[In the following essay, Bevington surveys Shakespeare's “creative reconfiguration of classical sources” in The Comedy of Errors with regard to late-sixteenth-century London theater.]

The Comedy of Errors is often seen as a work of Shakespeare's “apprenticeship.”¹ To what extent is it also a play whose dramaturgy can be understood in the theatrical context of its time? One approach does not preclude the other, of course, but the second does focus attention on Shakespeare's apprenticeship in the theater as distinguished from non-theatrical influences upon him—his reading, the rhetorical bent of what must have been his education, his Warwickshire background, his social class, his observations of London life, and other factors that might be seen as influencing his future development. Even here the distinctions are not hard and fast, since the plays he presumably saw and perhaps helped to perform made plentiful use of rhetorical tropes, romance narratives, classical five-act structure, typed characters, and commentary on the current social and economic scene that Shakespeare might also have encountered in his reading. To study Shakespeare's literary sources (some of them dramatic) and to survey his incessant and only partly digested use of classical citations in a play like Titus Andronicus is to acknowledge that he was a great reader. At the same time, to a remarkable extent he could have encountered much of what he needed in the London theater of the late 1580s and early 1590s.

That theater must have come upon him as an astonishing revelation, however much his appetite for theater may have been whetted (and perhaps frustrated) by the mystery cycles and morality plays he presumably encountered in Warwickshire. Moreover, the London theater put before him the materials he needed in dramaturgical form: rhetoric not as pedagogical ingenuity but as living dialogue, Latin not as dusty pedantry of the sort young William doggedly singsongs in The Merry Wives of Windsor but as plot narrative, ideas about decorum and copiousness not as the abstractions of Donatus and Puttenham but as effective ways of moving audiences to laughter or tears, language not as sterile schoolboy demonstrations but as confrontational wordplay. This essay will argue that Shakespeare was never more a “man of the theater” than in his earliest and most formative years.

Fortunately, the theater Shakespeare encountered was not polarized into elite and popular traditions, as it was sometimes in France and Italy (though “mixed genres” also met with success in the Italian Cinquecento).² Most London drama of the 1580s was neither rigorously neoclassical nor predominantly a native theater uninformed by classical precedent. Philip Sidney's genteel animadversions against romantic comedies and hybrid drama that violated all the unities were cheerfully unheeded by dramatists and acting companies that could tell what their audiences wanted, but those same playwrights and actors knew a good thing when they saw it in Senecan horror or in Plautine comedy of outwitting fraudulent figures of authority. Shakespeare's “mixed” genres are an essential feature of his great accomplishment, and they are a product not of his reading so much as of the theatrical expectations he encountered when he came to London.

The point can be made first in relation to the “fable” of The Comedy of Errors and how it is constructed. The play is one of Shakespeare's most regularly plotted works in terms of five-act structure. Its action is ostentatiously limited to the daylight hours of a single day, and to a single location; the Duke allows Egeon “this day” to seek the thousand marks that can rescue him from execution as a hated foreigner in Ephesus (1.1.150),³ and before evening all is reconciled. The regularities of exposition, complication, crisis, and resolution are derived from Shakespeare's main sources, The Menaechmi and Amphitruo of Plautus, augmented in sturdily neoclassical fashion by the combining of two classical texts, by the amplification of one servant into two, and the like. Ariosto was an important guide here, known to Shakespeare especially in George Gascoigne's lively translation of Ariosto's I Suppositi (1509) as Supposes (1566, at the Inns of Court), which Shakespeare was to use in writing The Taming of the Shrew.⁴ Staging requirements are compatible with the familiar Plautine concept of a street scene in front of two or more houses.⁵ A neoclassical street scene in perspective need not have been employed, but it would have been feasible, especially for performances at the Gray's Inn in 1594. Nowhere else does Shakespeare employ such a formally neoclassical structure and concept of staging.

At the same time, romantic plotting in the frame plot of Egeon and his two sons opens up vistas of extensive voyaging over a long period of time, separation, loss, and seemingly miraculous reunion in the time-honored tradition of the Greek romance-writer Heliodorus of Emesa (third century a.d.) and of many a medieval saint's life, following the model of St. Paul's travels in the Acts of the Apostles.⁶ Although Shakespeare contains this plot of wandering and rediscovery in a narrative form that cleverly does not disrupt the classical unities of dramatic presentation, it is the essence of everything that Sidney found objectionable in drama. Shakespeare's direct source is the story of Apollonius of Tyre, as translated out of the French by Lawrence Twine in The Pattern of Painful Adventures (registered in 1576, though no published edition survives prior to 1594-5) or as told earlier by John Gower in his fourteenth-century Confessio Amantis (published as early as 1493 by William Caxton, England's first printer).⁷

