistic level of the comic structure.

Once again, the conscious craft of The Comedy of Errors is not merely the result of Shakespeare's lifting the Plautine farce from its Latin setting, peopling it with more lively characters, giving a contemporary twist to a Terentian debate, and then recasting the combination into a totally new comedy palatable to English Renaissance tastes, because the Roman dramas themselves still clearly underlie the Shakespearean superstructure. Neither does Adriana's view on marriage erase that imprinted on the audience's mind from scripture because Luciana has already presented the Pauline position liberally laced with other Biblical allusions to the subservience to man expected of all created things. The comic totality of The Comedy of Errors and the sophistication of its response in laughter depends upon consciousness of multiple and separate levels of dramatic representation working at once both in dramatic point and counterpoint.

ECLECTICISM IN THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

Conscious eclecticism is also what makes the ending of The Comedy of Errors “work” in the theatrical sense, because both its comic structure and its deliberate catering to audience conditioning allow the advantage of playing off actual visual representation against audience mental preconceptions. The mere entrance of the second Antipholus to the rest of the cast assembled on stage would suffice to unravel the mistaken identities, as it does in the Plautine farce. Shakespeare chooses to give the narrative resolution to his comedy a distinctly Terentian twist. As Professor Duckworth points out, “many of the pertinent facts of a Terentian plot were not revealed to the spectator until late in the action”;¹⁴ Shakespeare not only holds back knowledge of Emilia's existence, but also introduces her as an entirely new character when she emerges from the priory in Act 5, scene 1. That the Abbess turns out to be the mother of the Antipholi is another borrowing from Confessio Amantis, in which, after much wandering, Apollonius of Tyre is reunited with his wife in Ephesus. This is the same source that accounts for the resurrection of Egeon, the father reported to have died in Menaechmi.

The reactions of the various comic groups to the presence of double sets of twins are finely tuned. The eloquent despair voiced by Egeon when one he sees as his son denies any kinship changes to the joy of waking from a bad dream. Antipholus of Syracuse, whose fortunes were linked with the serious concerns of his father at the beginning of the play and who has throughout the action expressed his bewilderment in repeated doubts as to whether he were awake or asleep, repeats the dream imagery when he reiterates his vows of love 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.

(The Comedy of Errors, 5.1.375-77)

As for Adriana, one can only guess her facial expressions when first she exclaims with astonishment, “I see two husbands, or mine eyes deceive me” (5.1.332) and then later when she realizes that the Abbess with whom she had disagreed so vociferously is actually her mother-in-law. Her questions, however, are eminently practical—“Which of you did dine with me today?” “And are you not my husband?”—and she and her husband set about clearing up such realistic matters as who owes whom how much money and who gets the gold chain.

PROBLEMS IN THE ENDING OF THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

The actual ending of The Comedy of Errors presents specific problems that can perhaps be explained by again giving attention to audience and occasion. Charmingly funny as the Dromios may be in the closing lines as each acts as the other's mirror, why should Shakespeare choose to end the play with the servants of the low comic action rather than with the higher ranking or main characters, as he does in most other plays he wrote? One possible answer is that Plautus closes Menaechmi with a speech by Messenio, the former slave of Menaechmus of Syracuse, except that Messenio's words are only a farcical announcement of the forthcoming auction of Epidamus' property, whereas the Dromios' lines have actual thematic and tonal significance for the end of Shakespeare's play. It is also very strange that Shakespeare would overlook the joyous reconciliations at the close of The Comedy of Errors as an opportunity for providing, or at least implying, some kind of revelry to round out the action, as was common to most Elizabethan comedies. But the ending of the play is abrupt. The actual dramatic conclusion of the action comes with the Duke's agreement to join the reunited family in their celebration, and yet there is not even a call for music to accompany the feast. Perhaps a plausible answer to these problems is that the play as we have it in the Folio text is the version designed to fit into the special entertainment for which we have record in the Gesta Grayorum. It would certainly explain why The Comedy of Errors is so short, just over 1,700 lines, hardly enough for a complete theatrical performance. In fact, the New Cambridge editor thinks that the public playhouse version was “longer than the text that comes down to us, perhaps by as much as four hundred lines.”¹⁵

