SOURCE: Crewe, Jonathan V. “God or the Good Physician: The Rational Playwright in The Comedy of Errors.” Genre 15, nos. 1-2 (spring-summer 1982): 203-23.

[In the following essay, Crewe examines two idealizations of the playwright—one divinely omniscient, one the “good physician”—implied in The Comedy of Errors and explores themes related to these designations.]

In the ensuing discussion I will be concerned with the playwright of The Comedy of Errors. I will, that is to say, consider “the playwright” implied in the play rather than the William Shakespeare whom we believe on good authority to have written The Comedy of Errors. This “playwright” is not the real-life author but the idealized figure whose nature and activity the play itself implies. The “rationality” of this playwright is not, I would suggest, to be taken for granted—on the familiar if radically untenable assumption, for example, that Shakespeare “always knows what he is doing”—but is itself at stake in the play. The achievement of a rationale for The Comedy of Errors, and thus of a rational identity for the playwright, requires both that the arbitrariness of the play's inherited conventions and the farcical character of the comedy of mistaken identity in some measure be redeemed. I will suggest that in the process of “redeeming” the play, and thus himself, the playwright assumes no fixed identity, but rather hesitates between two identities, that of God and that of the Good Physician.

The implied playwright of The Comedy of Errors, then, manifests himself either as a benevolent deity, omniscient and omnipotent, whose good will anticipates the entire course of the play, or as a “good physician,” working through comic conventions to purge melancholy, impart self-knowledge, and exorcise psychic demons. Upon this question of identity (this either/or) much else depends: the nature of error, the nature of comedy, and the nature of the comic resolution. Moreover, the process of rationalization and of identity-formation entailed in The Comedy of Errors may be taken to exemplify the problematic of Shakespearean comedy, at least in one of its major aspects.

The “divinity” of the playwright in The Comedy is implied in several quite obvious ways. It is implied by the perfect comic form of the play insofar as that form necessitates a supreme controlling presence. Perhaps it is also implied in the “superhuman” virtuosity with which the original doubles of Plautine comedy are redoubled, thus revealing itself in a mode of superior skill and control. It is implied by the existence of an omniscient perspective on the action, a perspective that the audience is allowed to share up to the final moments and that confers upon the audience a happy invulnerability to the “errors” by which those onstage are plagued. Only within such a perspective is it possible to characterize as errors—that is to say, as wholly illusory—the predicaments of those onstage. The “divinity” of the playwright is ultimately revealed rather than implied in the grand finale, in which Emilia is sprung in the guise of the Abbess, in which full clarification is achieved, and in which an obviously predetermined restoration of benign order is accomplished.

The very nature of the Elizabethan theatre is exploited to establish the “divinity” of the playwright. Physically, that theatre offers a privileged (error-free) perspective on the action, not merely because the audience remains apart from—often literally above—the action, but because spectatorship, as opposed to ritual participation, is institutionalized in the theatre. Its being so enters continuously, as we know, into Shakespeare's calculations as a playwright; a “gap” exists to be exploited, to be reinscribed within the plays, and perhaps ideally to be reduced. One immediately relevant consequence of the audience's separation and privileged perspective is that onstage action may become a kind of pseudo-action, arising from the perceived error of the characters rather than from true necessity or from any established efficacy of action. Indeed, onstage action may become virtually coextensive with “error” or “erring” (errare) from the undeceived vantage-point of the onlooker. If such “erroneous” action may after all be traced back to the determining will of the playwright rather than to the characters' “free will,” a question remains as to what the characters do will in and through their actions. A contradiction may emerge within the same action between the will of a divinity shaping the end and the wilful rough-hewing of the putatively autonomous characters.

It may seem as if I have by now fully anticipated my own argument, yet the divinity of the playwright remains to be considered under further aspects, and for the present I am concerned to establish little more about The Comedy of Errors than readers of the play would normally acknowledge. Both the superior knowledge of the audience and the absolute foreknowledge of the playwright reduce to near-zero the stakes that appear to the puppet-characters in The Comedy of Errors to be bound up in their actions. Moreover, the playwright's ability to manipulate and control appearances in the professional theatre—an ability of which even the privileged spectators ultimately become victims—confers on him a quasi-divinity that is exploited to the hilt in The Comedy of Errors. The masterful control of the play (especially when it seems to the characters that everything is out of control), together with the coup de théâtre of the ending, establishes the playwright as a figure of “divine” omnipotence.

Stated in these terms, the presence of a “divine” playwright in The Comedy of Errors would probably be acknowledged by most readers. Indeed, the fact may seem obvious, and may constitute one ground of objection to the play. The reduction of the human predicaments in the play—which include claustrophobic bondage, lovelessness, alienation, delusion and despair—to a series of mere errors may seem facile if not heartless, conferring on the play the farcical character that has often been attributed to it. Indeed, the transformation of these predicaments into humorous spectacle for an invulnerable audience may seem to make the theatre a version of Bedlam, while the playwright's “divinity” will become not only that of a manipulative charlatan but of a showman in the worst sense. Of course, such considerations as these are not foreign to Shakespeare. Everyone knows that he reverts to the strict form of classical comedy only in The Tempest, in which the nature of the controlling divinity is visibly exposed, humanized and called to account in the figure of Prospero. (While Trinculo and Stephano devise a scheme to exhibit the monster Caliban, Prospero ultimately acknowledges that “thing of darkness” as his own and thus acknowledges his own implication in the nature of Caliban.) In the long interim separating The Comedy of Errors from The Tempest, the “divine” powers and privileges of the playwright are never reasserted in full measure, nor is the audience again allowed the degree of invulnerability it enjoys in The Comedy of Errors. Indeed, the dethroning and unmasking of any quasi-divinity is relentlessly effected throughout the Shakespearean canon, a fact that accounts as much as anything does for the “humanity” of Shakespeare.¹