Shakespeare thus turned to his reading for the frame plot, but in doing so he had ample precedent on the London stage and in the native English tradition it incorporated.⁸ Romantic plotting of the sort we find in Egeon's tale is plentifully available, for example, in the late fifteenth-century Digby Mary Magdalene, in which the heroine, after her own blessed encounters with Christ, converts the King and Queen of Marseilles to Christianity and encourages them to make a journey to the Holy Land; sailors maneuver a ship into the acting area, land at a rock to rescue its stranded occupant, and much more.⁹ Closer to the time of The Comedy of Errors, in the anonymous Clyomon and Clamydes (c. 1570-83), Clamydes journeys from Suavia to Denmark in pursuit of the hand of the King's daughter and is informed that to win her he must kill the flying serpent in the Forest of Strange Marvels. He subsequently encounters Clyomon, the Danish prince, in Macedon, seeking out glory in the court of the emperor Alexander.¹⁰The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune (1582), perhaps by Anthony Munday, tells of Hermione, son of the banished lord Bomelio, who overcomes numerous obstacles to become worthy of Fidelia, daughter of King Phizantius; Bomelio survives his banishment in the disguise of a hermit and then physician until he too is reconciled to the King. The play's title underscores the oscillations of the plot from amorous hope to threatened disaster until Venus and Fortune as presiding deities arrive at a final accommodation.¹¹ In Robert Greene's Alphonsus King of Aragon (1587-8), the title figure is another son of a dispossessed lord, eager to regain the lost title to Aragon. He disguises himself and joins in the defense of Naples; once he has acquired Aragon, he sets his sights on Constantinople and becomes enamored of the great Turk Amurak's daughter Iphigena. As in Rare Triumphs, Venus is a presiding deity. This Tamburlainian pastiche, loosely based on the history of Alphonsus I of Naples and V of Aragon, 1385-1454, reveals how an adroit commercial entertainer like Greene could infuse chronicle history and heroic drama with the kind of romantic claptrap that showed itself everywhere on the London stage of the 1570s and 80s.

Shakespeare's frame plot in The Comedy of Errors is not close in narrative detail to any of the romantic plays cited here, nor to a host of others one could name, such as George Peele's The Old Wives Tale (c. 1588-1594), Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1589-92) and Orlando Furioso (1588-92) and The Scottish History of James IV (c. 1590-1), George a Greene (1587-93, perhaps by Greene), Fair Em, The Miller's Daughter (c. 1589-91, perhaps by Robert Wilson), and various lost romances like Ariodante and Genevora (1583) and Felix and Philomela (1585). The point rather is that the London theater to which Shakespeare gravitated revelled in romantic plotting and found every imaginable way to incorporate it into other dramatic genres. Shakespeare went to the story of Apollonius of Tyre for his frame material, but his model for the synthesis of romantic adventure with neoclassical farce—a kind of synthesis Ariosto would never have attempted—lay all around him in the stage plays of his generation.

Even in his most neoclassical vein, Shakespeare adapts his plotting to the expectations of his theater. The Comedy of Errors expertly stitches together not one but two Plautine comedies. From The Menaechmi Shakespeare derived the story of twins separated by the fortunes of sea and now united by chance when Menaechmus the Traveler of Syracuse arrives in Epidamnus (or Epidamnum, as Plautus and Shakespeare spell it) and is mistaken by the courtesan Erotium's cook for Menaechmus the Citizen of that town. Although Shakespeare transforms a single servant, Messenio, into two twin servants, and anglicizes the moral atmosphere of the play by enhancing the roles of the wife and her newly invented sister while conversely eliminating the parasite Peniculus and downplaying the function of the courtesan's cook and maid, he retains and indeed augments Plautus's farcically brilliant plot of mistaken identities. To it he adds, from Amphitruo, the business of a husband (Amphityron) locked out of his own house while his wife (Alcmena), inside, receives a lover (Jupiter) in the guise of her husband, while a servant (Mercury) guards the door in the guise of the husband's slave (Sosia). The real Sosia, like Dromio of Ephesus, approaches the door and is so bewildered by Mercury's inventive wit that he begins to wonder who he really is. Again Shakespeare moralizes the situation in conformity with his audience's expectations:¹² the wife Adriana never commits adultery with her disguised visitor. Indeed one can argue that the sister Luciana is provided expressly so that Antipholus of Syracuse's amorous desires can be deflected onto a woman who is free to be his wife. Similarly, the comic business of doorkeeping finds a suitable dramatic function for Dromio of Ephesus, one of the characters in The Comedy of Errors not found in The Menaechmi; arguably, the device of two comic servants mistaken for each other is taken from Amphitruo, rather than being simply a duplication of the situation in The Menaechmi. Shakespeare's conflation of two Plautine comedies is admirably skillful; an audience has no sense of being passed from one narrative to another, for the business of mistaken identities links the two stories together, and the character types of citizen husband and comic servant are so compatible that one can only guess at Shakespeare's thought processes as he wove the two plays together.

