[In the following essay, MacCary presents a psychoanalytic and genre-based reading of The Comedy of Errors that emphasizes its classical comedic sources together with its narcissistic and egocentric themes.]

We say that the human being has originally two sexual objects: himself and the woman who tends him, and thereby we postulate a primary narcissism in everyone, which may in the long run manifest itself as dominating his object-choice.

Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction”

Our comic tradition, since Menander, has been essentially romantic: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl and lives happily with her ever after. Much else, of course, happens in comedy from the fourth century b.c. to the present, but this “nubile” pattern of action focuses our attention. Even in plays where the couple are of little interest as characters, their union nevertheless symbolizes the beginning of a new life, and comedy, if it differs at all from tragedy and satire, must at least make us that promise. There are some plays in the tradition which do not end in marriage, leaving many people dissatisfied: their expectations seem to have been shaped as much by dramatic conventions as by deeper needs and desires. Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors is one of these plays and has been criticized for its lack of definitive marriage plans: there is brief allusion to future arrangements between Luciana and Antipholus of Syracuse, but the marriage of Adriana to Antipholus of Ephesus is left unreconstructed. In fact, this is a comedy of a different kind. Its entire argument prepares us not for the union of man and wife—its view of marriage is especially pessimistic—but for the reunion of twins with each other and with their parents, the sort of reestablishment of the nuclear family which is so important in Shakespeare's last plays. To appreciate the Comedy we need to master certain basic problems: the history of the development of the romantic pattern in comedy; the psychological significance of this pattern; its alternatives and their significance.

Shakespeare's play was adapted from Plautus' Menaechmi, which, in turn, was adapted from a Greek original of unknown author, date, and title. It has been argued that this Greek original did not belong to the period and genre we know as New Comedy,¹ as did the originals of most of Plautus' other plays, but was written earlier, before Menander, when comedy had not yet quite reached the final form he gave it. This was the Middle Comedy, preceded only by Aristophanes and the Old Comedy. Now the differences between the three periods are not definitive, but they do help us in tracing the development of the comic tradition, which, I shall argue, was the process of a narrowing of vision. Old Comedy for us is Aristophanes, though the plays of his celebrated contemporaries Eupolis and Cratinus might have differed in important respects from his own. (He certainly claims they did, in a number of passages containing scurrilous references to their work.) For us, though, Old Comedy is Aristophanes' “heroic comedy”:² each play is dominated by one character, usually an old man, who manages to impose his will on the world. These plays end in festivity which sometimes includes a marriage of sorts, such as the union of Peithetaerus in the Birds with the personified abstract Basileia, or “kingly power.” Such weddings are not the goal toward which the action of the plays moves, but simply an effective closing gesture. The goal of Aristophanic comedy is not marriage but self-fulfillment and self-expression. If we speak in terms of ritual, they follow a pattern of resurrecting the old god rather than of uniting cosmic forces to create a new god.

Already in the last plays of Aristophanes, written early in the fourth century, there is a change of mood and theme, and his Plutus and Ecclesiazusae are usually reckoned as transitional pieces, the beginning of the Middle period. The heroes are no longer unlimited in their fantasy and ingenuity; the plays are more social in their outlook rather than political: whereas previously an individual could change the direction of his state, now he is a function of his environment; there is a concentration of professional and semiprofessional types, such as prostitutes, cooks, and soldiers. Our knowledge of Middle Comedy, which extends from Aristophanes' Plutus in 388 to Menander's Orge in 321, is derived entirely from fragments of lost plays contained in references by later authors. Our impression is that their content was trivial in the extreme, with much attention paid to the preparation of banquets, the arrangements for employing prostitutes, the deception of pimps and bankers—all of this engineered by clever slaves to benefit their young masters. Much of this foolishness seems to have been hung on plots drawn from myth; in fact, travesties of myth were very popular, such as Odysseus at the Loom, Herakles in Veils, etc. The titles surviving from this period suggest that certain patterns of action which were later to become archetypes of comedy were already in use. Several authors wrote “twin” plays, for instance, and there are indications of other such situations in which a man's identity is called into question: he has a double he is unaware of, or he cannot find the double he knows he has. The original of Plautus' Amphitryo capitalized on the former; the original of his Menaechmi managed to combine both. These have been described as “comedies of a dominant idea” to distinguish them from the “comedies of character” which we associate with Menander in the period of New Comedy.³