In The Comedy of Errors, the divinity of the playwright is upheld. This is not to say that it is blindly upheld, but rather that it is consciously maintained throughout the play. Although the nature of this “divinity” is somewhat humorously exposed in the conjuror's finale, a degree of seriousness can be retained if the divinity of the playwright can be conceived as derivative from, or analagous to, true divinity.² This is not just a matter of the playwright's being able to “stand for” the divine being. The phrase “the divinity of the playwright” may ambiguously refer to both the identity and the doctrine, so to speak, of the playwright. In Shakespeare's vocabulary, as well as our own, “divinity” refers not only to the divine being but also to the system of thought, belief and observance arising from the assumed presence of a divine being. In anything but an inconceivably primitive context the two forms of “divinity” are interdependent, and if the divine nature of the playwright is to be more than a trivial conceit, it must be located within a systematic divinity.

This I take to be the case in The Comedy of Errors. Within the play's “divinity” an at least quasi-divine conception of the playwright remains tenable. It does so because it need entail neither hubristic presumption nor a theatrical travesty of divine powers as long as it relies on the possible analogy between a true divinity and a divinity of the theatre. The role of the comic dramatist in particular may be constituted and justified by analogy with the divine, since analogy may without sacrificing resemblence also acknowledge the difference between small things and great. Indeed, the playwright may feel himself bound to this analogy if his work is to justify itself at any level other than that of pure farce or ignoble showmanship. I would suggest that it is not so much divine presumption as this peculiar divine necessity that informs The Comedy. If the play nevertheless remains precariously close to farce (as well as being somewhat “un-Shakespearean”), perhaps it is because the analogy upon which the quasi-divine status of the playwright depends is always questionable, and perhaps unduly optimistic. Trusting to analogy becomes itself the subject of an extensive Shakespearean critique, while a possible alternative to this analogical conception of the playwright is, as I have suggested, also present in The Comedy of Errors.

What is now necessary is a closer consideration of the “divinity” of the playwright. To begin with a significant deduction, the divine powers of the playwright, however extensive, stop short of any original act of creation. At the simplest level this means only that the playwright reworks existing dramatic forms and character stereotypes rather than creating forms and characters of his own. No matter how fully stock situations and characters are developed and refined, no matter how ingeniously plot-structure is complicated, and no matter how many simple forms are combined to produce the final synthesis of the play, the act of creation is always pre-empted, and the divinity of the playwright will thus always be of an inferior order. This fact is advertised rather than concealed in The Comedy of Errors. The appreciation of the play may paradoxically be heightened by this exposure, since it will facilitate recognition of the humanizing and transforming powers of a master playwright reworking familiar material. The spectator who knows that The Comedy is “unoriginal” may indeed appreciate it more justly than one who does not, while the complicated virtuosity of the transformation will supply the basis for a sophisticated appreciation of the play.

At the level of the playwright's craft, then, the presumption of creativity can and must be foregone, yet the “divinity” of the play requires that both an original act and state of creation be conceived. In The Comedy of Errors, various traces or “evidences” of this original state remain. If these evidences point to the original state of the play before it has been reworked, they even more importantly point to a prior, mythical state of creation, preceding and pre-empting the mere craft of the pagan dramatist. In other words, the play contains evidence of what came before it.

At one level this prehistory is simply the history that the characters expound in the opening scenes. At another level, what comes “before” The Comedy of Errors is the old play that the playwright reworks. At yet another level, what comes first is an original act and state of creation from which the play lies at an infinite distance. All these questions of priority need not concern the spectators, yet they must concern the playwright. Or, to put it differently, the extent to which they do concern the playwright will affect his own conception of his role as well as the nature of the play he produces. Both will depend less on his own “originality” than on his consciousness of origins. It therefore becomes possible that the playwright of the Menaechmi, while enjoying legitimate temporal priority over the playwright of The Comedy of Errors, may nevertheless have had a more limited view of his own material (or of its origins) than that available to his successor. As a result, the playwright of the Menaechmi may have been subject to forms of error (particularly short-sightedness) akin to those of his characters. Given an extended ontological perspective, it may become possible for the Elizabethan playwright to realize what is only implicit in the Roman comedy of twins, and also to attempt a fuller—even a definitive—rationalization of Plautine comedy. That, it appears to me, is what Shakespeare attempts in The Comedy of Errors on the basis of his own “divinity.”

It would be premature to call this divinity Christian. In Milton's poetry, for example, a comparable superiority of perspective is consistently rationalized as the outcome of Christian revelation that literally makes all the difference. That revelation opens up a complete perspective on the history of creation and at the same time secures the applied logic and aesthetics of Christian belief. But for Shakespeare, and especially for the playwright of The Comedy of Errors, the basis of such an assumed superiority remains problematical. The divinity of the playwright originates in the theater, and its ultimate justification remains in doubt.