Two points can be made here about Shakespeare's response to the theater of the late 1580s and early 90s. The first is that his impulse toward an anglicizing moralization, however much it may or may not have accorded with his own temperament and artistic instincts, is wholly in accord with the practices of dramatists like Greene, Peele, Wilson, and the rest. Greene's Margaret of Fressingfield, in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, is invincibly decent and English. She affirms her loyalty to her rural companions and maneuvers her way past the ardent advances of the crown prince of England, choosing instead to marry the Earl of Lincoln in a double ring ceremony with that of the Prince and his Spanish bride. The improbabilities of such a rank-levelling match underscore the extent to which Greene knew how to cater to pipe-dreams of his spectators. Greene's heroines are generally cut from the same cloth, as in James IV and George a Greene. Somehow they manage to be wholesomely appealing and devoid of prudishness even while insisting that erotic love and marriage are to be indissolubly linked. Not surprisingly, the instances we find in Greene focus on women as they prepare to marry, as though in direct response to the Plautine typing of the courtesan.

Shakespeare's adaptation of Greene's model in Adriana and Luciana is thus part of a theatrical trend, one to which other dramatists contributed as well. The title character in Fair Em, The Miller's Daughter (1589-91) and the Countess of Salisbury in Edward III (c. 1590-95) provide further examples. In the boys' more exclusive and courtly private theater, the cult of Elizabeth (complicated by male resentment of her authority) led to many invocations of Diana and of chaste propriety, as in John Lyly's Gallathea (1584-8). The linking of erotic love and marriage in English popular drama and in much nondramatic literature (such as Spenser's Epithalamion) reflected concerns of the English church as it undertook to strengthen and deepen the mutual responsibilities of marriage. Shakespeare's treatment of love and marriage, like Greene's, attempts to come to terms with the misogyny that is so characteristic of Lyly and of many male courtiers who served restively under the rule of a female monarch.¹³

The second point about Shakespeare's astute mingling of his sources and plots in The Comedy of Errors is that it conforms to theatrical fashions in multiple plotting that Shakespeare plentifully encountered when he first came to London. Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay weaves together the story of a scholarly friar-magician with that of the wooing of Margaret of Fressingfield, and shows how the plots can be linked by giving Prince Edward a function in both. The Comedy of Errors is more decorously neoclassical, but it does achieve its linkage of the Menaechmi and the Amphitruo plots in a similar fashion, by locating Antipholus of Ephesus and the two Dromios in two plots that intersect when Antipholus is locked out of his house. Shakespeare uses this kind of intersection often, as in The Taming of the Shrew, where Kate and Bianca as sisters form the centers respectively of the taming and the Supposes plot, or A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which Bottom is both the lover of the Queen of Fairies and the leading thespian of the band that performs in Theseus's presence, or Much Ado about Nothing, where Hero and Beatrice as cousins and Claudio and Benedick as fellow officers bring together the two main plots of that play. Similar linkages occur earlier and were thus potential models for Shakespeare, as in Doctor Faustus (c. 1589), in which Faustus himself, his servant Wagner, and Mephistopheles all interact with characters in the raucous scenes of “low” comedy, or Henry Porter's The Two Angry Women of Abingdon (c. 1585-9), with its extensive antithetical balancing of the tribulations of two neighborly families and their sons, Frank Goursey and Philip Barnes.

Characterization in The Comedy of Errors certainly reveals the intensity of Shakespeare's reading in Plautus and in neoclassical comedy. Clever servants and their masters are at the center of the plot.¹⁴ Yet the cast is very English, for all the play's being set in Ephesus, and manifests a concept of character that is compatible with the London stage of the late 1580s and early 90s. The parasite is gone, and the courtesan is given a reduced role and retinue. The conventional doctor, Medicus, becomes the zany Pinch, a schoolmaster and a conjurer whose attempts to exorcise Satan from Antipholus of Ephesus add hilariously to the play's fascination with magic, dreaming, and witchcraft (see 4.3.77, for example). Whereas The Menaechmi refers to a goldsmith, to whom the courtesan's maid carries a chain for mending, Shakespeare brings on a goldsmith named Angelo, presenting him as one who might well belong to the London guild of goldsmiths. Three merchants, one named Balthasar, augment the play's mercantile and bourgeois ambience. An officer and a messenger supplement the atmosphere of civic officialdom. Luce is a brilliant translation into the English domestic household of the courtesan's maid and cook. Duke Solinus, Egeon, and his wife the Abbess Emilia come from a world apart from those worlds created by Plautus, even if Plautus, Terence, and Menander rely, as does Shakespeare, on theatrical concepts of role-playing. And, as we have seen, Adriana and especially Luciana are more English than Roman in their views on domestic harmony. On balance, most of the play's characters are not essentially Plautine. They are, on the other hand, highly recognizable in terms of London's theatrical environment.