Menander took all these elements of Middle Comedy, and even a few from Old Comedy, and fashioned a whole new genre. He was much influenced by Euripides and drew on the patterns of recognition and escape which distinguish Euripides' late “romances” Ion, Iphigeneia in Tauris, and Helen from previous tragedy. He confines the professional types to subordinate roles, or makes them break “type,” as with the sensitive and sympathetic soldiers of Misoumenos, Perikeiromene, and Sikyonios. He insists on marriage for his young people and prefers double and triple marriages. What we really come down to in Menander is endless variation on the ritual pattern we call by Persephone's name: the young girl is freed from bondage to an unchosen lover, who is usually old, ugly, and violent, by the young man whom she would choose for her husband if she were allowed to choose. This suggests that the action is seen through the eyes of the young girl; and though he certainly shows a great deal of sympathy for the plight of his women, and it might be argued that one distinguishing and causative factor of New Comedy is the “humanization” of women (they are no longer the drag queens of Aeschylus or the female ogres of Euripides), the plays are still mostly about men: it is their fantasy which is played out, the St. George fantasy of rescuing the beautiful girl from the dragon. Happiness in Menander, then, is marriage. This is to be contrasted with happiness in Aristophanes, which is self-fulfillment and self-expression, and happiness in Middle Comedy, which seems to have been, for the most part, food and sex, in that order, or, occasionally, reunion with one's double, though an examination of the question of identity which such material raises might not have accompanied it.

Northrop Frye speaks of the “comic Oedipus situation” in New Comedy: “Its main theme is the successful effort of the young man to outwit an opponent and possess the girl of his choice. The opponent is usually the father (senex), and the psychological descent of the heroine from the mother is also sometimes hinted at. The father frequently wants the same girl, and is cheated out of her by the son, the mother thus becoming the son's ally. The girl is usually a slave or courtesan, and the plot turns on a cognitio or discovery of birth which makes her marriageable.”⁴ If the pursuit of a young woman who reminds the young man of his mother is oedipal, then the pursuit of a young man who reminds the young man of himself is pre-oedipal and narcissistic. I do not mean to propose a new cycle of forms here;⁵ I do think the appreciation of certain correspondences between stages in literary history, stages in human development, and different conceptions of happiness can make our reading of a difficult text more complete. Aristophanes does not use doubles in his plays, but he does consistently develop patterns of action which lead toward the comic close that is implicit in the use of doubles by other authors, i.e., self-fulfillment and self-expression. His male characters enjoy sexual intercourse with women, but they do not pursue women as the embodiment of complete contentment. Rather, they enjoy a wide range of sensual experiences that are specifically sexual (i.e., genital) or capable of producing sexual gratification (i.e., oral or anal): masturbation, homosexual intercourse, defecation and urination in a variety of postures, flatulence, expectoration, scoptophilia, eating and drinking, kissing and fellatio. They also like to talk about all these activities. In short, Aristophanic heroes sound like psychoanalytic textbooks on perversion and, more precisely, they sound like Freud's description of the polymorphously perverse child, the pre-oedipal child, the child before he has learned to channel all his libidinal energy into the pursuit of a woman who will take the place of his mother.

If we were to formulate a kind of comedy which would fulfill the demands associated with the pre-oedipal period, it would have many of the aspects which critics find annoying in The Comedy of Errors. The family would be more important than anyone outside the family, and the mother would be the most important member of the family. Security and happiness would be sought not in sexual intercourse with a person of the opposite sex but in reunion with or creation of a person like the person the protagonist would like to become, i.e., his alter ego, or, more correctly, his ideal ego. There would be an ambivalent attitude toward women in the play, because the young child (male) depends upon the mother for sustenance but fears being reincorporated by the mother. Such fears of the overwhelming mother might be expressed in terms of locked doors and bondage, but the positive, nurturing mother would occasion concern with feasting and drinking. There might even be ambivalent situations, such as banquets arranged by threatening women, and ambivalent symbols, such as gold rings or chains, which suggest both attraction and restriction.

