SOURCE: Whitworth, Charles, ed. Introduction to The Comedy of Errors, by William Shakespeare, pp. 1-79. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

FARCE, CITY COMEDY AND ROMANCE

E. M. W. Tillyard, in his generally sympathetic if not unequivocally enthusiastic discussion of Errors [The Comedy of Errors], followed the well-established tradition, in both criticism and stage production, of assuming its ‘core’ or essence to be farce and its comedy as being that exaggerated kind peculiar to farce. The critical tradition dates from the time of Coleridge at least. He insisted on the uniqueness of the play in the Shakespeare canon, defining it as ‘a legitimate farce’, distinct ‘from comedy and from other entertainments’ by ‘the licence … required … to produce strange and laughable situations’: ‘A comedy would scarcely allow even the two Antipholuses … but farce dares add the two Dromios’.¹ While on the page, farce may be conveyed by vigorous dialogue and in stage directions and a sympathetic reader may react to it, only on the stage does it come into its own, there for all to see. From the low comedy that crept into the Restoration theatre and was decried by Dryden and other guardians of dramatic decorum (see p. 27 n. 1 above), to vaudeville and the popular French farces of the late nineteenth century by masters like Labiche, Feydeau and Courteline, to the slapstick of early American cinema, farce has always had to be seen to be (dis)believed. It relies on visual gags, facial expressions, large gestures, exaggeration, repetition, grotesque business such as pratfalls, ear-wringing and nose-pulling. That generations of literary critics, many of whom rarely or never went to the theatre, could have affirmed so emphatically that The Comedy of Errors is a farce is just one of the misfortunes of its critical and theatrical history.

What critics usually have in mind when they label the play as farce is the increasingly hectic and crazy action in the middle acts generated by the presence in Ephesus of two sets of identical twins, and in particular the physical violence of which the two servant Dromios are the main victims. Their increasingly irritated and uncomprehending masters, the Antipholus brothers, resort to beating and threats of such punishment on several occasions—there are specific directions in the Folio only at 2.2.23 and 4.4.45—and there is much talk of beating, especially by the Dromios. Beat, beaten and beating, always in the primary sense of physical blows (as opposed to the beating of the heart, for example, or of the sea upon the rocks), occur a total of fourteen times in Errors, more than in any other play in the canon. There is further vigorous action in 3.1 when Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus and their dinner guests try to enter their own house, where their Syracusan twins are already ensconced, and in 4.4 when the exorcist Pinch and his assistants catch and bind the supposedly possessed Ephesian master and servant. But to categorize the whole play as ‘farce’, even ‘the only specimen of poetical farce in our language, that is intentionally such’, as Coleridge did, solely because there are twins and people mistake them or because masters sometimes beat servants, would seem to be wilfully to ignore its other facets. Perhaps critics' uneasiness about its authenticity, dating from Pope, could be resolved by isolating it in a separate genre from all of Shakespeare's other plays. After all, there are apparently identical twins, of opposite sexes, in Twelfth Night, one of whom is married to a woman who thinks she has married the other, who is in fact a girl—yet few critics have called that wonderful comedy a farce. Beatings are administered and characters are otherwise physically assaulted in a comical context in many other plays: The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost, even The Tempest, but those plays have not generally been relegated to the literary outer darkness connoted by the term ‘farce’. As for improbable or ‘unbelievable’ endings, if that is what some may have in mind as justifying the label, one need look no further than some of Shakespeare's other comedies—Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure—or any of the late plays, with their multiple, complex, truly incredible revelations and resolutions—The Winter's Tale, Pericles, and above all, Cymbeline.

Farce is essentially a dramatic genre, viewerly, spectator-friendly; romance is essentially literary, readerly, a narrative genre, making large demands upon the imagination whereas farce leaves little or nothing to it. In performance, drama occurs in the present, is immediate, visual as well as aural, shows as much as or more than it tells. Narrative is usually in the past tense, most often in the third person, and the narrator must supply descriptions of places, actions, persons and their states of mind; such work is done by actors, directors, designers, composers and set-builders in the theatre. Romance in particular relies on the scene-setting, mood-making, spell-binding voice of the narrator. ‘Once upon a time, long ago’ is the romance narrator's typical opening gambit, but not the dramatist's, whose action begins in the present, in medias res. Even if a narrator does not start his story at the beginning, as many authors of prose romance have done, from the Greeks Chariton and Xenophon of Ephesus to the Elizabethans Sidney, in his original Arcadia, and Lodge, in his Rosalynde, but rather at a decisive moment in the plot, as both Heliodorus in his Ethiopian Story and Sidney in his partially-revised Arcadia did, he must eventually go back and fill in, in his own voice or in that of one or more characters, the prior history necessary to the hearer's or reader's understanding of all that will occur. And of course he is free to move from one place and one character or group of characters to another and back again—the entrelacement of French medieval romance—confident that the hearer/reader will follow. Both the time-scale and the geographical space of romance can be vast.

But the task is much more difficult for the dramatic author who, as Shakespeare so persisted in doing, attempts to put romance matter on the stage. There is not time for all that scene-setting, back-tracking, gap-filling, digressing and explaining, and there is normally, in the dramatic mode, no narrator on hand to do it. Consider some of Shakespeare's ploys to resolve the problem of the intractability of romance story: he uses prologues, epilogues, choruses, frames, or simply great lumps of narrative within the play. The forward action stops, and someone tells the story or the necessary part of it that is supposed to have taken place previously and/or elsewhere, up to the present moment, when the present-tense of drama resumes: Orlando at the beginning of As You Like It and Oliver in Act 4, Scene 3 of the same play, Othello with his striking story about story-telling in Act 1, Scene 3, Prospero in the second scene of The Tempest, the succession of Gentlemen in Act 5, Scene 2 of The Winter's Tale. Samuel Johnson complained that in his narrative passages Shakespeare

affects … a wearisome train of circumlocution, and tells the incident imperfectly in many words, which might have been more plainly delivered in few. Narration in dramatic poetry is naturally tedious, as it is unanimated and inactive, and obstructs the progress of the action; it should therefore always be rapid and enlivened by frequent interruption. Shakespeare found it an encumbrance …²

If that is so, Shakespeare repeatedly brought it upon himself by choosing to dramatize romance material. Only once did he (and his collaborator) simply put a narrator on stage and leave him there throughout, to sort out for the spectator/auditor the tangled threads of the too-complicated plot, that of the Apollonius of Tyre story: Gower in Pericles. It is a striking recognition of the peculiar nature of the material that in the most quintessential romance in his entire dramatic canon, Shakespeare and his colleague in effect handed the famous story back to a story-teller, and a real, historical one besides. Gower refers repeatedly to his tale or story, calling it a play only in the very last line: ‘Here our play has ending’. (Then George Wilkins, who was probably Shakespeare's collaborator, wrote his prose version, ‘being the true history of the play of Pericles, as it was lately presented by the worthy and ancient poet, John Gower’, thrusting the romance firmly back into its more natural, narrative mode.³) The Apollonius story was simply too much to handle in conventional theatrical terms. As we have already seen, just that story, or one very like it, is told by Egeon in the first scene of The Comedy of Errors. Furthermore, the denouement of that story, its concluding chapter as it were, constitutes the final three hundred lines or so of the play.⁴

The farcical action is framed, overarched and subsumed by the romance plot, as the latter absorbs the characters from the former: in the family romance finale, both sets of twins as well as a husband and wife are reunited, two sons are restored to their parents, the misunderstandings between another husband and wife are resolved, as is a potential rivalry between sisters, a new pair of lovers is formed, legitimately now (and Dromio of Syracuse gratefully escapes a snare set for him by a man-hungry kitchen wench). Egeon himself, the narrator of his and his family's tragic mishaps in the first scene, becomes a character in the dramatic conclusion to his own story, absorbed in the stories told by others, suffering errors and confusion and anguish as they have done, then being saved from death, then rejoicing with them in the rescues and reunions. The language of the final scene both recalls Egeon's account of the twins' birth in his opening narrative, and anticipates that of the finales of other, later family romances: both Pericles and Cymbeline, for example, like the Abbess in The Comedy of Errors, use images of rebirth when they are reunited with children whom they had believed dead.⁵ And the last coup de théâtre of all looks forward to the ‘resurrection’ of Hermione in the final scene of The Winter's Tale: the revelation of Emilia as Egeon's wife. We had known that both sets of twins were in Ephesus since the first of the ‘errors’ in Act 1, Scene 2. Their eventual reunion was just a matter of time. But Shakespeare keeps from us the fact that the Abbess, who does not appear until the final scene anyway, is Emilia, Egeon's wife, mother of the Antipholus twins, alive and safe; the last we heard of her was in Egeon's tragic tale of their separation at sea years before. Even in Pericles, we witness the rescue of Thaisa from the sea well before the end when she is reunited with her husband. But the romance ethos and atmosphere seep into the rest of the play too, infusing even the ‘farcical core’ and the city comedy with mystery, weirdness and awe. Indeed, this early comedy is much more nearly kin to the true romances and the romance-based comedies of Shakespeare's later career than has usually been acknowledged.

Egeon's seemingly interminable narrative, ‘the wearisome train of circumlocution’, ends, and he is led away to await his fate: the past has caught up with him. The dramatic present of theatre succeeds the narrative past of romance, and the second scene opens in the midst of a conversation, in mid-sentence in fact (‘Therefore …’), begun before the three characters, Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse and the First Merchant, burst upon the scene and into the story. ‘Once upon a time’ gives way to in medias res. The very verbs and temporal indicators change, from the past, mostly distant, of Egeon's story, to the immediate present, indicative and imperative: ‘Therefore give out’ (1.2.1), ‘This very day’ (3), ‘Is apprehended’ (4), ‘not being able’ (5), ‘Dies’ (7), ‘There is’ (8). The shift is radical—plot, mode, time-scale, everything. Nevertheless, we soon begin to understand that the two apparently unrelated plots are related, and also that the threat of death to the weary old man with which the first scene ended will not be carried out, as the elements necessary to forestall it and bring about the happy denouement begin immediately to assemble: tragicomedy (or romance), not tragedy, will be the genre. The very subject of the conversation into which we intrude in the second scene is what we have just witnessed in the first, the dire sentence pronounced against Egeon. The frequent reminders of the time of day—in eight of the play's eleven scenes—keep Egeon and his impending doom on the edge of the spectator's consciousness while he is absent from the stage, from the end of 1.1 to well into Act 5, just under a third of the way through the final scene. Shakespeare's pointed observation of the unity of time—all of the action occurs between late morning and late afternoon of the same day—signals the end of the romance, its final chapter.