Shakespeare's concept of characterization admirably fits his anglicizing of the comedy. The play's characters are defined by their roles, in the social structure and in the family. Antipholus of Ephesus is a householder, a patriarch, a husband, a master of servants, a brother, a commercial trader, a worthy citizen of the town.¹⁵ All that he does can be explained in terms of the decorums and responsibilities of these roles; comedy arises out the conflicting demands of these roles generated by mistaken identities. We laugh to see a master shut out of his own house, denied entrance by his own servant. We laugh to see a servant told that he may not enter the house because it is already provided with servants. The comedy of mistaken identity depends upon the concept of role. The recurring conundrum of this play, nightmarish to its participants and hilarious to us, is one of misplaced identity in which a character is led to wonder if he has any role and hence any identity.¹⁶

Shakespeare shows later how brilliantly he can treat the subject tragically, as when King Lear is denied in succession his roles as king, father, master, judge, and sane human being. Here in The Comedy of Errors Shakespeare explores the dark potentials of illusion and misrepresentation as well;¹⁷ yet the theme remains comic in that it questions but ultimately does not disrupt identity. The play's resolution is to restore to Antipholus of Ephesus his wife, his brother, his loyal servant, his commercial integrity, and his place in the polis as a good subject of the Duke. Other less comfortable roles, like that of patronizing the local courtesan, assume the character of the midsummer madness that has seized for a time the citizens of Ephesus, and that has been discarded now that sanity and status are restored. So too with Antipholus's brother, whose role of seeker is ultimately confirmed; with the servants, who at the last see in each other as in a mirror the portrait of one who is fulfilled by being a servant; with the women, who recover or discover their identities as loyal and patient wives; and even with Luce, the “fat friend” who is now to be Dromio of Ephesus's wife and the other Dromio's sister-in-law (5.1.415-7).

Examples of this comic treatment of role-playing are not hard to find in Shakespeare's contemporary theater. Luce's below-stairs flirtations with the Dromios, parodying the quarrels and misunderstandings of their social betters, are not unlike the bantering that goes on in Lyly's Endymion (1588), for example, between the pages Dares and Simias and the maids-in-waiting Scintilla and Favilla, or between the pages Criticus and Molus and the ladies of Sappho's court in Sappho and Phao (1584). The invention of Luciana gives to Shakespeare the opportunity for a debate between two sisters as to how women should respond to marital infidelity. The plot of mistaken identities allows the audience to explore vicariously a fantasy of infidelity as it watches Adriana flirt with her husband's twin brother (as in many similar fantasies about making love to twins), and yet Adriana does all this unknowingly; the device explores disloyalty as a kind of reciprocity for Antipholus of Ephesus's waywardness without in fact making Adriana guilty of anything. The portrayal is not deeply motivated in psychological terms, but is instead a farcical comic manipulation of Adriana's conventional roles as shrew and beleaguered wife.¹⁸ None of this is in Plautus, but it does resemble, for example, the comic conflict in Porter's The Two Angry Women of Abingdon, where the amity between two neighborly women, Mrs. Goursey and Mrs. Barnes, is tested by Mrs. Barnes's fear that Mrs. Goursey is more interested than she should be in Mr. Barnes. When Mr. Barnes tells his wife to rule her tongue and be hospitable to their friend, she turns on him angrily, prompting Mrs. Goursey to flare up at her erstwhile friend. The men, seeing they are both saddled with curst wives, resolve to patch things up if they can, but things are not made any better when Mr. Barnes scolds his wife for being at fault in the quarrel. His role-conscious criticism is that she has violated rules of neighborliness out of womanly willfulness. She for her part sees her role as that of the justly jealous wife. The strife between the families worsens until finally a Justice of the Peace, Sir Ralph, plays the role of Duke Solinus (or Duke Escalus in Romeo and Juliet) in urging all to a peace.