It is true that a Christian context is implicit in the play, one well-known peculiarity of which is its reliance on St. Paul's letter to the Ephesians on the subject of love, marriage, and the proper roles of the sexes. The play also apparently incorporates some material from Acts of the Apostles in which Ephesus is described as a place in which “curious arts” and dubious magic are practiced.³ Such allusions establish a Christian outlook within the play. They do not however make The Comedy of Errors a “Christian play” (i.e., a morality play), and indeed it is one of the major errors of those onstage to believe that in Ephesus they are in the presence of evil charlatans, black magicians and demonic deceptions.⁴ What they cannot “see,” as the audience may, is the benign and healing theatricality that is shaping their ends. They are also blind to the existence of a benign stage deity that controls the entire action. We cannot therefore say that a Pauline or even dogmatically Christian divinity prevails in The Comedy of Errors, although it may be suggested that a certain logic, conditioned by Christian history and habits of belief, governs the play. This logic also sustains the analogy between the divinity of the playwright and a true divinity; perhaps too this logic prevails over dogma wherever the two threaten to come into conflict.

What all the “evidences” of the play refer back to is an original created unity. The mere existence of dramatic conflict presupposes such unity, which becomes both the “lost” point of departure and the actual point of return for the play. While a state of separation and conflict may be essential to drama, such a state cannot, at least in comedy, be conceived as primary or interminable. That thought is quite simply unthinkable (whateven may be suspected) in the “divinity” of the comic playwright. Clearly the narratives, soliloquies and early action (or pseudo-action) of The Comedy of Errors all entail a rupturing of unity from within and from without. This rupturing, which threatens to culminate in disintegration or anarchy, has begun before the play starts, and it continues throughout the early scenes of the play. Starting in medias res, the play reveals that a state of separation and discord exists between the twin cities of Syracuse and Ephesus. That rupture has been formalized as a general lex talionis, one that the Duke is powerless to suspend despite its manifest injustices in the case of Egeon, who stands condemned to death simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then we hear in Egeon's narrative that his present plight is the logical end to an absurd series of misfortunes that began with the shipwreck in which both sets of twins were divided from one another, and he from his wife. Huge and expanding gaps of space and time have seemingly divided the characters from one another, disrupting the unity of the family and leaving individuals isolated, melancholic and lacking an adequate sense of identity. In one sense a condition of “error” prevails as the characters become uprooted wanderers on the face of the earth, blindly in quest of the place or person that will restore lost unity. An original “error” in this sense, namely Egeon's wandering abroad in quest of some dispersed property, has precipitated all the subsequent errors. “Error” in its multiple senses of going astray, being mistaken, and being involved in complicated misunderstanding, threatens, in fact, to become the universal condition of the play, as we observe the proliferating misconceptions and cross-purposes of the first three acts.

The rupturing of unity through error threatens to continue when we see Adriana and Antipholus E. becoming estranged, yet this series cannot be thought to continue indefinitely. The end Egeon anticipates (and indeed comes to desire) is death, while for other characters a final loss of identity through the rupturing of external boundaries emerges as the threatened end. Such is the “end” Antipholus S. anticipates and even proleptically enacts in his speech:⁵

I to the world am like a drop of water,
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to seek his fellow forth
(Unseen, inquisitive) confounds himself.

(I.ii.35-38)

In the first of these lines the self is conceived on a reduced scale, yet identity persists and may even seem to be secured by the analogy between macro- and microcosm; the self-enclosed drop of water remains momentarily suspended in deceptive resemblance to a stable globe. This suspension is only momentary, however, since in moving to “seek” another drop, and thus to (re)constitute identity and unity on a larger scale, the drop “falls,” merging into an oceanic mass without stability, definition or form. Both the stable unity of the “world” and the correspondingly stable unity of the isolated drop can only fall into terminal error. The boundaries of the self reveal their extreme fragility in the moment in which the drop moves, and an already reduced identity is finally lost—or paradoxically confused with that of its alter ego—as the drop “confounds himself.”

It has often been observed that Adriana expresses her own sense of reduced and threatened identity in metaphorical terms closely akin to those of Antipholus S., thus expressing from the conjugal rather than the fraternal standpoint the consequences of a loss of unity. What has been “lost” in Adriana's case is once again a “full” identity, only her loss stems from the seeming rupture between husband and wife. Given this extremely precarious sense of self in both Adriana and Antipholus, but also implicitly in other characters in the play, an excessive dependence on conventional roles, familiar appearances, and fixed external markers of time and place becomes inevitable. These become the containers of the fluid self. As soon as any of these external and wholly arbitrary forms of security is threatened, panic or rage break out. The disruption of regular mealtimes, the apparent departure of a servant from his regular comic act, seeming aberrations of behavior, the apparent loss of financial security, all prove excessively disconcerting in the absence of any sustaining inner order or self-definition. The mere fact that her husband is “late” in relation to the arbitrarily set time of two o'clock (II.i.3) launches Adriana on a tirade about the miseries of women, while Antipholus S. is disconcerted by the early arrival of the servant whom he calls “the almanac of my true date” (I.ii.41). And so it goes. While not all the characters express their sense of self as Adriana and Antipholus do, their common dependence on appearances for forms of regularity involves them in almost universal hysteria as those appearances and forms progressively break down.

It may seem arbitrary to relate all the play's phenomena of rupturing and threatened dissolution to an original created unity, since all that is required is given in the apparently matter-of-fact exposition of what has led up to the present state of affairs. It seems hardly necessary to go “behind” this history to an obscure mythical point of origin. Yet there is something avowedly “strange” about the original condition of the family as Egeon recalls it. The twin sons born to Egeon and Emilia were “.. the one so like the other, / As could not be distinguish'd but by names” (I.i.51-52). In this condition, names distinguish. Identity is truly constituted, not by appearance or action, but by the potency of a name that corresponds to the essential being. Appearances, even indistinguishable appearances, cannot deceive, nor are distinctions arbitrary or invidious. The twins are not “confounded” either in themselves or by onlookers, since the identity of each is secured by his proper name.