In the only other Shakespeare play whose time-scale is explicitly limited to one day, The Tempest, Prospero interrupts in the second scene the dramatic action begun by the storm in the first to tell Miranda the story of their lives and misadventures up to that moment. His narrative serves exactly the same purpose as Egeon's in the first scene of Errors. It is very nearly the same length (about 150 lines; Tempest 1.2.37-187) as Egeon's ‘sad stories of [his] own mishaps’, and like his, it is punctuated by questions and remarks from his auditor. In the later play too, the action that unfolds constitutes the final chapter of the story related by the father to his daughter, and that action begins with the arrival on the scene of the first of the other characters from the story who must together act out its conclusion. A similar strategy is evident in the early comedy. This is just one of the ways in which the Egeon romance plot ‘overarches’ the inner plot drawn from Plautus. Coincidences and links begin at once to appear: Antipholus and Dromio are from Syracuse, which provides the opportunity for the Merchant to tell them about their fellow countryman who has just been condemned to death (and to suggest that they ‘give out’ they are from somewhere else). Within a few minutes, the amount of money returned to Antipholus by the Merchant in the opening lines—‘There is your money that I had to keep’ (1.2.8)—and entrusted by the master to his servant, is mentioned: a thousand marks (1.2.81). That sum, we just heard, is exactly what is needed by Egeon to pay his ransom (1.1.21).

Money and trade will be prominent motifs throughout the play: Ephesus, for all its reputation as a strange and dangerous place, is also a working commercial centre, where the making of profit and the doing of deals is everyday and everybody's business. The enmity between Ephesus and Syracuse has arisen from a trade war: merchants are in the thick of it. The Duke defends the business interests of his subjects with terrible rigour. No sooner does the old merchant Egeon leave the stage to seek the pecuniary means to save his life than another merchant ostentatiously hands over just that sum to Egeon's son. The First Merchant excuses himself from accompanying Antipholus on a visit of the town because he has an appointment with ‘certain merchants’ of whom he hopes ‘to make much benefit’ (1.2.24-5). Antipholus himself proposes to ‘Peruse the traders’ (13) while on his sightseeing tour, presumably because they are one of the things the city is famous for. Several merchants, a goldsmith and a businesswoman (the Courtesan) figure among the dramatis personae. Buying and selling seem to be going on all the time. Creditors repeatedly demand payment of bills, people get arrested in the street for debt, send for money to pay fines, pay officers to arrest others. Money, purses and articles of barter (a chain, a ring) are prominent properties in any production of the play. Dromio of Syracuse's first exit is on an errand to put his master's money away safely at their inn; his absence is the occasion of the first ‘error’ when his twin comes to call his supposed master home to dinner. The word money occurs twenty-six times in Shakespeare's shortest play, more than in any other work in the canon. Marks (the amount of money) and mart also occur more times than in any other play. Gold and golden are found more often only in Timon of Athens, ducats and merchant(s) more times only in The Merchant of Venice. The rare guilders occurs only in Errors, where it appears twice. This extraordinary density of vocabulary relating to financial and commercial affairs, with the busy to-and-fro of the marketplace, makes The Comedy of Errors a true city comedy. The city itself, Ephesus, has a personality, is not just a setting, but a presence in the play's world, like Venice in The Merchant of Venice, Vienna in Measure for Measure, or Rome in Julius Caesar.⁶ But the comparison should be made also with such romance never-never lands as the wood outside Athens, the Forest of Arden, Illyria, or Prospero's island. Whatever moved Shakespeare to replace Plautus' Epidamnus with the Ephesus of romance and the New Testament, it gave him two cities in one, a twin: the bustling, mundane metropolis of urban comedy, and the weird and wonderful setting of romance.

The imagery of romance also carries over from the first scene to the second and thence to the rest of the play, binding the separate plots and the broken family together. Egeon's tale is of the sea and shipwreck, of a family torn apart, carried away from one another, helpless before the stupendous powers of nature. The motif, expressed in imagery of the sea and the loss of oneself in that vast element, is the theme of Antipholus' first soliloquy:

I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, failing 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.

(1.2.35-40)

The objects of his hopeless search and subjects of his despairing meditation, his mother and his brother, are those very ones who were lost to Egeon and his remaining son, this same Antipholus. In fact, Egeon in his long tale in the first scene, and Antipholus in his short reflection in the second, speak of the same lost members of their family, and both speak the language of the sea, the former referring literally, in his factual narrative, to a particular large body of water, the latter, in his dramatic soliloquy, likening himself, in simile, to a single drop in an even vaster gulf, the ocean. Errors has more occurrences of the word sea(s)—plus one compound, seafaring (also ocean and gulf once each)—than any of the comedies and romances except the obvious sea-story ones, The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, Pericles, and The Merchant of Venice, which has the same number; Errors has one more than Twelfth Night. The bay is mentioned three times in dialogue and once in a Folio stage direction. Only in Pericles in the entire canon do ship(s) and its compounds occur more often. The Comedy of Errors is not just farce, not just adapted Roman domestic or city comedy, it is also romance, sea-romance, family romance, and not only in the Egeon frame plot.

Adriana, the scolding but devoted wife of Antipholus of Ephesus, echoes the other Antipholus when she addresses him, mistaking him for her wayward husband:

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.

(2.2.128-32)

The conjugal conflict of domestic comedy is expressed by the distressed wife in the same terms as her unknown brother-in-law's anguish in his isolation and despair. Storm, shipwreck and loss at sea, the very stuff of romance, become metaphors for spiritual and emotional incompleteness, hopelessness, self-doubt, loss of one's identity. The sea/water motif swells and surges into all corners of the play, in floods, tears, streams, waves. In an unexpected passage of formal verse in cross-rhymed quatrains and couplets, which set it off from the blank verse and prose on either side of it, Antipholus of Syracuse, infatuated by Adriana's sister Luciana, imagines that she is a mermaid, enticing him to perdition, to lose himself in a watery bed:

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.
          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.
          Let love, being light, be drownèd if she sink.

(3.2.45-52)

Later in the scene, in a grotesque prose counterpart to Antipholus' lyrical wooing, Dromio tells him of his terror at the advances of the immense kitchen wench, the spherical ‘Nell’. Her sweat and grime are too much even for Noah's flood to wash away (106-9). In his geographical anatomization of her, the English Channel and its chalky cliffs, armadas of Spanish treasure ships, and such faraway lands across the seas as America and the Indies, are evoked (116-44). The scene ends with Antipholus' resolution to take the first ship available and flee this increasingly disturbing place. Salt water washes over and through the whole fabric of the play.

Sinking and drowning, dissolution, transformation, metamorphosis, madness—these and related processes and states constitute a central motif, running through the play from beginning to end. They occur and recur, weaving a dense web of associations and allusions, criss-crossing and bridging the various plot elements, making one whole. Words such as changed and transformed echo throughout. The mood is sometimes humorous, sometimes fearful, sometimes anguished. Adriana wonders if age is diminishing her beauty, causing her husband to seek his pleasure with other women (2.1.88-102). When old Egeon's son does not know him, he supposes that grief and ‘time's extremity’ must have changed him beyond recognition (5.1.297-9). Both use the rare word defeatures, its only two occurrences in Shakespeare. Dromio of Syracuse is convinced he is an ass in the scene with Antipholus just mentioned (3.2.77), and that the ‘drudge’, ‘diviner’, or ‘witch’ who claims him for her betrothed would, had he not been resolute and fled, have turned him into another kind of beast:

And I think if my breast had not been made of faith, and my heart of steel,
She had transformed me to a curtal dog, and made me turn i'th' wheel.

(150-1)

‘I am transformèd, master, am not I?’ wails the same bewildered Dromio earlier (2.2.198), convinced he is an ape (201). Luciana tells him that he is merely an ass (202), having already called him ‘snail’ and ‘slug’ a few lines before (197), as he muttered nonsense about goblins, elves, sprites, and being pinched black and blue (193-5). He even feels like an ass: ‘'Tis true: she rides me, and I long for grass. / 'Tis so, I am an ass’ (203-4). In the very next scene, the other Dromio is told by his master ‘I think thou art an ass’, and replies in much the same way as his brother: ‘Marry, so it doth appear / By the wrongs I suffer and the blows I bear’ (3.1.15-16); he confirms his metamorphosis a few scenes later: ‘I am an ass indeed. You may prove it by my long ears’ (4.4.30-1). The workaday city of Ephesus itself is curiously animate: its buildings and houses bear the names of exotic fauna—Centaur, Phoenix, Tiger and Porcupine. More than thirty names of animals, real and legendary, generic and specific, occur in the play.

The Duke makes explicit the idea of metamorphosis (and in so doing looses its hold upon fevered imaginations) in the final scene when he exclaims ‘I think you all have drunk of Circe's cup’ (5.1.270). No one has, of course. But the allusion to the goddess-enchantress of ancient legend recalls her transformation of Odysseus' men into swine in Book 10 of the Odyssey, most famous of all classical sea-romances. It also recalls the ‘siren’ and ‘mermaid’ of Antipholus' rhapsody in 3.2 when he was under the spell of Luciana's ‘enchanting presence and discourse’, and his subsequent determination to ‘stop [his] ears against the mermaid's song’ (169): it was Circe who gave Odysseus advice on how to avoid the deadly Sirens' song by stopping his men's ears with wax so they could not hear it as they sailed past (Odyssey, Book 12). Apart from one in Act 5 of the First Part of Henry VI (a passage which may not have been written by Shakespeare), this is the only allusion to Circe, by name at any rate, in the canon.