The suddenness and arbitrariness of falling into a complicated and sometimes guilty love relationship, destined to become a hallmark of Shakespearean romantic comedy, is not absent from the concept of character in The Comedy of Errors, especially in the wooing of Luciana by Antipholus of Syracuse and parodically in the below-stairs antics of Luce and the Dromios. Plautus, in his Amphitruo and The Menaechmi, shows little interest in the phenomenon (though it does surface elsewhere in New Comedy, especially in Terence). Shakespeare's English theatrical resources, on the other hand, were rich in opportunities, as found also in the narrative materials on which the plays were based. Fair Em gives us William the Conqueror falling in love with the mere picture of Blanch, daughter of Sweyn, King of Denmark, much as King Henry VI is to do when he sees a picture of Margaret of Anjou in 1 Henry VI. Blanch falls for William at once when he comes to Denmark, even though he is in disguise. Meantime, Mandville, a gentleman of Manchester, berates himself for falling in love with a seeming miller's daughter, Em, but is unable to control his own feelings of rivalry with Trotter, the comical servant who seems more socially suited to be Em's suitor until her father is revealed to be the disguised Sir Thomas Goddard, in hiding in the wake of the Norman Conquest. In Anthony Munday's John a Kent and John a Cumber (c. 1587-90), the Prince of South Wales (Sir Griffin Meriddock) and Lord Geoffrey Powis enlist the help of a Welsh magician, John a Kent, to abduct Llwellen's daughter Sidanen and the Earl of Chester's daughter Marian from arranged and loveless marriages. Examples could easily be multiplied, from Greene's James the Fourth, where the King falls in love with the virtuous Ida in betrayal of his vows to Dorothea, daughter of the King of England, and is eventually recalled to his duty; or John of Bordeaux (1590-94), perhaps by Greene and revised by Henry Chettle, in which the Emperor's son Ferdinand falls guiltily in love with Rossalin, the wife of the title figure; or Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Mucedorus (1588-98), and a host of other contemporary plays.

Shakespeare's dialogue in The Comedy of Errors, as Robert Y. Turner has shown,¹⁹ is fashioned out of the rhetorical tropes that he learned in school, but it is also noteworthy that Shakespeare's “apprenticeship” in this regard points to many examples from his dramatic contemporaries and immediate predecessors. John Lyly above all other dramatists showed how the pedagogical and theatrical could be brilliantly combined by putting on stage juvenile actors and inviting them to capitalize on their familiarity with rhetorical word games. Sir Tophas in Endymion, afflicted by love melancholy, complains to his page Epiton that he is “but three quarters of a noun substantive” and is little more than a “noun adjective” because he cannot “stand without another,” that is, cannot survive without Dipsas's love (3.3.16-19).²⁰ His lame witticism plays on the familiar Renaissance definition of a noun as enunciated in Lily and Colet's famous A Short Introduction of Grammar, sig, A5: “A noun is the name of a thing, that may be seen, felt, heard, or understande[d],” and also on that same book's definition of a noun substantive, or what we would call simply an adjective (as in “a black coat,” where black is abstractly a nominative for a certain color but here used to modify “coat”): “A noun adjective is that cannot stand by itself, but requireth to be joined with another word.” Tophas's “stand” thus comes to mean (a) “stand alone in a sentence,” (b) “survive,” and (c) “be erect.”

Argumentation and use of syllogism come in for a fair amount of fun in Lyly, as in Sappho and Phao, where the pages Criticus and Molus end their first scene of wordplay in the following exchange:

CRITICUS.
Soft, scholaris, I deny your argument.
MOLUS.
Why, it is no argument.
CRITICUS.
Then I deny it because it is no argument.

(1.3.44-6)

To Molus's insistence he was not intending to use syllogistic argument in what he has just been talking about, Criticus replies in effect that if it was not syllogistically constructed then it was invalid. Marlowe or his collaborator exploits a similar jest when Dr. Faustus's cheeky servant Wagner uses schoolboy choplogic to rebuke the Doctor's two scholarly friends for their inquiries into the Doctor's whereabouts (Doctor Faustus, 1.2).

This pattern of adolescent wit combat onstage gave Shakespeare what he needed to write the dialogue of the Syracusan Dromio when he inquires of his master why he has been beaten:

S. Antipholus.
Shall I tell you why?
S. Dromio.
Ay, sir, and wherefore; for they say every why hath a wherefore.
S. Antipholus.
“Why,” first—for flouting me; and then “wherefore”—for urging it the second time to me.
S. Dromio.
Was there ever any man thus beaten out of season,
When in the why and the wherefore is neither rhyme nor reason?

