Who are you? The Comedy of Errors
Just imagine if David Simon, the brilliant screenwriter who gave us The Wire, possibly the greatest telvision series ever written — a gritty examination of the nexus between criminals, police, politicians and education in Baltimore — had followed it up with his new series: Two and a Half Men. That’s about as close as I can come to an analogy for Shakespeare going from the visceral, dark tragedy of Richard III to the light whimsy of The Comedy of Errors for his next work. It’s a bit of a come-down, to be honest. But it does show the tremendous range that Shakespeare had: he could handle such a variety of content while still showing his distinctive wit and wordplay.
This is a play of doubles and mistaken identities. Despite Ben Jonson’s claim that Shakespeare had “small Latin and less Greek,” he draws here on two Roman plays by Plautus: Menaechmi and Amphitruo. The back story is that Egeon, a merchant from Syracuse, had identical twin sons, born on one of his trading voyages. By chance, a poor woman gave birth to identical twins at the same inn on the same night, and these were brought up by Egeon to be the servants of his own children. As you might expect, though, there was a storm and the vessel was split in two, just like the family itself (“this unjust divorce of us”): Egeon returning to Syracuse with one of his sons and one of the servants, while his wife and the other son and servant were rescued by a fisherman and taken away. The son (Antipholus) who returned to Syracuse yearned to be reunited with his missing brother and set off several years before the beginning of the play with his servant (Dromio) to find him. Not hearing back from him, Egeon then set out to find one or both of his sons himself, which has brought him to Ephesus. This turns out to have been not such a good idea, as Syracuse and Ephesus have an enmity that has led to laws prohibiting travel between them and now the Duke of Ephesus has some bad news for Egeon: “Therefore by law thou art condemned to die.” An inauspicious beginning for a comedy, but Antipholus and Dromio (of Syracuse) have also just turned up in Ephesus and it turns out their identical twins are well established here. Cue shenanigans!
Shakespearean actors are often expected to ‘double’ and play multiple roles, which is a simple financial necessity with plays that have a large dramatis personae and a limited budget to pay actors. When one character is offstage the actor can play another character. Shakespeare probably wrote his plays to accommodate this practice. In this case, though, the doubling is intrinsic to the set-up, with the same actor playing the role of identical twin brothers with both Antipholus (of Ephesus, and of Syracuse) and Dromio (likewise). This actually makes the dual roles quite demanding as the nature of the play depends on one brother appearing onstage as soon as the other goes offstage. The audience gets a cue as to which brother is which by variations in costume even though they otherwise look (are) identical, as it’s important for the comedy that the audience actually understands which brother is which even though the other characters onstage can’t tell them apart. Of course, if it’s straightforward for the audience to tell them apart why is it so difficult for everyone else? We just have to suspend our disbelief when it comes to that issue.
The other issue comes at the very end of the play when the two sets of identical twins appear onstage together. In a film adaptation this can be handled through the use of split screens, but I suppose on the stage directors cope with this short period of awkwardness by actually having similar looking actors don wigs and identical costumes at this point and again the audience just has to pretend that they’re as identical as they’ve appeared all along. Or they might stage the play with similar looking actors from the outset. I wonder if anyone has staged a version with actual identical twins? And remember, of course, that Shakespeare himself was the father of twins: Hamlet (who died tragically young) and Judith.
All the farcical misunderstandings and slapstick humour leaves me a bit cold, to be honest, although again there are interesting portrayals of gender roles and marital expectations. The misrecognised brothers find themselves in situations suggesting infidelity, with Antipholus of Syracuse (who is a bachelor) falling instantly for the sister of the wife of Antipholus of Ephesus. Meanwhile, Antipholus of Ephesus is finding himslef in trouble with a courtesan. It’s possibly not accidental that Shakespeare chose to set his play in Ephesus, the location of Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, whom he associated with magic and witchcraft and whom he felt the need to instruct in the proper hierarchy of things, with wives obeying their husbands and servants their masters.
The BBC film version, which screened on Christmas Eve in 1983, had a few flourishes in staging, with the set built on a large map of Greece, which we see an aerial view of at the beginning. The cast includes some notable faces, including the veteran Cyril Cusack (father of the actresses Sinéad, Niamh and Sorcha) as Egeon and Dame Wendy Hiller as the Abbess who we only discover at the end of the play is actually Emilia, Egeon’s lost wife. Michael Kitchen (best known these days as Detective Chief Superintendent Foyle in the television series Foyle’s War) does a fine job of playing the brothers Antipholus, but the face most people will recognise onscreen is Roger Daltrey, lead singer of The Who, who plays the brothers Dromio. Daltrey isn’t much of an actor, but the roles don’t demand a great deal of nuance, so he does okay with them. And after all, if The Beatles can do Shakespeare, why can’t he?
So Shakespeare’s still warming up here. It is, after all, only his third comedy. Maybe he has something a bit more enduring coming up…