Madness, the fear of it in oneself and the conviction of it in others, is a closely related theme, as are magic and conjuring. Even before anything bizarre or distressing happens to him, Antipholus of Syracuse voices in his first soliloquy his trepidation at finding himself in Ephesus, with its renowned ‘libertines of sin’, eye-deceiving, body-deforming, mind-changing, soul-killing (1.2.98-102). The lexical group of words formed from and including mad—madness, madly, madman, etc.—are more frequent in Shakespeare's shortest play than in any others except his longest, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night, a play which has more than that and a pair of twins in common with the earlier comedy. The theme was already there, of course, in Menaechmi: the local brother's relations and acquaintances think he is mad as he seems not to know any of them, and a doctor is sent for to cure him, the ancestor of Shakespeare's schoolmaster-exorcist Dr Pinch. The treatment prescribed for the supposedly mad Ephesian master and servant is exactly that imposed upon the allegedly mad Malvolio in Twelfth Night: ‘They must be bound and laid in some dark room’ (4.4.95). The furious frustration of Antipholus of Ephesus is exactly that of Malvolio: to those who are convinced that one is mad, nothing one can say—especially ‘I am not mad’ (4.4.59)—will change their minds. The frantic comic tension that has built up in The Comedy of Errors prior to Act 4, Scene 4, creates a quite different atmosphere from that in Twelfth Night when Malvolio's tormentors insist that he is mad, but the utter conviction and deadly earnestness of everybody (including, particularly, the grieving wife Adriana) give the underlying theme of supposed madness a potential gravity and disquieting edge missing from the later play. In Twelfth Night, Malvolio's alleged madness is a prank, which deteriorates into a cruel joke. He is the unfortunate butt. Everyone knows that Malvolio is not really mad (not in the way the conspirators pretend he is anyway), the threat ends with the joke, though the distasteful impression of mental cruelty may remain, as is seen in much modern criticism and many modern productions, in which Malvolio is made an almost tragic figure. Feste's Sir Topas is a much more sinister exorcist than the pompous mountebank Pinch. Everyone concerned does believe that Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus are mad, no one is pretending or playing a game. Only the denouement resolves that problem and saves the two from further attempts at ‘curing’ them. Of course, the farcical frenzy has reached such a peak, and Pinch is so inept, that any real threat remains well below the surface in performance. It is there nevertheless, part of the pervasive romance atmosphere.

Still another aspect of the madness theme, different from both the supposed madness of Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus and the alleged madness of Malvolio, is the fear that one is mad, or going that way, oneself. This is the predicament of the Syracusan pair from early on in the action. It reinforces strongly their isolation in a strange country, particularly that of Antipholus, who is given several soliloquies in which he expresses his fears. Such fears, such isolation, generating self-doubt, failure of the will, the temptation to surrender, and sometimes madness itself, are common to romance heroes from Odysseus of Ithaca to Apollonius of Tyre to Lancelot du Lac to Frodo Baggins of the Shire, struggling on in his lonely mission in the hostile Land of Mordor, and Luke Skywalker facing the evil forces of the Empire. For some of those heroes, as for Antipholus of Syracuse, the absence of family, the uncertainty even that he has a family any more, is a main factor in their despair and sense of isolation. Antipholus is peculiarly vulnerable because he is lonely, and is susceptible to the least suggestion that he may be losing his senses and his self. Ephesus is definitely not the place to be when one is in that frame of mind. Egeon is not the only one who finds danger in that strange, hostile city. For Antipholus too is a romance hero, wandering, searching, isolated, fearful, half-believing already the things he has heard about Ephesus and resolved to be gone as soon as possible, yet held there as if by magnetism. Before the end of Act 2, Scene 2, though he suspects some ‘error’ that ‘drives our eyes and ears amiss’ (2.2.187), he is ready, until he knows ‘this sure uncertainty’, to ‘entertain the offered fallacy’ (188-9), that is Adriana's insistent invitation to be her husband and come in to dinner, though he may wonder: ‘What, was I married to her in my dream?’ (185). In just such terms, another twin, Sebastian in Twelfth Night, a stranger in Illyria, when enjoined by Olivia to go with her to her house, marvels ‘Or I am mad, or else this is a dream’, and resolves still to sleep (4.1.60-2). Later, while he hopes that ‘this may be some error but no madness’ (4.3.10), he is driven to conclude the contrary: ‘I am mad, / Or else the lady's mad’ (15-16). In any case, ‘There's something in't / That is deceivable’ (20-1).⁷ The close parallels between the predicaments and reactions of Antipholus of Syracuse and Sebastian, even to the very language and images in which they express themselves, illustrate well the kinship between the ‘early’ and the ‘middle’ comedy written some seven years later. Surely the twinship of Sebastian and Viola in the later play, whichever source he may have drawn it from and despite the differences in plot (and gender), triggered recollections and produced echoes in Shakespeare's mind of passages composed for the earlier one. We do not hesitate to affix the label ‘romance’ to Twelfth Night. The fear-of-madness motif is common to both plays.

The vulnerability of Antipholus is strikingly emphasized by the scenes in which he is seen in the company and under the spell—as he believes—of a woman. These imagined enchantresses succeed each other in a sequence of neatly distributed scenes, one per act: Adriana in 2.2, Luciana in 3.2 (in which we also hear of Dromio's encounter with the terrible ‘Nell’, another sorceress), the Courtesan in 4.3, the Abbess (his mother) in 5.1; another element in the play's tight and tidy structure. And as prelude to the sequence, there is the soliloquy in 1.2 in which Antipholus voices his fear of sorcerers, witches and the like. His case is similar to that of a hero of Arthurian romance, Perceval, one of the Grail knights. Brought up by his mother in ignorance of chivalry (his father, the famous King Pellinor, had been killed, and the widow tries to protect her sons from a similar fate), his encounters with women—his mother, his saintly sister, the fiend in female guise several times—underline his naïvety and his susceptibility to error. During his Grail quest, he narrowly avoids succumbing to temptation on several occasions when beautiful women, always of course fiends in human form, attempt to seduce him. When Antipholus of Syracuse, convinced that he and Dromio are bewitched, calls for divine aid—‘Some blessèd power deliver us from hence’ (4.3.44)—the Courtesan appears, not a heavenly rescuer, but the fiend herself. In Adrian Noble's 1983 RSC production, she rose spectacularly from beneath the stage floor, scantily and seductively clad in red, black, and white. The terrified Antipholus recognizes her immediately: ‘Satan, avoid! I charge thee, tempt me not!’ (48); then, to Dromio, emphatically: ‘It is the devil’ (50). Epithets such as ‘Satan’, ‘devil’, ‘fiend’, ‘sorceress’, ‘witch’, ten or more of them in a thirty-line passage, are hurled at the supposed ‘devil's dam’ (48-79). In the very next scene, 4.4, Satan is hailed again by the would-be healer Pinch, who exhorts him to leave his abode in the allegedly mad Antipholus of Ephesus. The madness theme is now given expression in satanic terms. One brother sees the devil in the woman standing before him, the other is believed by all who know him to have the devil in him. Divine aid will come, and in female form, bringing safety and relief from the fear of madness, when the Abbess appears and gives her unknown Syracusan son and his servant sanctuary. In contrast to his brother, Antipholus of Ephesus is always seen in the company of men only—his servant (or the other, wrong, one), friends, business associates, creditors, the officer who arrests him—until the conjuring scene (4.4), when at last he is surrounded by women—his wife, his sister-in-law, the Courtesan—who insist that he is mad. The same woman, the Abbess, mother to this Antipholus also, will resolve that error too. The two brothers are further distinguished by the fact that the Syracusan has no fewer than six soliloquies and asides, totalling fifty lines, while the Ephesian has none. The one, isolated, fearful, impressionable, is the vulnerable romance protagonist, the other, irascible, defiant, impetuous, the jealous husband of domestic comedy.

A complex of related motifs, made up of opposite or complementary states or processes, underlies and reinforces the more prominent and explicit ones, such as metamorphosis, loss of identity and madness. Losing and finding, closing and opening, binding and freeing, spellbinding and spellbreaking, condemning and pardoning, separating and uniting, beating and embracing, dying and being (re)born, and other such pairs are the play's thematic sinews. And binding all of them together, ensuring that the positive, hopeful one of each pair—finding, freeing, pardoning, uniting, embracing—prevails in the end, is Time. ‘The triumph of Time’, the subtitle of Robert Greene's short romance Pandosto, published in 1588 and used by Shakespeare as his main source for The Winter's Tale, could well stand as a subtitle for all romances, including The Comedy of Errors. Time, of which we are repeatedly made aware as it ticks away, bringing the happy end of the story ever closer, and its nevertheless ineluctable ravages, the work of its ‘deformèd hand’, are the subject of two comic exchanges, between Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse (2.2), and between the same Dromio and Adriana at the end of 4.2. Dromio is Time's spokesman, and at the very end of the play, he defers to his brother, his ‘elder’, in acknowledgement of its inexorable rule over all persons and things, despite such apparent anomalies as twinship. It was noted earlier that the time of day is mentioned frequently, some ten times, in eight of the play's eleven scenes, and that does not include the two comic duologues just referred to and a few other general references to the hour, clocks, sunset, etc. In only two other plays in the canon, As You Like It and Henry IV, Part One, both considerably longer than Errors, does the word clock occur more often, and in only a small number of plays, a half-dozen or so, does hour(s) occur more often.