There is certainly ample precedent for using short dramatic representations as part of larger aristocratic entertainments throughout Elizabeth's reign. In addition, Geoffrey Bullough lists a number of Italian and other Continental adaptations of Menaechmi¹⁶ in the sixteenth century, and both Foakes and Lea agree that Shakespeare “does seems to have been acquainted with the way in which comedy of mistaken identity was exploited on the Italian stage.”¹⁷ George Freedley and John Reeves describe an Italian performance of Menaechmi, which was followed by “one of the famous banquets which included a morisco (a simplified ballet d'action) in which Cesare Borgia acted. As the music rose for a glorious finale, the guests danced with the performers and the Pope looked on approvingly.”¹⁸ Shakespeare's play appears to have been adapted to be part of a similar larger entertainment, and there is reason to suspect that The Comedy of Errors was also meant to be followed by a masque.

At the entertainment planned for “Innocents-Day at Night” in December, 1594,¹⁹ the Prince of Purpoole was, on behalf of his subjects at Gray's Inn, to entertain an Ambassador from the Inner Temple and his court. The King of Arms announced the arrival of the Ambassador and his attendants to the Prince “then sitting in his Chair of State in the Hall.” The guest proceeded through the hall to honor the Prince of Purpoole with speeches of high compliment. However, the Ambassador was no sooner placed so he could view “something to be performed for the Delight of the Beholders,” than the plans went awry, for “there arose such a disordered Tumult and Crowd upon the Stage, that there was no Opportunity to effect that which was intended.” Indeed, the Gray's Inn lawyers and their company behaved so badly that the guests from the Inner Temple left in displeasure. Considering the progress of events to the disorder, the indication is that had the evening's entertainment continued as planned, the presentment, procession to state, and ceremonial compliments would have been followed by a play and a masque. Under other circumstances, the “something to be performed for the Delight of the Beholders” might have meant merely games of mumchance, barriers, or some other diversion interjected before the play, but the earlier reference to “good Inventions and Conceipts,” suggests that the plan was for something more elaborate such as a masque.²⁰

The end of The Comedy of Errors seems to support this suggestion. After the denouement—the discovering and sorting out of the Antipholi and the Dromios and the joyous reunion of parents with children and brothers with brothers—the major characters, led by the Duke, withdraw from the stage to celebrate the happy occasion. The two servants, the Dromios, are left on stage to go through a series of burlesque gestures as to who will leave the stage first, finally agreeing:

We came into the world like brother and brother:
And now let's go hand in hand, not one before the other.

(The Comedy of Errors, 5.1.426-27)

This posturing is suggestive of an antic dance, one type of comic contrast that gave rise to the antimasque in the Court Masques and could have been intended as a prelude to the masque dances. These measures, if this were the case, would be performed by members of Gray's Inn and their ladies taking the place of the professional actors for the dance finale. The use of the lowly Dromios as masque presenters is fully in keeping as a final fillip for a play that has relied so much upon comic confrontation and juxtaposition, while, at the same time, their amusing dialogue would provide stage business during the substitution. The masque would thus fulfill two functions. It first rounds out the action of the play proper by visually symbolizing harmony achieved after confusion, and it would also act as the final sport of the entire Innocents-day night celebration.

Various other suggestions would also seem to relate the extant version to this specific occasion: an unusual amount of legal terminology that Sidney Thomas uses to support December 28, 1594, as the first performance of The Comedy of Errors,²¹ the appropriateness of Emilia's closing line, “After so long grief, such nativity” (5.1.407); and the fact that it was thought suitable for presentation at the stylish Stuart court for the same festival in 1604.