Is this an accurate recollection? Is Egeon aware of the peculiar logic of what he is claiming? The twins, by the time we encounter them, have identical names, and are only—ineffectively—distinguished by their association with particular places, Ephesus and Syracuse. The Arden editor speculates that Egeon's ostensible recollection is actually an uneffaced trace of the original (Plautine) state of the play, in which the twins did have different names. What Egeon “remembers” is thus actually what the playwright has forgotten to cover up or assimilate to his own design. That is one possible explanation. It is also clear, whatever the explanation, that Egeon is “recalling” as a part of his own history a mythical condition in which the power of proper names absolutely prevails. This is a condition utterly unlike that which prevails in the play. Moreover, Egeon is recalling a mythical “time” in which identity and difference could coexist within a larger unity, a time of fruitful concord without “identity crises,” éstrangements or confusions. Again, a time utterly unlike that of the play, and preceding the first fatal error. What we thus find in Egeon's speech is an uneffaced trace of a time and condition akin to that made explicit in the paradoxical formulas of “The Phoenix and the Turtle”:⁶

So they loved as love in twain
Had the essence but in one,
Two distincts, division none;
.....Property was thus appalled,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature's double name
Neither two nor one was called.

The evidential value of Egeon's claim, as well as the legitimacy of glossing it with the help of “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” is dubious. More supporting evidence of a mythic origin would be helpful, yet it is hard to find. What can, however, be said is that The Comedy of Errors is virtually unthinkable without such an origin, the almost complete effacement of which may be significant in itself. The clue supplied by Egeon may be enough to disclose the logic of the play.

In possession of this clue, we may insistently ask why a “time” and “condition” resembling that in “The Phoenix and the Turtle”—or resembling that of the “original” united family in The Comedy of Errors—is desired by the principal characters, if not all the characters, in the play? The condition of unity, secure identity and of concord remains apparently normative despite its absence in the play, despite its having been long-lost prior to the play. Is the actual history of the characters enough to account for this desire? To account for the obsessive quests on which Egeon and Antipholus S. embark, and for the self-assertive rage of Adriana? To account for all the nostalgic regressiveness that precludes “mature” acceptance of a conflicted and imperfect world, a divided and diminished self? Perhaps the immediate history of the characters will suffice to explain their feelings and desires, yet Egeon's peculiar recollection suggests the possibility of a further explanation in terms of a universally felt mythical loss. That loss may still be “making itself felt.”

Before relating these issues to the undertaking of the playwright, I shall first consider Egeon's own understanding, one that the play seemingly contradicts. The one peculiarity I have so far noted in Egeon's account of himself is in no way isolated or emphasized in the flow of his exposition. Whatever significance it may possess for others, it has none for Egeon; for him, it is merely one detail among others. It is a detail that certainly does not govern his interpretation of events.

Readers will recall that Act I, scene i of The Comedy of Errors is a virtually uninterrupted monologue spoken by Egeon. This form of exposition looks like “early Shakespeare,” which is to say relatively lacking in dramatic craftsmanship and verbal fluidity. The excessively long, formal address virtually stops the play dead in its tracks, while no dramatic necessity is established for Egeon's narrative. The Duke tells Egeon that nothing can save him from the full rigor of the law, and then invites him to tell “for what cause thou cam'st to Ephesus” (I.i.30). Does it now really matter why? What is now at stake in the narrative? The mere prolongation of the narrative, although perhaps more than the Duke has bargained for in asking for a “brief” account, will not postpone the moment of execution, and will thus lack one time-honored justification of narrative per se. Dramatically, Egeon's account seems almost entirely beside the point.

What is to the point, however, is the very fact that Egeon's narrative is so undramatic. The first scene frames but does not partake of the action of the play, and to the extent that Egeon does have a place in that action it is not as a storyteller but as one in quest of another to bail him out. (The Duke having relented slightly out of a sense of “honor” that prompts him to substitute a large cash fine for the death penalty.) The narrative quality of Egeon's address is foregrounded by such phrases as “… by misfortunes was my life prolonged, / To tell sad stories of my own mishaps” (I.i. 119-20) and “but here must end the story of my life” (I.i. 137). The “storytelling” quality is intensified by the obvious romance provenance of Egeon's tale of shipwrecks, separations and amazing misfortunes, while it becomes possible to detect a (possibly unconscious) sprezzatura in Egeon's disclaimers:

A heavier task could not have been impos'd
Than I to speak my griefs unspeakable. …

(I.i.31-32)

But ere they came—O, let me say no more!
Gather the sequel by that went before.

(I.i.94-95)

(To which the Duke duly responds: “Nay, forward, old man …”). Egeon, in fact, has not only become a melancholy storyteller, but his life has become the almost inexhaustible “material” of that story, which proceeds as an unbroken series of mishaps. The ultimate “mishap,” which seems now to have become imminent, will be the crowning one, its conclusive and validating effect on the entire “story” lending it a certain appeal. Egeon, at all events, almost wilfully embraces his fate, appearing to take a grim satisfaction in the inevitable:

Hopeless and helpless doth Egeon wend,
But to procrastinate his liveless end.

(I.i. 157-58)

Procrastinating but also foreseeing the “end,” Egeon remains perversely attached to his own version of his life-story.