As the time of day, five o'clock, set for Egeon's execution, is announced—‘By this, I think, the dial point's at five’ (5.1.118)—the Duke and the old man return to the stage for the first time since the end of the first scene. The Abbess has just withdrawn into the abbey into which the Syracusan pair had fled (5.1.37). The Ephesian pair had previously been forcibly removed into the Phoenix to be bound and laid in a dark room (4.4.131). Both pairs of twins are hidden away, the farce is suspended, and the main romance plot resumes. A new order intervenes in the person of the Abbess, one of genuine divine authority, not Pinch's sham, and the solemn temporal authority of the Duke reasserts itself after the anarchic disorder of the previous scenes. The farce is suspended, but the comedy continues and bridges the two plots: Adriana throws herself prostrate at the Duke's feet, impeding his progress towards the place of execution, literally halting the tragic progress in its tracks. At this moment the two plots meet and merge, for Adriana pleads with the Duke to intercede on her behalf with the Abbess to get her husband, whom she believes to be in the abbey, restored to her. Just as the First Merchant in 1.2 links the Egeon frame and the inner play by informing the newly arrived Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse of another Syracusan's fate, so now another member of the city's thriving commercial community (Angelo the goldsmith in the present edition) announces the arrival of the Duke and Egeon at the appointed time, signalling the opening out of the action to embrace both plots. His interlocutor is sure that they are to witness the final act of a tragedy: ‘See where they come. We will behold his death’ (5.1.128). But this is romance, not tragedy. To be sure, the unravelling will take some three hundred more lines, and there will be further supposes, surprises, reversals and irruptions, even some pathos, as when Egeon pleads with the wrong son and servant, the ones who have never known him (286-330). Again, the parallel with Twelfth Night is evident: in the later play, Antonio, under arrest and in mortal danger, pleads desperately with the supposed Sebastian whom he had befriended earlier. But it is the uncomprehending Viola in her disguise as Cesario whom he addresses (Twelfth Night 3.4.325-64). The finale of Errors is one of Shakespeare's most eventful and complex, a true romance denouement, anticipating those of later plays such as As You Like It, Twelfth Night, All's Well that Ends Well, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale.⁸ At 430 lines, it is considerably longer than the final scenes of all but three of the other comedies and romances in the canon: Love's Labour's Lost, Measure for Measure and Cymbeline.

Time, which Dromio claimed had gone back an hour (4.2.53), has in fact gone back years, to when the family of Egeon and Emilia was whole, before the tragic events narrated by the husband and father a couple of hours earlier took place, thirty-three or twenty-five years ago, it matters little. The boys, all four of them, were infants then, new-born. It is, fittingly, the Abbess, the holy mother, who gives explicit utterance to the metaphor of nativity, describing this moment as one of rebirth:

Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail
Of you, my sons, and till this present hour
My heavy burden ne'er deliverèd.
The Duke, my husband, and my children both,
And you the calendars of their nativity,
Go to a gossips' feast, and joy with me.
After so long grief, such felicity!

(5.1.402-8)

The imminent death with which the play began is transfigured into birth; then we met with things dying, now with things newborn. The stern, death-dealing Duke of Act 1, Scene 1, becomes the generous, life-giving magistrate, refusing the ransom offered by Antipholus of Ephesus for his new-found father: ‘It shall not need. Thy father hath his life’ (392)—so much for Ephesian law which he had been so scrupulous to enforce in the opening scene. Patron already to one Antipholus, the Duke becomes godfather to both at their re-christening. The ever-moving clock in Theodor Komisarjevsky's famous 1938 Stratford-upon-Avon production … should have been whirling furiously backward at this point, turning back the years, for in the biggest and best of the comedy's errors, Time has indeed gone back, all the way from death to birth, from the intense dramatic denouement to the expansive romance narrative ‘Once upon a time’, from the end of the play to the beginning of the story. That, essentially, is what happens in romance.

FOUR CENTURIES OF ‘ERRORS’ ON THE PAGE AND ON THE STAGE

Nevertheless, the play seems to have been either played as farce, or denatured and transformed into a saccharine love comedy with many cuts and the addition of music, for a very long time. In the early nineteenth century, around the time Coleridge was proclaiming its uniqueness as ‘poetical farce’, the playwright and show producer Frederick Reynolds mounted a musical extravaganza in London which set the tone of productions for much of the following century and a half. After those early documented performances in 1594 and 1604, the play seems to have had no stage life to speak of until the eighteenth century. No doubt its brevity, perhaps too its low-comic and farcical aspects did not recommend it to later seventeenth-century playgoers, after the Restoration in any case. We have seen that Dryden denounced that kind of theatre. The Comedy of Errors was apparently not one of the many Elizabethan plays to be adapted for the Restoration stage. Little is heard of it in the theatre until the mid-eighteenth century, when heavily adapted and ‘arranged’ versions began appearing on London's stages. A farce, Every Body Mistaken, had appeared as early as 1716; it seems to have been loosely based on Errors. A two-act comedy, See if You Like it, or 'Tis All a Mistake, opened at Drury Lane in 1734, and apparently had a long life both there and at Covent Garden. It competed with at least one other heavily adapted version, which may have been the first of Thomas Hull's several reworkings, from 1762. So, albeit in considerably altered, emended and augmented form, something vaguely reminiscent of Shakespeare's play was around to entertain audiences through most of the eighteenth century.

Some years before Coleridge made his solemn pronouncement upon the genre of Errors, W. Woods adapted it for performance at the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, giving his three-act version the title The Twins, or Which is Which?, and defending the liberties taken with the original: ‘the characters and incidents in general of this entertaining piece would rank with much more propriety under the title of Farce. It would also … obtain a great advantage in representation by being shortened’.⁹ Despite being by far the shortest play in the canon! Woods (who played Antipholus of Ephesus) went on to opine that ‘the similarity of character, and quick succession of mistakes, must render the subject very liable to pall upon an audience during the exhibition of five acts; whereas, by being reduced to three, the judgement will not be so much offended, having less time to reflect on the improbability of the events.’ Woods's text was published in London in 1780. His version temporarily superseded that of Thomas Hull at Covent Garden in August 1790. Hull's may be considered the first major, serious adaptation for the contemporary theatre. His latest version was first presented at Covent Garden in January 1779. Hull, attempting to rescue the play from its perceived hopeless (and incomprehensible) triviality and vulgarity, had sentimentalized it by expanding the wooing scenes, for example in Act 3, Scene 2, where he interpolated some sixty lines before returning to something like Shakespeare's text, which he nevertheless curtailed radically (Odell, ii. 46-7). Much of the text is, in Odell's acerb terms, ‘Hull undiluted by a word of Shakespeare’ (46). But it did represent an attempt to make something other than a slapstick show of the play, and it seems to have pleased the London theatregoing public, as John Philip Kemble's revival nearly thirty years after its first performances testifies: when Kemble revived Errors in 1808, it was Hull's text with a few modifications that he staged.¹⁰

That year, the dramatist and novelist Elizabeth Inchbald published a twenty-five volume collection called The British Theatre; or A Collection of Plays, which are acted at the Theatres Royal, Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and Haymarket. In volume i, she printed Hull's version of Errors ‘as performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden … from the Prompt Book’, and refers in her ‘Remarks’ to his ‘judicious alterations and arrangements’. She performed a genuine piece of theatre-historical work, providing complete cast lists for each play in her large collection. We learn, for example, that Charles Kemble, younger brother of John Philip and father of Fanny Kemble, played Antipholus of Ephesus. We discover also that Hull had identified two Merchants; the distinction was apparently not made by editors before Alexander Dyce (1857). Nevertheless, Inchbald enthusiastically joined the ranks of the doubters and detractors:

This play is supposed, by some commentators, to have been among Shakespeare's earliest productions; whilst others will not allow that he had any farther share in the work, than to embellish it with additional words, lines, speeches, or scenes, to gratify its original author, or the manager of the theatre … As it is partly decided that the work is not wholly Shakespeare's, full liberty may be taken to find fault with it. Of all improbable stories, this is the most so. The Ghost in Hamlet, Witches in Macbeth, and Monster in The Tempest, seem all like events in the common course of nature, when compared to those which take place in this drama. Its fable verges on impossibility, but the incidents which arise from it could never have occurred.

Meanwhile on the Continent, in Vienna, The Comedy of Errors was undergoing a different kind of transformation, to the opera stage, at the hands this time of more than competent adapters, the Anglo-Italian composer Stephen Storace (1762-96) and the great Italian librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749-1838). Storace, a friend and almost certainly a pupil of Mozart's and brother of Nancy Storace (1765-1817), the soprano who created the role of Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro, produced his opera on a libretto by Da Ponte, Gli Equivoci, based on a French translation of Errors, in 1786, the same year as Figaro. Da Ponte was librettist for that Mozart opera also, as well as for Don Giovanni (1787) and Così fan tutte (1790). It is intriguing to speculate that Mozart must have seen and heard Storace's opera based on Shakespeare's least musical comedy, and may well have advised his younger friend on the score. Winton Dean has high praise for Da Ponte's text, though he worked from a French translation of the play: ‘by far the most skilful’ of late eighteenth-century Shakespearian librettos; he was after all adept at opera buffa.¹¹ Da Ponte cut the Egeon-Emilia intrigue and the Courtesan, and had Euphemio and Dromio of Syracuse shipwrecked on the shore of Ephesus. Nancy Storace was Sofronia (Adriana). Another of Mozart's Vienna circle, the Irish tenor Michael Kelly, who created the operatic role of Euphemio (Antipholus) of Ephesus in Gli Equivoci (as well as Basilio in The Marriage of Figaro in the same year), wrote in his highly entertaining Reminiscences (1826) that ‘it became the rage, and well it might, for the music of Storace was beyond description beautiful’.¹² The composer himself must have thought so too: he borrowed from his own score in at least two later operas in English, No Song, No Supper (1790) and The Pirate (1792) (SMC, 215).¹³ By coincidence, in 1786, the same year as Storace's Gli Equivoci, the French opera composer André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry (1741-1813) produced Les Méprises par Ressemblance at Fontainebleau, with libretto by Joseph Patrat. The text, drawn mainly from Menaechmi, seems also to contain borrowings from The Comedy of Errors (SMC, 217-18).