G. B. Harrison senses a rather condescending touch about the play, “a hint that the author is above this sort of thing but if you challenge him he will show you how cleverly he can do it.”²² On the other hand, we might speculate that a beginning playwright would be flattered that his company was asked to present one of his plays before such a prestigious and learned group and go out of his way to adapt it to their tastes and formal occasion. Harold Goddard calls it “pure theatre,” “a product of Shakespeare's intellect rather than of imagination.”²³ Although we might not agree totally with this assessment, The Comedy of Errors is certainly a remarkably eclectic play, which depends for its comic impact upon knowing the theatrical game the playwright is playing. It is an Elizabethan hybrid. Although still showing the clear signs of its original farcical stock, the play has been crossbred with both the realism and romance of the English stage and the learned and dialectical wit of Renaissance thought. The multileveling of character and narrative tone and the superimposition of various layers of dramatic representation upon the Latin base have produced a Shakespearean palimpsest. Structurally and stylistically, Shakespeare uses Plautus to outdo Plautus, Terence to outdo Terence, and turns a Roman farce into a polished and sophisticated entertainment, which produces a special intellectual relation between performance and audience depending for its effect upon awareness of its conscious art.

Notes

1. On the Compositional Genetics of “The Comedy of Errors” (Urbana, Illinois, 1965), Chapter VI, pp. 73-87.

2. Multiple Plots in English Renaissance Drama (Chicago, 1971), p. 226.

3. The Complete Roman Drama, edited in two volumes with Introduction (New York, 1942), I, xxxi.

4. Op. cit., p. 227.

5. The Two Menaechmuses, trans. by Paul Nixon, Loeb Classical Library (London, 1917), p. 413. All quotations are from this edition.

6. T. W. Baldwin notes that “Dromio's lesson in political geography … was not lost on the Gentlemen of Gray's Inn, who turned it into ‘Purpoole smut’” (op. cit., pp. 3-4).

7. Paradigmatic variations of the verb contaminare were used by Terence to describe the transference of plot elements or characters from one play to another. He defends the practice in various of his Prologues (see, for example, The Lady of Andros and The Self-Tormentor).

8. Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” Comedy, edited by Wylie Sypher (New York, 1956), p. 122.

9. Introduction to The Comedy of Errors (The Arden Shakespeare: London, 1968), pp. xxix-xxx.

10. The term auto-contamination is first used by Gilbert Norwood (The Art of Terence [Oxford, 1923], p. 16). Roy C. Flickinger accepts the validity of the term with regard to Terence's stagecraft although he objects to the example Norwood cites (“The Originality of Terence,” Philological Quarterly, VII [1928], p. 112).

11. Italian Popular Comedy (Oxford, 1934), II, 42.

12. For a summary of Boronski's argument and the various Biblical borrowings, see R. A. Foakes's notes to Act 1, scene 2, and Appendix 1 (pp. 113-15) in The Arden Shakespeare.

13. Shakespeare and His Comedies (London, 1962), pp. 54-55.

14. Op. cit., p. xxxii.

15. The Comedy of Errors, edited by John Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1968), p. 77.

16. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, I (London, 1957), 57.

17. Foakes, op. cit., p. xxxii.

18. The History of the Theatre (New York, 1941), p. 66.

19. Gesta Grayorum, edited by W. W. Greg, Malone Society Reprints, 42 (Oxford, 1914), 20-23.

20. It is tempting to speculate that part of this planned “Delight” was to have been a rehearsal for the Masque of Proteus, which was performed at Court by the gentlemen of Gray's Inn the following Shrovetide. The “Adamantine Rock,” the movable device employed in the masque, would account for the necessity for “Scaffolds,” which the record tells us were “reared to the top of the House, to increase Expectation.”

21. “The Date of The Comedy of Errors,” Shakespeare Quarterly, VII (1956), 380-81.

22. “Shakespearean Comedy,” Stratford Papers on Shakespeare (Toronto, 1962), p. 42.

23. The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago, 1951), I, 26.

Bibliographical Note

This paper owes much to classical scholars concerned with the dramaturgy of Latin comedy, particularly Gilbert Norwood (The Art of Terence [Oxford, 1923]; The Nature of Roman Comedy [Princeton, 1942]) and George C. Duckworth (The Complete Roman Drama [New York, 1942]). Also seminal to the study of relationships between Latin and Renaissance comedy is Appendix A “The Double Plot in Roman Comedy” in Richard Levin's Multiple Plots in English Renaissance Drama (Chicago, 1971).