What is implied in this tale of mishaps is an essentially amoral world ruled by Fortune, the power Egeon invokes (i. 105) to explain everything including himself. Wittingly or not, he has also supplied his answer to the Duke's question about the cause of his being in Ephesus. Passivity, shortsightedness and irresponsibility characterize Egeon's interpretation, while a kind of random “wending” at once procrastinates the end and supplies mishaps with which to cram the narrative. Egeon is of course in error. His unacknowledged conversion of Fortune into Misfortune imposes a false consistency on the operations of his deity. His transformation of romance into a mode of pure melancholy is at odds with the character of the genre, in which shipwrecks and separations lead in the long run to salvation and reunion. Most importantly, his adherence to his own life-story (which the Duke seems powerless to alter), is at odds with the purposes and principles of comedy, a dramatic genre into which the benign possibilities of romance may be assimilated. Not only can he not “see” the invisible deity who is in control of events, but he unwittingly assumes a power of interpretation that leads him astray. He also cannot “see” that benign logic rather than arbitrary power governs the comedy in which he is destined to participate. He does not anticipate that his own life story, with its foregone conclusion, will be rewritten, and that a better ending is held in store for him by a far-sighted providence. His perverse wish for a lifeless end opposes the good will of the comic playwright. Of course, the audience of the play is not privy to all this either, yet it is allowed some perspective on Egeon's narrative, the lifelessness of which need not go unnoticed. Neither need its tendentiousness or its misrepresentation of the genre to which it adheres. In short, a critical perspective on Egeon's tale is available from the start. The listener need not fall into the Duke's attitude of spellbound passivity.

What applies to Egeon will in some degree apply to each character in the play, at least insofar as his vision, his purposes and his sense of an ending conflict with those of the play's informing divinity. No will but that of the playwright can prevail, and it is always by implication a stronger, better and more rational will than any that opposes or incompletely approximates to it. Adriana, for example, presents a classic argument against the “double standard” that applies to men and women respectively in marriage, at the same time rebelling against the supposed injustice of her plight and threatening to transform the play into another violent “shrew” comedy. She is in error, however, since her suppositions about her husband's activities are quite simply false. She has no authentic “case” and her paranoid resentments arise from her own insecurity rather than from any external cause. Her rebellious error is dramatically exposed by the playwright. Then, with the help of the Abbess who “knows better,” Adriana is made to see the error of her ways and to reconcile herself to her fate and to her husband, both of which are for the best. Luciana, on the other hand, whose essential acceptance of the double standard and whose doctrine of submission imply almost cynically low expectations, parodies rather than conforms to the divine will. Eventually she gets more than she bargained for in the shape of a loving husband, and can seemingly overcome her own sterilizing anxiety about “troubles of the marriage bed” (II.i.27). Again, a better spirit prevails.

The will of the playwright consistently triumphs, legitimately so in serving the best interests of all involved. It triumphs both in the shape of the play and through the mediating figure of the Abbess, who unites in herself the apparently irreconcilable roles of wife, mother and nun. Becoming the agent of love, reason and unification, she transmits the final resolution of the playwright. Before this resolution transpires, however, other expedients have been tried and found wanting. Although they may prefigure the true resolution, they do not correspond to it. Antipholus E.'s golden chain, which ostensibly signifies marital concord and implies the possibility both of linking and of binding separate entities, passes from hand to hand throughout the play, leaving behind it a trail of error. It ineffectively mediates the relationship between husband and wife, and seems finally destined to become the adornment of the whore. If it anticipates the true solution, it cannot represent it, since only the play can do that.

We have already seen that the law of Ephesus becomes a lex talionis in the face of which even the Duke is powerless, while the binding of prisoners, either at the hands of the constable or at the pseudotherapeutic instigation of Dr. Pinch, simply becomes another instance of the bondage of error. True boundaries, which is to say rationally acceptable forms and rules to be inhabited by the characters, can correspond only to those imposed by the playwright. These are the ideal forms (unities) of classical comedy and of the nuclear family, in which brotherly love is at once restored and subsumed in conjugal love. No other forms of tried rationality and maturity exist.

Another false resolution, anticipating the true one, occurs midway through the play, when Luciana romantically manifests herself to Antipholus S. as a divine figure:

Sweet mistress—what your name is else I know not,
Nor by what wonder you do hit of mine—
Less in your knowledge than in your grace you show not
Than our earth's wonder, more than earth divine.
Teach me, dear creature, how to think and speak;
Lay open to my earthly, gross conceit,
Smoth'red in errors, feeble, shallow, weak,
The folded meaning of your words' deceit.

(II.ii.29-36)

This false theophany, the place of which is in pure romance rather than divine comedy, can only anticipate the true clarifying and restorative theophany of the play's ending. It can do so even to the extent of implying the existence of a nameless god, and to the extent of allowing for truth to be “folded” in deceit. Antipholus is in error, however, when he jumps to the conclusion halfway through the play, and also when he too romantically identifies divinity itself with the appearance of a woman. In the true divinity of the play, the woman becomes a mediator rather an embodiment of the divine. Even Antipholus cannot fully overcome his own skepticism and his masculine anxieties:

O, train me not, sweet mermaid, with thy note
To drown me in thy sister's flood of tears;
Sing, siren, for thyself, and I will dote. …

(III.ii.45-47)

The female enchanter is always incipiently a betrayer, whose deceit “enfolds” the malignant design of betraying the male ego to its doom; conversely, the lawless passion of the male transforms the woman into an enchanter, the service of whose divinity soon reveals its true end:

Spread o'er the silver waves thy golden hairs,
And as a bed I'll take them, and there lie,
And in that glorious supposition think
He gains by death that hath such means to die. …

(III.ii.49-51)

The service of this divinity entails a willing embrace of error, while its end is a “death” from which no salvation is desired or anticipated. The death-directed romance of this youthful error makes it paradoxically akin to the error of old Egeon, while both forms of error involve a foredoomed idolatry.