Making The Comedy of Errors palatable to early nineteenth-century audiences—which implies of course that it was felt to be unpalatable as it stood in its original form, as represented in the grand editorial tradition, deriving in a straight line from the folios and those early editions of Rowe, Pope and Theobald—was the concern not only of more or less ‘legitimate’ theatrical producers like Hull, Woods and Kemble. In 1819, Frederick Reynolds ‘laid violent hands’, as Odell puts it, upon Errors, and turned it into a musical spectacle of vast proportions. Reynolds's advertisement indicates the scope of his intentions:

The admirers of Shakespeare having long regretted, that most of his Lyrical Compositions, have never been sung in a Theatre, the Comedy of Errors (one of the shortest and most lively of his Comedies) has been selected as the best vehicle for their introduction,—A few additional scenes and passages were absolutely necessary for this purpose; and however deficient these may be found, it is hoped they will be readily pardoned, as having served to bring on the stage, more of the ‘native wood notes wild’ of our Immortal Bard!

(Odell, ii. 131-2)

Shakespeare's least musical comedy had that deficiency corrected at last, and with a vengeance. The title-page of the 1819 edition specifies the types and sources of the musical embellishments: ‘Songs, Duets, Glees, and Choruses, Selected entirely from the Plays, Poems and Sonnets of Shakespeare … The Overture and new Music composed, and the Glees arranged, by Mr. Bishop. The Selections from Dr. Arne, Sir J. Stevenson, Stevens, and Mozart’ (Odell, ii. 131). A hunting scene is interpolated in Act 3, only to allow the singing of ‘When icicles hang by the wall’ from Love's Labour's Lost. A drinking party in Act 4 at the house of Balthasar (‘a character certainly harmless enough as Shakespeare left him’, quipped Odell) provides the setting for a rendition of ‘Bacchus, monarch of the vine’ from Antony and Cleopatra. Other songs include: ‘It was a lover and his lass’, ‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind’, and ‘Under the greenwood tree’ (As You Like It), ‘Sweet rose, fair flower’ and ‘Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good’ (The Passionate Pilgrim), ‘Willow, willow’ (Othello), ‘Tell me where is fancy bred’ (The Merchant of Venice), ‘Take, O take those lips away’ (Measure for Measure). Lines from Marlowe's ‘Come live with me and be my love’ (printed in The Passionate Pilgrim) are sung by Adriana, and the show ends in a medley of songs from A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. Henry Rowley Bishop, a prolific composer and arranger, is remembered today chiefly for ‘Lo, here the gentle lark’, for soprano and obbligato flute, which he took from Venus and Adonis (l. 853ff.) and inserted forcibly into Reynolds's extravaganza that passed under the title of The Comedy of Errors.¹⁴

Many found Reynolds's enormities just the thing to save a silly, incredible play. The critic for the European Magazine wrote in December 1819:

The revival of a comedy of Shakespeare, with interpolated songs, this evening, was a dramatic epoch, and it seems the favourite expedient of managers, after a run of unpopularity, to recommend them once more to the public good will. If this was the idea in which The Comedy of Errors was revived, its reception has amply justified the hazard. It was attended by the most crowded house since the beginning of the season, and the audience were throughout in a unanimous temper to applaud. We will not repeat the plot, for who does not read Shakespeare? … No illusion of the stage can give probability to the perpetual mutations of four persons, paired in such perfect similitude, that the servant mistakes his master, and the master his servant: the wife her husband, and the husband his wife. All this so strongly contradicts common experience, that it repels us even in description; but on the stage, with the necessary dissimilarity of countenance, voice, manner, and movement, that occurs between the actors, however disguised by dress, the improbability becomes almost offensive.¹⁵

The anonymous reviewer, with all his refined sensibilities, is carried away by his own rhetoric: no husband mistakes his wife, because the wife in question, Adriana, has no twin. Even the farce, let alone what little may have been left of the romance, if anything, failed to work for the dyspeptic critic. But he, and the audience too apparently, put up with the absurdity of the pairs of twins ‘for the sake of the music, which was abundant, and in general happily selected’, though the selection of songs ‘might have been more appropriate to the scene’. He concluded that ‘the drama … bids fair to attain a higher popularity than it has ever done before, when bereft of its new musical accompaniments’ (69).

Thus within a few decades, we find Coleridge defending Errors as unique Shakespearian work, a ‘poetical farce’; Woods arguing that the play is indeed a farce, and needs to be shortened so that its absurd plot may be comprehensible and thus acceptable to a modern audience who couldn't put up with a full-length version; Elizabeth Inchbald alternately snorting at the absurdity and sniffing at the distasteful beating of servants (‘a custom that is abolished, except in the West Indies’); and Reynolds and Bishop, to the general applause of critic and spectator, inflating the thing and stuffing it with extraneous music of all sorts, covering up the farce and smothering any remaining hint of a coherent narrative line or dramatic suspense beneath ‘songs and scenery’, of which it was found to be in dire need.

While theatrical producers, even the more serious ones, who deigned to take up the play at all decked it out in a variety of borrowed finery, critics before Coleridge had had little that was good to say about it, being mostly content to note its Plautine provenance. Gerard Langbaine had ventured a little further than that as early as 1691, preferring Shakespeare's to Warner's version: ‘This play is founded on Plautus his Maenechmi, and if it be not a just translation, 'tis at least a paraphrase, and I think far beyond the translation, call'd Menechmus, which was printed 4o. Lond. 1595’.¹⁶ Early eighteenth-century critics—Rowe, Gildon, Dennis—all commented on the Roman derivation of Errors, citing this as proof that Shakespeare knew Latin; unlike Langbaine, they apparently took no notice of Warner's version, or considered the possibility that Shakespeare may have known it. Both Rowe and Gildon mention ‘the doggerel’ of some of the verse of the play.¹⁷ Warburton, in his edition of 1747, placed Errors with The Taming of the Shrew in ‘Class IV’ of the comedies, as being ‘certainly not of Shakespeare’.¹⁸ Pope, as we have already seen, had relegated some passages, mostly of the despised ‘doggerel’ in the Dromios' speeches, to the bottom of the page and small print as being probably unauthentic. As far as I can discover, Warburton was the first to deny Shakespeare's authorship of the entire play. From that outer darkness it struggled to return to the fold. Later in the century, Johnson and Farmer, among others, were concerned mostly with the question of whether or not Shakespeare read Plautus in Latin or got his plot from Warner's translation of ‘the only play of Plautus which was then in English’. As late as 1817, shortly before Coleridge attempted to salvage it, as farce anyway, Hazlitt, placing Errors last in his Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, began his very brief remarks by saying: ‘This comedy is taken very much from the Menaechmi of Plautus, and is not an improvement on it. Shakespear appears to have bestowed no great pains on it, and there are but few passages which bear the decided stamp of his genius’.¹⁹ If the play's theatrical fortunes began to improve by the middle of the nineteenth century, its reputation remained low, as did those of a number of the comedies; the later nineteenth century admired the great tragedies, including the Roman plays, and the actor-managers found roles more suited to their talents and showmanship in them and in some of the history plays than in the comedies, with a very few exceptions, such as Shylock and Benedick. Actresses, on the other hand, found more challenges in the comedies and romances—Kate, Titania, Portia, Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola, Innogen, Hermione, Miranda. But Adriana and Luciana could hardly compete as star vehicles in such company.

Samuel Phelps, manager of Sadler's Wells from 1844 to 1862, restored something like Shakespeare's texts to the London stage, supplanting the often grossly overlaid and mangled versions that had become traditional. Odell is categorical: ‘Phelps gave more of Shakespeare in a play than did any other of the actor-managers for two hundred and fifty years’ (ii. 281). Among his many ‘firsts’ were the first production of Pericles (1854) since the Restoration, and the first Antony and Cleopatra (1849) for nearly a century. He staged all but a few of Shakespeare's plays, and Errors was one that benefited from his exceptionally responsible treatment of the texts. Phelps's 1855 production at the suburban Sadler's Wells was one of his triumphs in a decade that saw his restorations of, among others, Timon of Athens, Henry V, Pericles, Love's Labour's Lost and The Taming of the Shrew. Phelps must have been an extraordinarily versatile performer as well as a sensitive and intelligent director: besides reviving roles such as Timon, Henry V, Pericles and Antony, he is said to have excelled as Lear, Othello—and Bottom, in his own outstanding 1853 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.²⁰ His Errors may be considered the first serious attempt at rehabilitation of the play on the London professional stage. It was followed in 1864, the tercentenary of Shakespeare's birth, by another textually faithful production at the Princess's Theatre, played without an interval and including all the scenes from the original text. The main attraction was the Irish identical twins, Charles and Henry Webb, as the two Dromios (Odell, ii. 300-1). It was a gimmick, to be sure, and the Webbs got top billing in the publicity, but Shakespeare's text was again staged more or less as it had been written, and as it had probably not been staged in London between its few recorded Elizabethan and Jacobean performances and Phelps's revival in the previous decade.

The Comedy of Errors reached the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre's Stratford stage in 1882. The director, Edward Compton, played Dromio of Ephesus. In a preface to the Memorial Theatre acting edition published at the time, C. E. Flower makes a point about the text of the ‘Comedy, or as we should now call it, Farce’ being fully restored. So the tradition of Errors as farce died hard. On the critical front, little changed. Editions continued to appear at frequent intervals, of course: they included the major Cambridge Shakespeare of Clark, Glover and Wright (1863-6) and its satellite Globe Shakespeare, used worldwide as a college text for generations, the Arden Shakespeare edition by Henry Cuningham in 1907 and John Dover Wilson's New Shakespeare (Cambridge) in 1922. Errors was respectable, merely by virtue of being included in respectable, new scholarly editions of Shakespeare's works. It could be read like all the others, though the critics had little to say about it. It could also be seen now and again at the theatre: there were revivals at Stratford in 1905, 1914 and 1916, then none until 1938. In those productions, the different actor-directors took different parts: Sir Frank Benson was Antipholus of Syracuse in 1905, Patrick Kirwan was Dromio of Syracuse in 1914, and Sir Philip Ben Greet played Dromio of Ephesus in 1916; Greet had taken the same role in a production that he co-directed at Terry's Theatre, London, in 1899.