How much do we want to know about the pre-oedipal period? Can we really believe that certain conceptions of happiness develop in certain stages and all later experience is related back to these? To what extent is our appreciation of comedy based on our ability to identify with its protagonists? If we answer this last question affirmatively, then we must at least consider the implications of the other two. Most of us do not have twin brothers from whom we were separated at birth, so the pattern of action in The Comedy of Errors cannot encourage us to identify with Antipholus of Syracuse—clearly the protagonist, as I hope to show below—on the level of superficial actuality. There must be a common denominator, and thus the action of the play must remind us, by way of structural similarity or symbolic form, of something in our own experience. If a play has universal appeal, the experience recalled is more likely to be one of childhood than not, since the earliest experiences are not only the most commonly shared, but also the most formative: what we do and have done to us as children shapes all later experience. A good comedy “ends happily,” which means it follows a pattern of action which convinces us that we can be happy. Happiness is different things at different periods in our lives, and if the argument on development is accepted, the greatest happiness is the satisfaction of our earliest desires. By this I do not mean that comedy should feed us and keep us warm, but rather that it should cause us to recapture, in our adult, intellectualized state, the sensual bliss of warmth and satiety.

I do not think that many critics today would label The Comedy of Errors a farce and dismiss it as deserving no more serious analysis. The patterns of farce, like all the patterns of action in drama, are appealing for some good reason. Clearly the comic pattern involving mistaken identity appeals to us because it leads us from confusion about identity—our own, of course, as well as the protagonist's—to security. The most effective version of that pattern would be that which presents to us our own fears and then assuages them, so it must speak to us in language and action which can arouse memory traces of our own actual experience of a search for identity. While it is true that this search goes on throughout the “normal” man's life, it is most intense in the early years. When Antipholus of Syracuse likens himself to a drop of water in danger of being lost in the ocean, he speaks to us in terms which are frighteningly real:

He that commends me to mine own content
Commends me to the thing I cannot get.
I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.
So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.

(I. ii. 33-40)

The image is based on a proverbial expression in Plautus' Menaechmi: “neque aqua aquae nec lacte lactis, crede me, usquam similius / quam hic tui est, tuque huius autem” (“water is not to water, nor milk to milk, as like as she is to you and you are to her”) (1089-90).⁶ From a purely physical comparison, Shakespeare has developed a metaphysical conceit which has vast philosophical implications, but its immediate impact is emotional. The plight of the protagonist is felt almost physically, his yearning for his double accepted as natural and inevitable. Water itself is the most frequent dream symbol for birth, and with the mention of the mother and brother, we are set firmly in the child's world. The brother, in our own experience, is not a brother, but another self, the ideal ego which the mother first creates for us and we strive to assimilate. We are reminded of the Narcissus myth, since water can reflect as well as absorb, and Antipholus of Syracuse seeks himself in his mirror image. The water here, as ocean, is the overwhelming aspect of the mother, the mother from whom the child cannot differentiate himself. She projects to us the image of what we shall become; but it is a fragile image, and if we lose it we risk reintegration with her, reabsorption, a reversal of the process of individuation which we suffer from the sixth to the eighteenth month. Only later, when we have developed a sense of alterity, can we distinguish ourselves from the mother, and her image of us from ourselves.