Everything in the play, in short, calls for the action of a truly divine power, and the exercise of such power is consciously undertaken by the playwright. For various reasons that I have suggested, and many that I have not, it is necessary in the play that reason and the will of God prevail, nor is there any insuperable contradiction, it would seem, between reason and the will of God as represented by the playwright. (We may even succumb at this point to a Shakespearean pun on God's Will.) What has to be dispelled or converted to truth is a host of errors, a feat that can be accomplished only if reason comes to prevail. An extraordinary absence of reason manifests itself onstage throughout the play, nowhere more so than in the fact, noted by Anne Barton,⁷ that the sudden appearance of doubles in Ephesus should, instead of creating mad confusion, alert the characters to the presence of their twins in the city. Their long separation is already at an end, if only they could see it. The universal failure to see, however, becomes an utterly ludicrous failure of reason, one that the audience is permitted to observe, and from which it may draw conclusions.

In the full prevalence of reason, there is no error, as there never has been for the omniscient playwright. A prevenient reason and good will, in other words, anticipate all possible errors, never allowing them essentially to take hold or become rooted in time. Throughout the play, error never essentially but only contingently or superficially disrupts unity, compromises true identity, or threatens reason. The resolution, therefore, restores an order of being that has never essentially been compromised. The slate can be wiped clean, as Emilia suggests when she imagines a miraculous (re)birth of her sons:

Thirty-three years have I gone in travail
Of you, my sons, and till this present hour
My heavy burthen ne'er delivered.

(V.i.401-03)

Nothing—or at least nothing bad—has really happened in all the time that has elapsed before the play and in the play.

Within the play-world of pure error, reason can and always already does prevail, requiring only that its full force ultimately be manifested. In the full light of reason, a world of error is a world essentially without uncontrollable passion, madness, impenetrable deception, evil or death. If it is not a world without time, that time heals and matures instead of decaying, but it is not of the essence. No incorrigible antagonism to reason can establish itself, so the comedy of errors—comedy generically founded by the presence of error—precludes any real possibility of tragedy. What the divinity of the play depends on, however, is the questionably assumed priority of a created order of unity, love and reason. It would seem as though the essential basis for such a belief cannot be secured simply because things once happened to be so in Egeon's family, or because they may have happened to be so in the original play, or even because the genre of comedy will have it so. What is required to underpin the logic of the play is nothing less than an original unified act and state of creation. There is such a state of which Genesis speaks, but of which the literal truth is to be doubted. Moreover, the origin of which Genesis does speak is one in which no mere error is committed, and in which “bestrafte brudermord” rather than brotherly love is the true story of sibling relations. This tale of original sin, dictated, perhaps, by an irrational “sense of sin,” is therefore implicitly to be denied. For the comedy of errors to be consistent, no catastrophic “fall” can have taken place, and indeed so disturbing a fall remains irredeemably obnoxious to pure reason. What the logic of the play requires is a benign act and state of creation, any historical departures from which are (mere) errors. Although “lost,” this state of creation is not necessarily lost without trace. “Evidences” exist, whether in the guise of memories, dreams or nostalgic desires; they may even exist in poetic language manifesting a higher degree of regularity, harmony and elevation than current speech admits, in which case “evidence” is widespread throughout the play.⁸ At all events, the recovery of a perfect lost order (never really lost) becomes an enterprise to which the playwright can commit himself. If the result he achieves is not identical to the original created order, it may nevertheless suffice in the interim, supplying an acceptable equivalent for a true order that is contingently absent, but never to be despaired of.

Needless to say, grounds of objection to this divinity of the playwright are legion. As a “divinity” without a need for Christ, it flouts dogma, and relapses into pagan enlightenment. As a pseudo-theology without rigor or true commitment, it remains a form of play; even of mere conceit in both senses of the word. The evidences on which it relies are of no persuasive kind, while its consequences may be merely grotesque, as in the case of Emilia's thirty-three year labor to deliver her twin sons. The presumption that the down-to-earth and largely undeceived Dromio twins inhabit without realizing their advantages an ideal world disclosed to their “betters” is just that: flagrant presumption. The identification of ideal unity and order with the arbitrary conventions of neoclassicism remains an instance of the shallowest rationalism, if not of bondage to error identical to that of characters in the play. The reassertion of the dominant male and/or class ideology in the guise of an unsurpassably just providence, with or without the created order of things—even with only some hints that it does so—becomes an act of gross special pleading. The tacit claim of both play and playwright to represent a higher order of being is hardly compatible with the cheap, opportunistic theatricality of the representation, which, if it passes muster, does so by comprehensively flattering and indulging the audience. A positively idiotic implausibility reigns in a play about two sets of identical twins separated and reunited under so-called “romantic” circumstances. Such a play can only offend, not embody, reason. Finally, a world of mere error, devoid of evil, is conceivable only in a rationalistic mode of moral imbecility and psychological blankness.