In 1938 began a series of remarkable, memorable productions of Errors in Stratford. That year, the Russian director Theodor Komisarjevsky staged the play on a large, stylized but vaguely Mediterranean set, which he designed—‘a romantic huddle of pink and green and grey and yellow houses’ wrote the Times reviewer; ‘a scene of dolls' houses in pastel shades … a Christmas pantomime as it might be staged in Moscow’ mused Clive McMann in the Daily Mail—with the main buildings named in the text clearly marked. … W. A. Darlington in the Daily Telegraph saw ‘an Ephesus outside time and beyond geography’. Timelessness, zaniness and an atmosphere of comic anarchy pervaded the production, and they became hallmarks of productions both in Stratford and elsewhere in the following half-century. Komisarjevsky peopled his Ephesus with additional characters: a usurer, an innkeeper, a tailor, a fisherman, two sailors, two ladies, four officers, an attendant for the Duke—and Nell. A prominent feature of the production, remarked upon by many reviewers, was the clock on a tower at the centre of the set, referred to previously: from time to time, it would strike an hour that did not correspond to the position of the hands, which would then whirl round to catch up. The director-designer's awareness of the crucial importance of time in the play is abundantly clear from the prompt books, in which specific directions concerning the clock are frequent: ‘Clock 12’ (end of 1.1); ‘Clock 1. Turn hands of clock quickly to 2’ (end of 1.2); ‘Clock strikes 3’ (end of 2.2); ‘Clock 4’ (end of 3.2); ‘Clock chimes up to 8’ (4.2.53 in the present edition, altered by Komisarjevsky to ‘It was nine ere I left him, and now the clock strikes eight’); ‘4 Quarters. Clock 9’ (end of 4.4); ‘4 Quarters. Clock 10’ (5.1.118 in the present edition).²¹ His way with troublesome bits of text was more peremptory: for example, he simply cut the notorious passage at 2.1.110-14. Like their predecessors more than a century earlier who had applauded Reynolds's adaptation of a tiresome play, some reviewers congratulated Komisarjevsky for overcoming the apprentice playwright's shortcomings: ‘The producer, happy to find his author at his worst, throws him away and substitutes a dancing and timeless farce. It is mime, music, madness, what you like; the one thing it is determined not to be is Shakespeare's play. On that barren and tedious farce it superimposes the wittiest and gayest extravaganzas’ (Lionel Hale, in the News Chronicle, 13 April 1938). The Yorkshire Post critic commended Komisarjevsky, who ‘with some authority, decided that [the play] was rubbish, and to show his contempt, has burlesqued it into a French farce’; the critic was sure that the ‘studied affront to Bardolators’ would be ‘Stratford's biggest box office success to date, wail the purists never so much’. Critical commonplaces die hard. Thus, well into the twentieth century, the play's patent feebleness was felt to justify any liberties in production (if produced it must be), just as it always had. That condescension and that permissiveness continued, with rare exceptions, to characterize critical response and stage revivals.

Other notable productions have marked the second half of the twentieth century, as The Comedy of Errors has continued to please audiences, if not always jaundiced reviewers. Clifford Williams staged the play at Stratford in 1962, and his production was still being revived ten years later. … Most critics of course stuck to their preconceptions: ‘However can you stage such a conglomeration of improbabilities?’ (Gloucester Echo, 12 September 1962); ‘It is no mistake to see nothing more in The Comedy of Errors than an endearing Shakespearian frolic’ (Birmingham Dispatch). A few reacted more sensitively to Williams's effort: finding it ‘less fanciful than the earlier one by Komisarjevsky’, the reviewer in The Tablet remarked the ‘underlying note of seriousness established in the opening scene by a moving performance by Tony Church as Aegeon … beautifully spoken and played with touching sadness’. While Edmund Gardner in the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald (14 September 1962) still thought the play ‘early, flawed, unsubtle stuff’, he admitted that ‘it still works’. This relatively positive appraisal seems to have been due to both Williams's intelligent reading of the play and the outstanding ensemble playing of the Royal Shakespeare Company: ‘a skin-tight, integrated display of ensemble work … that kind of acting which mixes physical slickness with complete understanding of comedy's vocal nuances’. It is striking that critics began seeing more in the play when directors and actors showed that there was more in it than slapstick, or ‘a neat box of tricks for getting laughs’ (Wolverhampton Express and Star, 12 September 1962). Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times (16 September 1962) praised Alec McCowen, whose ‘bewildered impudence and sudden snatches of fear, finds more in Antipholus of Syracuse than one would have thought possible’. Hobson, in the same review, also put his finger on a crucial dimension of Williams's production: ‘The wild comedy of irrational recognitions is given consistency and a curious force by the suggestion that there is behind it something vaguely disquieting.’

It may be more than mere coincidence that academic critics too began to treat the play seriously, and to recognize its potential depths, at around the same time as first Komisarjevsky then Clifford Williams gave it serious, large-scale stagings in their respective Stratford productions of 1938 and 1962. H. B. Charlton accorded a full chapter to Errors in his Shakespearean Comedy of 1939, and in the same year G. R. Elliot published an influential article on ‘Weirdness in The Comedy of Errors’ that drew attention to that hitherto neglected aspect (University of Toronto Quarterly, 9, 95-106). It was in 1938 too that Richard Rodgers's musical comedy The Boys from Syracuse was staged, with book by George Abbott (who also directed), lyrics by Lorenz Hart, and choreography by George Balanchine. Though the libretto retained but a couple of lines from Shakespeare's text, that great Broadway success doubtless brought the play indirectly to the attention of many American theatregoers. A film version was released in 1940.

By the early 1960s, further critical studies had ensured the place of Errors in the canonical fold, after several centuries of disdain or, at best, patronizing tolerance: among them, T. W. Baldwin's William Shakspere's Five-Act Structure (1947); Bertrand Evans's Shakespeare's Comedies (1960); Harold F. Brooks's important article, ‘Themes and Structure in The Comedy of Errors’ (in Early Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 3, 1961). At the same time, the second, revised edition of Dover Wilson's New Shakespeare text (1962) and R. A. Foakes's new Arden Shakespeare edition (1962) brought the latest serious scholarship to bear upon the play. In 1965, Baldwin produced the first full-length study of Shakespeare's shortest play: On the Compositional Genetics of ‘The Comedy of Errors’. From the sixties onward, Errors has figured regularly in studies of Shakespearian comedy, though often, as has been remarked, it has been tacitly assumed if not explicitly stated to be the dramatist's first essay in the genre.²² In the same period, successive editors too, in both separate editions of the play and collected works of Shakespeare, have written critically informed, insightful introductions and commentaries that accord full recognition to its multiple facets and skilful construction; among them have been such scholars as Paul A. Jorgensen, Stanley Wells, Harry Levin, David Bevington, and Anne Barton in her excellent introductory note to the play in the Riverside Shakespeare. The play's coming of age, so to speak, in the critical arena as in the theatrical one, may perhaps be measured by the nine essays from the 1980s and 1990s selected by Robert Miola for inclusion in his volume of criticism on the play, as opposed to just six from the near century and a half, from 1836 (Coleridge) to 1974 (Leggatt); a compiler's choice, to be sure, but he obviously found much very recent, and comparatively little earlier, criticism of the play worthy of inclusion in the first full-length critical collection devoted solely to the one play. Miola himself and Wolfgang Riehle are among recent critics who have returned to the classical sources of The Comedy of Errors and reassessed Shakespeare's debt to them.²³

The last three decades of the twentieth century have seen a number of significant productions, in Great Britain as elsewhere. In Stratford alone, starting with the Williams production, each decade since the 1960s has been marked by at least one major RSC revival: 1976 (Trevor Nunn), 1983 (Adrian Noble), 1990 (Ian Judge), 1996 (Tim Supple), 2000 (Lynne Parker)—all in the main house, except for the outstanding Supple production of 1996 in The Other Place. …²⁴ Clearly the intimate space of that venue, and the sensitive direction of Tim Supple, which gave full scope to the actors' art, allowed the shadows and nuances of the play to emerge as they cannot, indeed, must not, in a popular main house spectacular. Like their predecessors Komisarjevsky, Williams, Nunn and Noble in their different ways, Ian Judge in 1990 and Lynne Parker in 2000 answered handsomely to the latter requisite. The former, however, compromised the very structure of the play by doubling the Antipholus and Dromio twins, necessitating transparent substitutions at the end, the romance denouement when the pairs of brothers are reunited, thus cheating the audience of one of the major thrills of recognition toward which the play builds from the beginning. To double the twins may work in film: the BBC television version of 1984 did so, with Michael Kitchen as both Antipholuses and Roger Daltrey as both Dromios. But that is a different medium, and not the one for which Shakespeare wrote his plays. On stage, such a choice leaves only cheating—a double who remains facing upstage, away from the audience—as the unhappy solution at the crucial moment when the twins meet for the first time. (A similar problem arises when Hermione and Perdita are played by the same actress in The Winter's Tale.) Lynne Parker's energetic production, in which different actors played the twins, nudged and winked the audience through a medley of movie and music hall sketches, gorged with technical tricks, gratuitous turns and gimmicks. Actors often forgot, or were not obliged to remember, what play they were in; often it did not matter, nor did the period: in the accelerated hysteria at the end of Act 4, characters from Henry IV, Part 1, which was playing in the adjacent Swan Theatre, joined in the chase (Falstaff, and a bewildered soldier in fifteenth-century armour), an in-joke for patrons who might have seen the other show. Zaniness ruled. The hodge-podge of styles recalled, distantly, the Komisarjevsky classic of sixty years earlier. A businesslike, tailleur-suited Luce greeted the audience with an extratextual prologue in verse, warning them of dire consequences should their mobile phones ring during the performance. Angelo became an Eastern rug merchant, present in almost every scene. The Second Merchant was a mad Cossack wielding a huge sabre. Pinch and his associates seemed to belong to some voodoo sect, and wore long beaked masks like those of medieval European plague doctors. The girlish Courtesan of Nina Conti managed to position herself just once over a draught vent downstage which made her full skirt billow, à la Marilyn Monroe. As a spectacle, of sorts, it worked. The laughs were frequent, loud and long. Shakespeare's text was not permitted to generate many of them.