(2.2.42-8)

The wit resides in the tension between logic and violence, between the rationality that ought to be accessible through reasoning and the seeming inexplicability to Dromio of what is happening to him. Much the same kind of humor resides in Dromio's syllogistic attempt to deny his master's proposition that “There's a time for all things” through appeal to the bald pate of Father Time and to the impossibility of recovering hair once lost to natural baldness (2.2.64-106); the language of comic exchange here is rife with logical signposts such as “Your reason?” and “By what rule?” and “For what reason?” The two Dromios' summing up of the dubious attractions of Luce is structured like a secular catechism, with questions like “What claims lays she to thee?” and “What complexion is she of?” and “Where Scotland?”

As Turner observes, the verbal exchanges take various forms of word games, twisting a central word from the opponent's statement into a new context in an act of verbal power, repeating and then reversing the preceding statement, turning a literal statement into a metaphorical one, engaging in riddle to prove the impossible (as when time is “proven” to go backwards at 4.2.53-5), and the like. Surprisingly, perhaps, we find essentially the same verbal pattern of wit combat in an early “serious” play like 1 Henry VI.²¹ This was an essential means through which Shakespeare learned to solve the problem of dialogue, in its pacing and development of character. He undoubtedly brought to the task his schoolboy training in rhetoric; he also lived and breathed it in the theater he saw in London.

Staging, finally, is an aspect of The Comedy of Errors over which contemporary theatrical practice has considerable influence, despite the play's adherence to neoclassical precedent. Even if the play seems to call for the traditional street scene flanked by domus, Shakespeare is entirely comfortable with an “open” scene that allows the actors' location to be fluid and unspecific. Act 3 scene 2, for example, begins with a domestic scene that plausibly belongs indoors at the house of Antipholus of Ephesus. Luciana is being wooed by the person she takes to be her own sister's husband, though we know him to be Antipholus of Syracuse. The conversation is intimate and domestic, like other scenes seemingly located in the house, especially the conversation of the two sisters about marital duty in 2.2 and their later worried consultation as to what they ought to do about Antipholus of Ephesus's seeming fascination for his sister-in-law in 4.2. Although Shakespeare provides occasional directional remarks that are consistent with a location on the street in front of the house (“Then, gentle brother, get you in again,” 3.2.25, “I'll fetch my sister, to get her good will,” 3.2.70, “Go fetch it [the money to redeem Antipholus], sister,” 4.2.47), these exhortations are also plausible if one imagines an interior location from which characters depart into other rooms to find someone or something. Yet by the end of 3.2 we certainly must imagine the scene to be outdoors, since the goldsmith Angelo shows up unannounced with the chain that has been ordered. A scene that begins in domestic intimacy ends in vigorous outdoor farcical action.

John Lyly offers apt illustrations of this kind of fluidity amid a set calling for certain fixed symbolic locales, ambiguously neoclassical and native English. In Sappho and Phao, for instance, two “houses,” antithetically opposed to represent the cave of Sibylla and the bedchamber of Sappho, are separated by a neutral playing space that can varyingly represent Phao's ferry location and Sappho's court, all comprising Syracuse and its environs. Phao need only make a short symbolic journey across the open stage to arrive at Sybilla's cave; pages and court ladies can converse in the open, allowing us to understand that they are going to see Phao at his oarsman's location or are in the vicinity of the court. Cave and bedchamber open onto the stage so that the speakers need not be hidden within some stage structure. Neutral stage space foreshortens distance and signals the metaphorical import of various journeys.²² Other locations in Syracuse are invoked as offstage, much as The Comedy of Errors alludes repeatedly to such inns as the Centaur (1.2.9), the Tiger (3.1.95), and the Porcupine or Porpentine (3.2.166). (The Phoenix, located at Antipholus's house, 1.2.75, is presumably associated with one stage door; the Porcupine, the dwelling of the Courtesan, need not require any such fixed sense of locale, though we do need one door to represent the Abbey for the moment of reversal in 5.1 when the Abbess enters with Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse. None of these requires any stage structure.)²³ Many of these tricks of stage illusion are ambivalently neoclassical and indigenous. Lyly was the theatrical genius preeminently able to synthesize the two in his plays designed for Blackfriars (like Sappho and Phao and Campaspe, both in 1584) or for the location known as “Paul's” (Gallathea and Endymion, both first performed in 1588), with the requirements of Whitehall and other royal palaces also in mind. It is perhaps not coincidental that The Comedy of Errors, so akin to Lyly in staging method, was acted at the Inns of Court in 1594. (Love's Labor's Lost, often justly called Shakespeare's most Lylyan play because of its juvenile wit combat, can similarly be antithetically staged in such a way as to juxtapose the ladies' tent with the gathering-place of Navarre and his fellow lords, all within the purviews of Navarre's park.)