Such is the kind of indictment that the divinity of the playwright provokes. (The brevity of the indictment does not imply any lack of further charges.) It is an indictment, however, that the playwright does everything possible to facilitate by betraying himself, heightening implausibility and giving an unprecedented degree of play to opposing views and principles.⁹ If the divinity of the playwright is still not to be despaired of, remaining only in abeyance until it reappears in The Tempest, perhaps that is because the playwright remains bound to it over every objection, despite every necessary qualification. No other divinity, and nothing less than a divinity, can comprehensively save the play. In the meantime, however, another conception of the playwright can be entertained. In the title of my essay I have already specified the alternative, while in adopting an either/or formula I have suggested that the clear alternative to “God” is “the Good Physician.” To put the matter in this way is no doubt to underestimate Shakespeare's negative capability, a capacity to be in two minds at once. I will, however, persist with the formula I have adopted, since my concern is not so much with Shakespeare's peculiar indeterminacy as with the idealizations of the playwright to which The Comedy of Errors lends itself. I will also accept that the alternatives I present may not be balanced in The Comedy of Errors. My conceptions both of The Comedy of Errors and of the ensuing plays actually implies the dominance of “God” and the recessiveness of “the Good Physician” in The Comedy of Errors.

The point is that the playwright can be conceived as a good physician. For him to be so does not require him to be omniscient and omnipotent, to be above reproach, or to rationalize and comprehend his entire dramatic stock. He may be subject to the errors of his “patients,” and he may be deeply implicated in their condition, to which death is the “procrastinated” end. He may inhabit a world in which conflict, madness, terror, alienation and lovelessness are not mere illusions but realities, or in which they are at least constitutively human ailments, capable of being alleviated if not cured. He may himself be subject to arbitrary conventions and to forms of imperfect rationality. He may proceed without hope of a final restoration of created order and without a metaphysical perspective. He will inhabit the given reality of the play, without the power fully to rise above it.

On what basis can these claims be made? On the basis that “evidences” of a wholly different order of being are so tenuous or ambiguous as to be inconclusive. If a created unity and order ever existed, evidence of the fact by way of alleged memory traces, dreams, desires, and poetic language prove exactly nothing. On the contrary, all such evidence can be reinterpreted as symptomatic of an irrational human condition that can be alleviated by good-humored exposure, therapeutic re-enactment, and the presentation of reasonably “well-adjusted” models. Mild palliatives may also be administered, such as that of the “happy ending.” If the justification for such practices is incomplete, they also run less risk than does a “divinity” of being consistently spurious.

The art of the good physician is simply the art of healing. The real patients within the theatre are not onstage but in the audience. Far from being invited to observe from a position of security the Bedlamite follies of those onstage, the audience is invited to sympathize with others and to recognize itself. An initial presumption of superiority and difference may give way to recognition of equality and even identity with those onstage. A failure of such recognition will imply an incurable childish hubris, while the acknowledgement of likeness will imply a heightened degree of self-awareness and fraternity. Whether The Comedy of Errors “is” farce or human comedy depends ultimately on its spectators, who alone can free it (and themselves) from cruel inanity. The “good physician” becomes not so much a controlling figure as a figure who mediates between a given dramatic heritage and its contemporary audience.

The role of the good physician is written into The Comedy of Errors because the possible lack of a true divinity means that his practice is emphatically called for. His desirability is established partly by the futile practices of the bad physician in the guise of Dr. Pinch. (He, too, is the false prototype of a true solution). It is to this self-deluded charlatan that the characters are forced to appeal when they are at their wits' end. The supposed competence of Dr. Pinch, who is introduced as a “schoolmaster,” depends according to the Arden editor, on his being “… a learned man (who) would have the Latin in which to address spirits in the language they understood.”¹⁰ A citation from Hamlet supports this assumption. The learning of Pinch thus establishes him in the role of a “conjurer” of evil spirits (an exorcist). On encountering the supposedly mad Antipholus E., however, Pinch says “Give me your hand, and let me feel your pulse,” (IV.iv.52), thus extending his practice into the physical realm. Without ever acknowledging or apparently suspecting any incapacity in himself, Dr. Pinch allows himself to be made a figure of universal authority, confidently pronouncing on the state of the patient and answering questions without hesitation. His practice remains a bizarre compound of schoolmasterly pedantry, of quasi-religious conjuration (“I charge thee Satan, hous'd within this man, / To yield possession to my holy prayers”) and of confidently propounded truisms (“… the fellow finds his vein, / And humors well his frenzy”). The net effect of Pinch's efforts is to exacerbate the ostensible madness of his patient (a madness that takes on the character of legitimate exasperation in his presence) and to descend to the lowest common denominator of social constraint: “Go bind this man, for he is frantic too” (IV.iv.113).

Under an aesthetic of the good physician,¹¹ Dr. Pinch becomes the play's principal figure of error. His practice is not only an absurd malpractice, one to which his own appearance as a threadbare mountebank testifies, but it involves precisely the wrong assumptions about the nature of the disease and of the cure in the play. In imputing demonic possession to his patient, he remains enslaved to humorless literalism in the twilight zone between divinity and mere folklore. Whatever the contemporary attitudes to possession and exorcism, the Dr. Pinch of The Comedy of Errors is quite simply in error, and thus no source of enlightenment to those who appeal to him.¹² His error is also significantly akin to that of other characters in the play for whom any and all false appearances imply the operation of demonic powers. The locus classicus for this attitude in the play is the speech in which Antipholus S. recites as hearsay (thus giving a paranoid quality to the recital) the terrible things said in Acts about Ephesus:

They say this town is full of cozenage;
An nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,
Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,
Soul-killing witches that deform the body,
Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,
And many such-like liberties of sin.