Plautus, of course, does not frame his comedy of twins with a family romance the way Shakespeare does. Neither mother nor father appears; there is not even any serious romantic involvement for either twin. In fact, the negative attitude toward marriage which spreads through Shakespeare's play derives from Plautus', where the local twin lies to his wife and steals from her, and finally deserts her entirely to go home with his brother. As Shakespeare expands the cast and develops themes only implicit in the Menaechmi, he provides a complete view of the relation between man and wife and clearly indicates the preparation for this relation in the male child's attitude toward the mother. In Plautus we have only one set of doubles, the twins themselves, but Shakespeare gives us two more sets: the twin slaves Dromio and the sisters Adriana and Luciana. We see these women almost entirely through the eyes of Antipholus of Syracuse, our focus of attention in the play. From his first speech onwards it is from his point of view we see the action, and the occasional scene involving his brother serves only as background to his quest: he is the active one, the seeker. We meet the two sisters before he does, in their debate on jealousy, and then when he encounters them, our original impressions are confirmed. They are the dark woman (Adriana, atro) and the fair maid (Luciana, luce) we meet with so frequently in literature,⁷ comprising the split image of the mother, the one threatening and restrictive, the other yielding and benevolent. The whole atmosphere of the play, with its exotic setting and dreamlike action, prepares us for the epiphany of the good mother in Luciana, the bad mother in Adriana. Antipholus of Syracuse, who seems to have found no time for, or shown no interest in, women previously, is entranced and wonders that Adriana can speak to him so familiarly:

To me she speaks. She moves me for her theme.
What, was I married to her in my dream?
Or sleep I now, and think I hear all this?
What error drives our eyes and ears amiss?

(II. ii. 183-86)

The extraordinary aspect of his reaction, though quite natural in the context of the play's system of transferences, is that he should take for his dream the strange woman's reality: in other circumstances we might expect him to say that she is dreaming and has never really met him, but he says instead that perhaps he had a dream of her as his wife which was real. She is, then, strange in claiming intimacy with him, but not entirely unknown: she is a dream image, and he goes on to question his present state of consciousness and sanity:

Am I in earth, in Heaven, or in Hell?
Sleeping or waking? Mad or well advised?
Known unto these, and to myself disguised!

(II. ii. 214-16)

If these women were completely alien to him, had he no prior experience of them in any form, then he could have dismissed them and their claims upon him. As it is, he doubts not their sanity but his own, and wonders whether he dreams or wakes as they persist in their entreaties, suggesting he has dreamed of them before, and not without some agitation.

The exact words of Adriana's address which creates this bewilderment are, of course, very like his own opening remarks. She seems to know his mind exactly, and this makes her even more familiar to him though strange in fact. She takes his comparison of himself to a drop of water and turns it into a definition of married love; this, then, is sufficient to drive him to distraction:

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

(II. ii. 121-31)

Most critics would acknowledge the central position of these two passages in the argument of the play, but they do not account for their effectiveness. The impact of the repetition is due to the reversal of the protagonist's expectations. He came seeking his mirror image, like Narcissus, his ideal ego, his mother's image of himself, and finds instead a woman who claims to be part of himself; and she threatens him with that absorption and lack of identity which he had so feared: she is the overwhelming mother who refuses to shape his identity but keeps him as part of herself. In his speech he was the drop of water; in her speech the drop of water is let fall as an analogy, but he becomes again that drop of water and flees from the woman who would quite literally engulf him.

He flees, of course, to the arms of the benign Luciana, she who had warned her sister to restrain her jealousy and possessiveness, to allow her husband some freedom lest she lose him altogether. This unthreatening, undemanding woman attracts Antipholus of Syracuse, and he makes love to her in terms which recall the two drop of water speeches:

LUC.
What, are you mad, that you do reason so?
ANT. S.
Not mad, but mated; how, I do not know.
LUC.
It is a fault that springeth from your eye.
ANT. S.
For gazing on your beams, fair sun, being by.
LUC.
Gaze where you should, and that will clear your sight.
ANT. S.
As good to wink, sweet love, as look on night.
LUC.
Why call you me love? Call my sister so.
ANT. S.
Thy sister's sister.
LUC.
That's my sister.
ANT. S.
No,
It is thyself, my own self's better part,
Mine eye's clear eye, my dear heart's dearer heart,
My food, my fortune, and my sweet hope's aim,
My sole earth's Heaven, and my Heaven's claim.

(III. ii. 53-64)

There is as much difference between Adriana and Luciana as between night and day: Adriana is the absence or perversion of all that is good in Luciana. It is not the difference between dark women and fair women we find in the other comedies—Julia and Sylvia in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Helena and Hermia in Midsummer Night's Dream—but much more like the difference in the Sonnets between the dark lady and the fair youth: on the one side we have all that is threatening and corruptive, while on the other there is truth and beauty. Again, all is a dream: Antipholus of Syracuse has seen Luciana before, in dreams, in madness, but then she was indistinguishable from Adriana, the two opposites bound up as one. Now, as if by the dream mechanism of decomposition they are separate, and he can love the one and avoid the other. He has overcome his fear of the overwhelming mother and projects now his image of the benevolent mother upon Luciana.