Stratford playgoers in 2000 with longish memories of RSC productions may have had a mild frisson at seeing Paul Greenwood as the aged Egeon: he had played the younger generation, as Antipholus of Syracuse, in Noble's 1983 version, identified then as the Ephesian Antipholus' twin by his blue face; the Dromios (Richard O'Callaghan and Henry Goodman) had clown faces with red noses. The circus motif was evident too in the suspended cradle which served as a balcony, or merely the interior, of the Phoenix; in 3.1, Antipholus of Ephesus (Peter McEnery) hung from the underside of the cradle while his twin and his wife embraced exaggeratedly above. … (Zoë Wanamaker (Adriana) has spoken of the panic induced by the failure of the cradle to descend at one matinée performance; she and Jane Booker (Luciana) had to improvise movement and business upon entering at stage level in 2.1. Such an accident illustrates both the hazards of high-technology in the theatre, and the continuing necessity for the age-old actor's ability to improvise on the spot.) In the scene, Dromio of Syracuse, stage right, sat behind and held a free-standing door, and listened to the fracas ‘outside’ through the mail-slot. The slanging/farting match between the Dromios took place via that aperture. In 3.2, Antipholus of Syracuse hung upside down from a window to woo Luciana; she was perched on a ladder, just out of reach. Ladders, lifts, bicycles, special sound effects from the pit orchestra—there were gimmicks aplenty in this production too. And music. Trevor Nunn's famous 1976 musical version had been tremendously successful. With an outstanding cast—Judi Dench, Francesca Annis, Roger Rees, Mike Gwilym, Michael Williams, Nikolas Grace, Richard Griffiths, Griffith Jones, Brian Coburn, among others—and music by Guy Woolfenden, it became a classic and was later filmed for television. Nunn solved the Luce-Nell puzzle by having both, the one a lady's maid, the other a kitchen wench. Both it and the BBC version are available on video. The BBC had already presented an operetta version with music by Julian Slade as early as 1954, in which Joan Plowright had taken the part of Adriana; it was revived at the Arts Theatre, London, in 1956.

The Comedy of Errors has had a life on stages other than those of Stratford and London's West End, of course. In December 1894, William Poel produced an elaborate Elizabethan-style reconstruction in the hall of Gray's Inn where the première had probably taken place 300 years earlier. In 1994, another anniversary performance was given at the Inn, directed by Anthony Besch. This was in fact a reprise of the 1954 musical version seen on BBC television. Composer Julian Slade provided new music for this Gray's Inn revival. In 1970, Frank Dunlop transposed Syracuse and Ephesus into London and Edinburgh at the Young Vic, where automobiles and bicycles circulated on the set. There have been a remarkable number of productions of Die Komödie der Irrungen in Germany, where it seems to have remained popular throughout the twentieth century: A Shakespeare Music Catalogue alone lists more than forty German stage productions with incidental music between the 1930s and the 1980s (192-211). A notable production at the Bristol Old Vic by Phyllida Lloyd in 1989 had a direct influence on Ian Judge's RSC version a year later. Lloyd did not make the mistake that Judge was to make, that of doubling the two sets of twins, and her rendition, based on a close reading of the text, was full of wonder as well as weirdness. Her Antipholuses, Owen Teale and Brian Hickey, and Dromios, Colin Hurley and Sean Murray, were of course not identical, but identical costumes implied twinship, as they always do in the theatre. Anthony Ward's stunning skewed set featured a Magritte-like skyscape and doors at first-floor level which opened into empty space. The door of Adriana's house in 3.1 was free-standing: first one Dromio, the one inside, propped it up, then the other, outside, caught it as the other let it fall. The device, a piece of pure theatricality, borrowed no doubt from Noble's 1983 RSC version, resolved the problem and allowed the audience to see inside and outside simultaneously. The necessary letter-slot was provided, through which insults and farts were exchanged, and through which the enraged Nell (Luce) applied a vacuum cleaner to the outside (her) Dromio's crotch. Even in 1989, critics could still be terribly vague about the play's action, or woefully inattentive to the performance, as if befuddled themselves by its manifold ‘errors’: the Financial Times reviewer (21 February) of the Bristol production names the wrong actor in the part of Angelo, says that Adriana makes her entrance in a swimming pool (it was Luciana), that the Abbess comes out leading the Ephesian Antipholus (it is of course the Syracusan twin, who had taken refuge in the abbey), and that Shakespeare unforgivably marries off the Abbess and Egeus—a double howler: they are already married, have been for many years, and he is called Egeon. Finally, he says, we shall never know which Dromio ends up with Nell (Luce), when it is perfectly clear at the end that the Syracusan resigns her, with relief, to his Ephesian twin.

Caroline Loncq, who played Luciana in both the 1989 Bristol Old Vic and the 1990 RSC productions, reported that her RSC colleagues were struck, when shown photographs of the set of the former, by its similarity to that designed by Mark Thompson for the RSC show. Clearly the first influenced the second. But instead of Phyllida Lloyd's close and careful work on the text—a literary adviser was called upon, members of the cast were shown copies of the Folio text in rehearsal, were encouraged to observe the original, or at any rate, the earliest surviving form of the text which they were learning, and to compare various editions' readings of troublesome passages—the RSC director went for ill-judged doublings, gratuitous tricks and over-the-top gags, a vaudeville potpourri. The Abbess wore an extravagant headgear which made her look like the Flying Nun. Any hint of lyricism or pathos in the text was stamped out or sent up. ‘The Travesty of Errors’ was the jaundiced verdict of some spectators. But once again, the unjaundiced majority loved it. Another ill-advised attempt at doubling the pairs of twins was Kathryn Hunter's version at the new Globe in 1999. Reviewers found it clumsy and distracting.²⁵

It is not possible to go further than the year 2000 in a review of the fortunes and misfortunes of The Comedy of Errors. The play is firmly established in the canon and in theatrical repertoires. Doubtless its boisterousness, high jinks and farce will continue to attract directors and audiences. Perhaps some may also continue to find and respond to its subtler aspects, the very real shadows and depths of romance. The stage history of The Comedy of Errors, which has been sketched in rudimentary form here, testifies to its peculiar blend of the seemingly incompatible extremes of farce and romance. It was argued earlier in this Introduction that romance is essentially a non-theatrical mode, while farce is essentially theatrical. It is scarcely surprising then that producers of the play in the theatre have gone for the farce and have, for the most part, let the romance go. The curious penchant of Shakespeare throughout his career for the unlikely tales of romance as matter for stage plays has been remarked upon. That first audience at Gray's Inn at Christmas 1594 may well have been, given the prevailing atmosphere, more in a mood to applaud the frenzied farce than in one conducive to imaginative and sympathetic response to the distressing predicaments in which Egeon, both Antipholuses, Adriana and, to a lesser degree, some of the other characters find themselves. No director is likely to be foolish enough to try to turn Errors into the sombre, laughless ‘dark comedy’ that As You Like It and Twelfth Night often masquerade as nowadays in the theatre, even less to make of it topical-political drama like The Taming of the Shrew or The Merchant of Venice. But the best modern productions, such as those of Williams, Lloyd, and Supple, have shown that the tragi-comic element can be respected and rendered movingly, without sending up or grotesque hamming, and without in the least denying or denaturing the farce and the domestic comedy. If directors, designers and actors, as well as readers, critics and playgoers, continue to give the play a fair chance, it will without doubt emerge more clearly as a comedy on a par with, if different from—as each of his works is different from all the others—Shakespeare's best in that kind.

Notes

1. From Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Shakespeare Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor, 2 vols. (1960), i. 213; quoted by Miola, p. 18.

2. Preface to Johnson's edition of Shakespeare (1765); reprinted in Brian Vickers, ed., Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 5: 1765-1774 (1979), 67.

3. Shakespeare's exploitation of the differences and tensions between the telling/hearing function peculiar to narrative, and the showing/seeing one peculiar to drama, particularly in the late romances but with reference also to The Comedy of Errors among other plays, is the subject of a published lecture by the present editor, Seeing and Believing in Shakespeare (Rome, Ga., 1993). Stanley Wells's ‘Shakespeare and Romance’ (in Later Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 8 (1966), 49-79) contains a suggestive reading of The Tempest as romance, with Prospero as a romance narrator (pp. 70-8).

4. The similarities and differences in Shakespeare's handling of very similar if not identical romance narrative material in Errors and Pericles, and the narrators' respective roles in the two plays, are discussed in some detail in Charles Whitworth, ‘“Standing i' th' gaps”: Telling and Showing from Egeon to Gower’, in Narrative and Drama, vol. 2 of Collection Theta: Tudor Theatre, ed. André Lascombes (Bern, New York and Paris, 1995), pp. 125-41.

5. ‘Thou that begett'st him that did thee beget, / Thou that wast born at sea, buried at Tarsus, / And found at sea again!’ (Pericles, 21.183-5); ‘O, what am I? / A mother to the birth of three? Ne'er mother / Rejoiced deliverance more’ (Cymbeline 5.6.369-71).

6. Gail Kern Paster has a stimulating section on Errors as city comedy in her The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens, Ga., 1985), pp. 185-94.

7. Menaechmus Sosicles in Plautus' comedy thinks that Erotium the courtesan is either ‘mad or drunk’ (aut insana aut ebria) when she hails him as her lover (Warner, Act 3).

8. Stanley Wells compares details in ‘Reunion Scenes in The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night’, Wiener Beitrage sur Englischen Philologie, 80: A Yearbook of Studies in English Language and Literature 1985/86, pp. 267-76.

9. Quoted in G. C. D. Odell, Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, 2 vols. (New York, 1920; repr. New York, 1966), ii. 48.

10. Kemble liked to give names to Shakespeare's anonymous minor characters; the Second Merchant in Errors is named Chares in his version of Hull (Odell, ii. 56). He made a particular effort to revive the least known of Shakespeare's works; The Two Gentlemen of Verona was also staged by him at Covent Garden in the same season, 1808.

11. In Phyllis Hartnoll, ed., Shakespeare in Music (1964), p. 100. Further material on the opera is to be found in Roger Fiske, English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1973), pp. 495-6.

12. Ed. Roger Fiske (Oxford, 1975), p. 120. I am grateful to Stanley Wells for this reference and for additional details on Storace's opera.