(I.ii.97-103)

What this blind dread and “pre-theatrical” superstition preclude is any healing art, any legitimate forms of “conjuring” or “humor” other than those pre-empted by the impotent charlatan. With complete lack of discrimination—consistent, perhaps, with the Pauline rigor of Puritanism—all kinds of performance or illusionism are consigned to the powers of darkness. Yet Antipholus lacks the perspective in which the “Ephesus” of The Comedy of Errors is not really a place of dark enchantment and demonic practices, but the comic stage given over to innocuous entertainment and mild healing.

A better physician than Dr. Pinch appears in the guise of the Abbess, who tricks Adriana into a kind of self-recognition and who also prescribes the anti-melancholic remedy of “sweet recreation” in place of Dr. Pinch's violently exasperating cures. She opposes bondage in its legalistic, medical and domestic forms, and thus supplies a sensible justification for the release of comedy and even for theatre going, notorious “liberties of sin.” The Abbess is not, however, infallible, somewhat misreading the situation that is presented to her and also envisaging a pious sequestration of the “mad” Antipholus. Ultimately the good—if not “ideal”—physician of the play is the playwright himself, exploiting the possibilities of the public theater as a place of healing.

In presenting these two idealizations of the playwright in The Comedy of Errors, I have also implicitly suggested two ways in which the play may be rationalized, on one hand comprehensively and on the other to a degree. In the first instance the reason of the play is pure and absolute, while in the second it is skeptical and limited. In both cases, however, a sufficiency of reason informs the play, as it does the optimistic genre of Shakespearean comedy. The progressive invasion of that genre by Evil rather than error, and by ailments more malignant and intractable than those of The Comedy of Errors,¹³ increasingly challenges this sufficiency. Benign conceptions of the playwright and of play accordingly shift until both the genre of comedy and the role of the comic playwright prove untenable. An insufficiency of reason discloses itself both in and as Shakespearean tragedy. Yet a consciousness of this insufficiency is very far from implying the defeat of reason or the absence of any further rationale under which the playwright may proceed. On the contrary, reason that persists in the tormenting knowledge of its own insufficiency may at once hold the line and anticipate the time of its full recovery.

Notes

1. The locus classicus in Shakespeare's comedy for the dethroning of a “semi-divinity” is IV.iii of Love's Labours Lost, in which Berowne is exposed. I would suggest that this moment is decisive in Shakespeare's comic development as well as in LLL, implying as it does a relinquishment of certain untenable presumptions.

2. Compare Portia's self-justification after her “saving” masquerade in Merchant of Venice, V.i.92-95:

   NER.

   When the moon shone, we did not see the candle.

   POR.

   So doth the greater glory dim the less:

   A substitute shines brightly as a king

   Until a king be by. …

3. The Comedy of Errors in the Arden Shakespeare, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Methuen, 1962), pp. 17-18.

4. Conjuring as a “Christian” (I.ii.77) does Antipholus S. no good in his mounting difficulties, and his appeal in the name of Christianity becomes simply one of his ineffective conventional recourses.

5. The Comedy of Errors in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), pp. 83-104. (All citations.)

6. Riverside, p. 1795. The canonical importance of this poem is suggested, though in terms somewhat different from mine, by Joel Fineman, “Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare's Doubles,” in Representing Shakespeare, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), 70-110. From my own standpoint, Shakespeare's poetic essay in “pure logic” (one might almost say in the logic of logic) is a fixed point of reference within the canon. The “condition” of the Phoenix and the Turtle is exactly what cannot be dramatized, while the death of this united pair, reports of which have been exaggerated, becomes the point of departure for romantic comedy.

7. Riverside, p. 79.

8. I can only note here what is obviously a crucial issue in itself. The functioning of poetry as “evidence” of earlier and other creation is a major point in Sidney's Apologie, just as it is in the poetics of the English Renaissance. The highly patterned and formalized language of The Comedy of Errors, even in its low comedy passages, may also be conceived as evidence of divinity, although in terms somewhat different from Sidney's.

9. Characteristically, in allowing the “shrewish” Adriana her dignity, her humanity and her chance to deploy her own rhetoric. If this still does not constitute a fair trial of the issues, since the conclusion is foregone, a relaxation of censorship may nevertheless allow uncontrollable sympathies to be aroused. Even the appearance of justice cannot be secured without this risk, as the history of Paradise Lost criticism may suggest.

10. Arden, pp. 80-81.

11. I acknowledge here Stanley Fish's coinage of this indispensable phrase, as I do the more general influence of his reading of seventeenth-century literature on my approach to The Comedy of Errors.

12. The weakening of reason in the playwright is suggested in Macbeth, for example, with its notoriously opportune “lapse” into witchcraft, demonism and superstition. This “weakening” is also suggested by the presence of a conscientious doctor who can no longer minister to a mind diseased or pluck up a rooted evil. Moreover, the protagonist becomes paradoxically the source of evil and moral vision in the play. No transcendent Reason appears to preside over Macbeth's self-constituted “theater of God's judgments.”

13. Ailments quite inexticably bound up with forms of play, and even of world play, that have grown malignant, or that cannot in any way be justified. There is of course the malignancy of Iago, but in Macbeth equivocation is hell, and in The Winter's Tale all “play” catastrophically loses its innocence in the diseased mind of the protagonist. In the late sonnets, too, “Will” is no longer simply “good.”