The relation between these two young women and Aemilia, the actual mother of Antipholus of Syracuse, becomes clear in the climactic scene. He has been given sanctuary in the priory, after having been locked up by Adriana and escaping her; Aemilia emerges, like the vision of some goddess, to settle all confusion. Her attention focuses on Adriana, and she upbraids her son's wife for the mistreatment she has given him. It is a tirade not unlike others in early Shakespearean comedy against the concept of equality and intimacy in marriage. We hear it from Katharina at the end of The Taming of the Shrew, and we see Proteus fleeing from such a marriage in Two Gentlemen of Verona, as do all the male courtiers in Love's Labor's Lost. In the later romances this antagonism between the man who would be free and the woman who would bind him home is equally apparent and more bitterly portrayed; e.g., Portia's possessiveness in The Merchant of Venice and Helena's pursuit of Betram in All's Well. The identification of the threatening woman with the mother in the man's eyes is developed to varying degrees in these different instances—the maternal aspect of Portia is remarkable, as are Helena's close ties to the Countess—but here it is transparent: Aemilia must instruct her daughter-in-law on the proper treatment of her son, and we see this through the eyes of Antipholus of Syracuse: he has finally been able to conquer his fear of losing his identity in his mother's too close embrace because she herself tells him that this is no way for a woman to treat him:

The venom clamors of a jealous woman
Poisons more deadly than a mad dog's tooth.
It seems his sleeps were hindered by thy railing,
And thereof comes it that his head is light.
Thou say'st his meat was sauced with thy upbraidings;
Unquiet meals make ill digestions.
Thereof the raging fire of fever bred,
And what's a fever but a fit of madness?
Thou say'st his sports were hindered by thy brawls.
Sweet recreation barred, what doth ensue
But moody and dull Melancholy,
Kinsman to grim and comfortless Despair,
And at her heels a huge infectious troop
Of pale distemperatures and foes to life.

(V. i. 69-82)

This description of madness reminds us of the mythical monsters Harpies, Gorgons, and Furies—all female, like Shakespeare's Melancholy and Despair—bitchlike creatures who hound men to madness. Clearly this entire race is a projection of male fears of female domination, and their blood-sucking, enervating, food-polluting, petrifying attacks are all related to pre-oedipal fantasies of maternal deprivation. By identifying this aspect of the mother in Adriana, he can neutralize it. Antipholus of Syracuse, then, finds simultaneously the two sexual objects Freud tells us we all originally have: his own benevolent and protective mother and the image of himself in his brother he has narcissistically pursued.

Psychologically it is the most satisfying ending possible, and those who ask for marriage here, or some guarantee that the existing marriage between Antipholus of Ephesus and Adriana will be revived, simply have not responded to the pattern of action Shakespeare has presented.⁸ They want a “romantic” comedy, a Menandrean comedy in which happiness is found in the person of a young person of the opposite sex who can complement the virtues of the protagonist and signify to the world that he is a mature and substantial member of the male community. The girl he marries might be a younger image of his mother, as Frye suggests, and he might even have had to compete with his father to win her, but the fact that he feels the need to possess a woman at all is in imitation of his father: this is the way grown men behave, monogamously. The situation in The Comedy of Errors is entirely different: the rejection of the threatening mother and the acceptance of the benevolent mother, in conjunction with the retrieval of the ideal ego or narcissistic image in the double, prepares the protagonist for marriage, but that is a separate and future action. The Comedy of Errors is not a romantic comedy⁹ but a narcissistic comedy or egocentric comedy. Insofar as comedy can revive memory traces of childhood experiences, this comedy takes us back to the pre-oedipal stage when we first emerged as creatures conscious of our own difference. By the principle of first is best, this kind of comedy can be even more satisfying than the oedipal comedy most frequent in the tradition since Menander.