13. On Storace's life and career and that of Nancy, see The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 20 vols. (1980), xviii. 179-82.

14. On Bishop and his music for Shakespearian spectacles, those of Reynolds in particular, see Hartnoll, ed., Shakespeare in Music, esp. pp. 75-6.

15. Reprinted in Gāmini Salgādo, ed., Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare: First Hand Accounts of Performances 1590-1890 (Hassocks, 1975), pp. 68-9.

16. Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets, or Some Observations and Remarks (Oxford, 1691), p. 455.

17. Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Brian Vickers, vol. ii (1974), 194, 197, 218, 225, 240.

18. Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Brian Vickers, vol. iii (1975), 226.

19. William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817); Everyman Library (1906), p. 253.

20. Later, in an 1864 production at Drury Lane of the two parts of Henry IV, he played Falstaff in Part One and doubled the King and Justice Shallow in Part Two (Odell, ii. 300).

21. I am grateful to the custodians of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre archives at the Shakespeare Centre Library for allowing me to consult the prompt books of Komisarjevsky's and other productions of the play in their keeping.

22. For example, among many others, in E. M. W. Tillyard's Shakespeare's Early Comedies (1965); the Penguin Shakespeare Library anthology of criticism, Shakespeare's Comedies, ed. Laurence Lerner (Harmondsworth, 1967); Alexander Leggatt's Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (1974); Kenneth Muir's The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (1977); Ruth Nevo's Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (1980); and Robert Ornstein's Shakespeare's Comedies: From Roman Farce to Romantic Mystery (1986), where the title itself implies that Errors was the first (and of least consequence).

23. Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Comedy: The Influence of Terence and Plautus (1994); Wolfgang Riehle, Shakespeare, Plautus and the Humanist Tradition (1990).

24. It is not possible in the introduction to an edition to give detailed accounts of all significant productions. Reviews of the first three listed above (including one of Adrian Noble's 1983 production by the present editor) may be found in the volume of criticism on the play edited by Miola. Of the Tim Supple production, which rediscovered the depths of romance anguish without in the least neglecting the high comedy and farce, a perspicacious account by Robert Smallwood is to be found in Shakespeare in the Theatre: An Anthology of Criticism (ed. Stanley Wells, 1997). Further reviews of modern productions will be found in such periodicals as Cahiers Élisabéthains, Shakespeare Quarterly and Shakespeare Survey.

25. Peter J. Smith: ‘[the production] remained superficial and smugly pleased with the easy comic solutions it offered … ; the play was reduced, for the most part, to a comic vehicle for the performances of Vincenzo Nicoli as the Antipholuses and, especially, Marcello Magni as the Dromios … [and] to the level of a school-leavers' review’ (Cahiers Élisabéthains, 56 (Octobre 1999), 105-7). Lois Potter: ‘In my experience, doubling the parts of the Antipholus and Dromio twins tends to make the play less funny, displacing attention from the plot to the logistics involved in the doubling itself … I felt sorry for the actors playing the doubles’ (Shakespeare Quarterly, 50 (1999), 515).

Abbreviations and References

All Shakespeare references are to the Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (1986), unless otherwise indicated. Place of publication is London unless otherwise indicated.

Editions of Shakespeare

F, F1: Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies … (1623) (First Folio)

F2: Second Folio (1632)

F3: Third Folio (1663)

F4: Fourth Folio (1685)

Alexander: Peter Alexander, The Complete Works (1951)

BBC TV: The Comedy of Errors, The BBC TV Shakespeare (1984) (the Alexander text)

Bevington: David Bevington, The Comedy of Errors, The Bantam Shakespeare (New York, 1988)

Cambridge: W. G. Clark and W. A. Wright, The Works, Cambridge Shakespeare, 9 vols. (Cambridge, 1863; third edition, W. A. Wright, 1891)

Capell: Edward Capell, Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, 10 vols. (1767-8)

Collier: John Payne Collier, Works, 8 vols. (1842-4)

Collier 1858: John Payne Collier, Comedies, Histories, Tragedies, and Poems, 6 vols. (1858)

Craig: Hardin Craig, Works (New York, 1951; 1961; revised edition, D. Bevington, 1973)

Cuningham: Henry Cuningham, The Comedy of Errors, Arden Shakespeare (1907)

Delius: Nicolaus Delius, Works, 7 vols. (Elberfeld, 1854-60)

Dorsch: T. S. Dorsch, The Comedy of Errors, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1988)

Dyce: Alexander Dyce, Works, 6 vols. (1857)

Dyce 1866: Alexander Dyce, Works, 9 vols. (1864-7)

Foakes: R. A. Foakes, The Comedy of Errors, Arden Shakespeare, new edition (1962)

Hanmer: Thomas Hanmer, Works, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1743-4)

Harness: William Harness, Works, 8 vols. (1825)

Hudson: Henry N. Hudson, Works, 11 vols. (Boston, 1851-6)

Johnson: Samuel Johnson, Works, 8 vols. (1765)

Jorgensen: Paul A. Jorgensen, The Comedy of Errors, in The Pelican Shakespeare, general editor, Alfred Harbage (New York, 1969)

Keightley: Thomas Keightley, Works, 6 vols. (1864)

Kittredge: George Lyman Kittredge, Works (Boston, 1936)

Knight: Charles Knight, Works, 8 vols. (1838-43); 12 vols. (1842-4)

Levin: Harry Levin, The Comedy of Errors, Signet Classic Shakespeare (1965)

Malone: Edmond Malone, Works, 10 vols. (1790)

Munro: John Munro, Works, London Shakespeare, 6 vols. (1958)

Oxford: The Complete Works, Oxford Shakespeare, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, general editors (original-spelling edition, Oxford, 1986; modern-spelling edition, Oxford, 1986)

Pope: Alexander Pope, Works, 6 vols. (1723-5)

Pope 1728: Alexander Pope, Works, 8 vols. (1728)

Rann: Joseph Rann, Dramatic Works, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1786-94)

Ritson: Joseph Ritson, The Plays of William Shakespeare, With Notes. In Eight Volumes. A projected edition by Ritson; a specimen first page (104 lines) of Errors from the projected vol. ii survives. The title-page is dated 1787.

Riverside: The Riverside Shakespeare, G. Blakemore Evans, textual editor (Boston, 1974)

Rowe: Nicholas Rowe, Works, 6 vols. (1709)

Rowe 1709: Nicholas Rowe, Works, 6 vols. (second edition, 1709)

Rowe 1714: Nicholas Rowe, Works, 8 vols. (third edition, 1714)

Singer: S. W. Singer, Dramatic Works, 10 vols. (1826; 1856)

Sisson: Charles J. Sisson, Works (1954)

Staunton: Howard Staunton, Works, 3 vols. (1858-60)

Steevens: George Steevens (with Samuel Johnson), Works, 10 vols. (1773)

Steevens 1778: George Steevens (with Samuel Johnson), Works, 10 vols. (1778)

Tetzeli: Kurt Tetzeli von Rosador, The Comedy of Errors/Die Komödie der Irrungen (Bern and Munich, 1982)

Theobald: Lewis Theobald, Works, 7 vols. (1733)

Warburton: William Warburton, Works, 8 vols. (1747)

Wells: Stanley Wells, The Comedy of Errors, New Penguin Shakespeare (Harmondsworth, 1972)

White: Richard Grant White, Works, 12 vols. (Boston, 1857-66)

Wilson: John Dover Wilson, The Comedy of Errors, The New Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1922)

Wilson 1962: John Dover Wilson, The Comedy of Errors, The New Shakespeare, second edition (Cambridge, 1962)

Other Abbreviations

Abbott: E. A. Abbott, A Shakespearian Grammar, third edition (1876)

Bullough: Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (1957-75)

Cercignani: Fausto Cercignani, Shakespeare's Works and Elizabethan Pronunciation (Oxford, 1981)

Clayton: Thomas Clayton, ‘The Text, Imagery, and Sense of the Abbess's Final Speech in The Comedy of Errors’, Anglia, 91 (1973), 479-84

Dent: R. W. Dent, Shakespeare's Proverbial Language: An Index (1981)

Eagleson-Onions: C. T. Onions, A Shakespeare Glossary, enlarged and revised throughout by Robert D. Eagleson (Oxford, 1986)

ES: E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1923)

McKerrow: R. B. McKerrow, Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare: A Study in Editorial Method (Oxford, 1939)

Miola: Robert S. Miola, ‘The Play and the Critics’, in ‘The Comedy of Errors’: Critical Essays, ed. Miola (New York and London, 1997), pp. 3-51

N & Q: Notes and Queries

New Readings: C. J. Sisson, New Readings in Shakespeare, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1956)

O'Connor: John O'Connor, ‘A Qualitative Analysis of Compositors C and D in the Shakespeare First Folio’, SB 30 (1977), 57-74

ODEP: The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, compiled by William George Smith, third edition, ed. F. P. Wilson (1970)

OED: Oxford English Dictionary (Compact Edition, 1971; repr. 1976)

SB: Studies in Bibliography

SMC: Bryan N. S. Gooch and David Thatcher, eds., A Shakespeare Music Catalogue, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1991); i. 192-218 (for The Comedy of Errors)

TC: Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford, 1987)

Tannenbaum: Samuel A. Tannenbaum, ‘Notes on The Comedy of Errors’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 68 (1932), 103-24

Tilley: Morris Palmer Tilley, Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, 1950)

Walker: W. S. Walker, A Critical Examination of the Text of Shakespeare, 3 vols. (1860)

Werstine: Paul Werstine, ‘“Foul Papers” and “Prompt Books”: Printer's Copy for Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors’, SB 41 (1988), 232-46

Whitworth: Charles Whitworth, ‘Rectifying Shakespeare's Errors: Romance and Farce in Bardeditry’, in Ian Small and Marcus Walsh, eds., The Theory and Practice of Text-Editing: Essays in Honour of James T. Boulton (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 107-41. Reprinted in Miola, ‘The Comedy of Errors’: Critical Essays (1997), pp. 227-60. References are to the prior publication.

Fr.: French

L.: Latin