The central action of denying Antipholus of Ephesus his own house, derived from Plautus's Amphitruo, nicely demonstrates how Shakespeare, at the Inns of Court and probably in a public theater as well, adapts an ancient Roman script lacking authentic stage directions to the practicalities of his stage or stages.²⁴ The very likelihood of multiple performance in varying locations and before audiences of differing social makeup obligated Shakespeare to be adaptable, just as Lyly, Marlowe, and others learned to be versatile. As Act 3 scene 1 commences, Adriana bids her seeming husband in to “dine above” (2.2.206), presumably on the second floor above Antipholus's shop. They presumably exeunt into the tiring house, though the Folio text gives no stage direction to separate 2.2 from what is plainly marked as “Actus Tertius. Scena Prima.” The absence of an exeunt may encourage us to speculate that Dromio of Syracuse remains visible somewhere onstage as porter, and that the scene is in effect continuous. Certainly the action works well if Antipholus of Ephesus and his Dromio then approach the stage door, knock, and are answered by Dromio of Syracuse from some location where he is visible and audible to the audience. The expedient of erecting some door onstage seems unnecessary and unlikely in the fast-paced Elizabethan theater. Alternatively, Dromio of Syracuse could remain offstage behind the stage door, bellowing his lines.

In any event, it seems likely that Luce, who is directed to “enter” at 3.1.47.1, does so above, by way of signaling that she is within the house in the upstairs dining room with Antipholus of Syracuse and with her mistress, the latter being similarly directed to “enter” at line 60.1.²⁵ Both women might well then be easily seen and heard by the audience and yet be understood to be invisible to those at the door. These devices are not unlike those used by Marlowe, for example, in The Jew of Malta (c. 1589-90), when Abigail throws down her father's treasure to him at his house that has been converted to a nunnery, or Doctor Faustus, in which the protagonist is first seen “in his study” (A-text) and yet can move beyond any constricted sense of location without a scene break, or later in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, where in one remarkable scene (3.5) Juliet is able to bid a tearful farewell to Romeo at her “window” in the upper acting gallery and then exit above to join her mother on the main stage, with no scene break and seemingly without her having left her chambers.

Staging thus expresses visually what is so evident throughout The Comedy of Errors: Shakespeare's responsiveness to his immediate theatrical environment in every aspect of his modifying his classical sources. At the same time, the play shows the daring of his achievement.²⁶ Far from being the imitative “apprenticeship” exercise as it has been viewed by so many critics, this early work shows how a creative reconfiguration of classical sources in the rich environment of the contemporary London theater could move Shakespeare rapidly in many directions that his subsequent work would take.

Notes

1. Robert Y. Turner, Shakespeare's Apprenticeship (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1974). This is a book worth rediscovering; I am indebted to it for many insights. See also T. W. Baldwin's William Shakespeare's Small Latine & Lesse Greek, 2 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), and E. C. Pettet, Shakespeare and the Romance Tradition (London: Staples, 1949).

2. Louise Clubb, “Italian Comedy and The Comedy of Errors,” Comparative Literature, 19 (1967), 240-51.

3. Textual citations are from David Bevington, ed., The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

4. Clubb, “Italian Comedy and The Comedy of Errors,” 240-51, argues for Italian influence on English Renaissance comedy in terms of increasing complication, doubling of characters, didactic discourse on moral topics, and still more, pointing to Cristoforo Castellati and Curzio Gonzaga, among others, besides Ariosto. See also K. M. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, II (Oxford, 1934), pp. 362-3 and 352 ff.

5. See note 20 below, and accompanying text, on the staging of the play and on the lack of necessity for a specific domus labelled the Porcupine or Porpentine.

6. Gāmini Salgādo, “‘Time's Deformed Hand’: Sequence, Consequence, and Inconsequence in The Comedy of Errors,” Shakespeare Survey, 25 (1972), 81-91, aptly contrasts the two different aspects of time that govern the frame plot and the play proper. See also C. L. Barber, “Shakespearian Comedy in The Comedy of Errors,” College English, 25 (1963-4), 493-7, who sees Shakespeare's “sense of life and art” asserting itself in the way the play combines “Gower's narrative with Roman dramatic form,” merging a narrative of reunion over long distances and time with one of restoration of domestic harmony.