Again I insist that I do not intend to add another dimension to Frye's “fearful symmetry.” I do not believe that the stages of either literary history or psychic development are so precisely segmentable that elaborate correspondences can be drawn so as to increase significantly our appreciation of individual works. It is just as well that the conventional labels for Greek comedy are Old, Middle, and New, in that order, rather than the reverse, lest we be tempted to speak of Aristophanes as comedy's infancy and Menander as its adolescence. Systems of correspondence almost of necessity become abstract and distract us from our primary concern. I do believe that something significant happened in the comic tradition late in the fourth century b.c. and that Menander was to a large extent responsible for changing the direction of comedy for the next twenty-three hundred years. (I do not pretend to understand what is happening today on the comic stage, but I trace the Menandrean age with ease as far as Oscar Wilde.) Whereas in pre-Menandrean comedy, especially Aristophanic comedy, the goal of happiness toward which the action moves is concerned with the self as independent center of the universe, after Menander it takes two to be happy, and they have to be man and woman. The great modern comedians sometimes recreate the earlier kind of comedy, either spontaneously, as did Mozart in Don Giovanni, or under indirect influence from the pre-Menandrean period, as did Shakespeare in The Comedy of Errors.

Authors do not usually choose their models blindly. Shakespeare saw in Plautus' Menaechmi a pattern of action which interested him, and we see basic similarities between this play and the other early comedies: male friendship is more important than marriage and women are seen as barriers in the way of male freedom and development. The Sonnets, too, show the same concern,¹⁰ while Henry VI is a study in misogyny and King John paints a rather frightening picture of mothers and wives as powers behind the throne. I must avoid, though, the suggestion that this was a major concern of Shakespeare's during his youth, lest I add the offenses of biographical criticism to a paper already burdened with the offenses of psychoanalytic and genre criticism. I do insist, finally, on but three points: comedy, as much as tragedy, requires identification between audience and protagonist, a clear point of view, and this must be based on common experience, actual or fantasized; early experiences are formative, and the effective comedian plays upon the fears and desires which we retain from infancy and childhood; romantic comedy has been in the ascendant since Menander, but there are some exceptional plays of the narcissistic type and Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors is one of these.

Notes

1. T. B. L. Webster, Studies in Later Greek Comedy, 2nd ed. (1953; rpt. Manchester, 1970), pp. 67-74.

2. Cedric Whitman, Aristophanes and the Comic Hero (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), passim.

3. See Webster, Studies, and W. Thomas MacCary and M. W. Willcock, Plautus: Casina (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 1-8.

4. Northrop Frye, “The Argument of Comedy,” in English Institute Essays (New York, 1948), p. 50.

5. Cf. Fredric Jameson, “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre,” New Literary History, 7 (Autumn 1975), 135-63.

6. Cf. Plautus, Bacchides, fr. IV (Lindsay): sicut lacte lactis similest (“as like as milk is to milk”).

7. See R. Rogers, The Double in Literature (Detroit, 1970), pp. 126-37; Leslie Fiedler, “Some Contexts of Shakespeare's Sonnets,” in E. Hubler, The Riddle of Shakespeare's Sonnets (New York, 1962), pp. 57-90, and Love and Death in the American Novel (New York, 1966), pp. 205-14.

8. Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London, 1974), p. 9: “The director may contrive a forgiving embrace, but nothing in the text requires it … for the critic, with only the text before him, the final state of the marriage must remain an open question.” One could say the same thing—if one were a critic incapable of visualizing a stage performance of one's own direction—of the marriages in Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, All's Well, and Measure for Measure. The plays that end in secure and satisfying marriages for the major characters are few indeed, perhaps only As You Like It.

9. D. Palmer and M. Bradbury, Preface to Shakesperian Comedy (New York, 1972), pp. 7-8: “Of the ten comedies which belong to the first half of Shakespeare's career, only The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew and The Merry Wives of Windsor are not given detailed discussion here: an omission which reflects less on their merits than on the volume's prevailing interest in the more ‘romantic’ plays.”

10. See Fiedler, “Some Contexts.”