7. See T. W. Baldwin, On the Compositional Genetics of The Comedy of Errors (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965). A. C. Hamilton, The Early Shakespeare (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1967), makes a case for Shakespeare's use also of Ovid's Metamorphoses. John Dover Wilson, ed., The Comedy of Errors, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 106, points out that the old miracle and morality plays come into use, especially in Dromio of Syracuse's ravings about Tartar Limbo and a devil who “carries pour souls to hell” (4.2.32-40).

8. Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), p. 30, speculates on Shakespeare's choosing romantic plots for his early comedies because of the plays he had seen as a boy. He points out further (pp. 64-5) that Shakespeare could have found in The Golden Legend the stories of St. Clement and St. Eustace, with their narratives of the extraordinary reunion of twin brothers.

9. Salingar discusses Mary Magdalene on p. 68.

10. Salingar, pp. 33-5 and 69-71. His discussion of Common Conditions on pp. 35-7 is also pertinent.

11. Salingar, pp. 37-8.

12. See Alfred Harbage, As They Liked It (New York, 1947). The cleaning up of New Comedic action was everywhere characteristic of English appropriation of Italianate neoclassical drama, as observed by Salingar, passim, T. W. Baldwin, Compositional Genetics, Bruce Smith, Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage 1500-1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), and others.

13. Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Louis A. Montrose, “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” Representations, 2 (1983), 61-94, rpt. in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 31-64; and Montrose, “A Kingdom of Shadows,” The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576-1649, ed. David L. Smith, Richard Strier, and David Bevington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 68-86. See also Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), and Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989).

14. Salingar, pp. 78-9, argues cogently that English imitations of Plautus and Terence were generally farces of trickery, as in Ralph Roister Doister and Gammer Gurton's Needle from the 1550s down through Lyly's Mother Bombie (c. 1589).

15. Turner, Shakespeare's Apprenticeship, pp. 156-7, and Thomas F. Van Laan, Role-Playing in Shakespeare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978).

16. On loss of identity, see Harold F. Brooks, “Themes and Structure in The Comedy of Errors,” Early Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 3 (London, 1961), pp. 55-71, and Barbara Freedman, “Egeon's Debt: Self-Division and Self-Redemption in The Comedy of Errors,” English Literary Renaissance, 19 (1980), 360-83.

17. Harry Levin, “Two Comedies of Errors,” Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 128-50.

18. Charles Brooks, “Shakespeare's Romantic Shrews,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 11 (1960), 351-6, argues for a psychological reading of shrewishness in this play; but see Turner, Shakespeare's Apprenticeship, pp. 146-62, and E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Early Comedies (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966), pp. 46-72.

19. Turner, Shakespeare's Apprenticeship, pp. 11-27 and 201-14.

20. John Lyly, Endymion, ed. David Bevington, The Revels Plays (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1996).

21. Turner, Shakespeare's Apprenticeship, pp. 12-27, 204-7.

22. John Lyly, Campaspe and Sappho and Phao, ed. George K. Hunter and David Bevington, The Revels Plays (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1991), pp. 184-8.

23. E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930), I.307, is not alone in supposing that three, not two, houses are represented at the back of the stage: the Priory, the Courtesan's house at the sign of the Porcupine or Porpentine, and, in the center, the house of Antipholus of Ephesus at the sign of the Phoenix. Indeed, a stage direction at 4.1.131-2 does specify that Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus enter “from the Courtesan's.” But since the Courtesan herself is not present at this moment, and appears only in the crowd scene of Act 5, no special door need be required at 4.1.131-2; the stage direction may indicate simply that the audience is to understand that Antipholus and Dromio have just come from the Courtesan's and that Antipholus has left there the chain he originally intended for his wife. The dialogue makes no mention of the Courtesan's, so that the audience is given no apparent way of making a visual connection unless we posit a signboard. Hamilton, The Early Shakespeare, p. 103, accepts Chambers's account without argument. R. A. Foakes, ed., The Comedy of Errors, Arden Shakespeare (London, 1962), pp. xxxii-xxxv and xxxix, discusses the staging in some detail.

24. Robert Miola, to whom I am indebted for a thorough and learned reading of an earlier draft of this essay, points out to me that the lockout scene of the Amphitruo was garbled in the surviving texts and was reconstructed in erudite notes in Latin editions of Plautus.

25. G. R. Elliott, “Weirdness in The Comedy of Errors,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 9 (1939-40), 95-106, discusses this scene thematically in terms of its contrasts between love and pathos on the one hand and farcical rage and frustration on the other. Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London: Methuen, 1974), pp. 1-19, argues similarly in this scene and in the play for a contrast between mundane materiality versus magic and danger. The two brothers are similarly polarized: one is showered with gifts, women, and money, while the other is locked out of his house and later tied up as a lunatic.

26. Stanley Wells, ed., The Comedy of Errors (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972).