Do I like comedies? In general, yes. Early this year I watched the whole series of The Office, New Girl and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. If I miss Mad As Hell, I make sure to watch it on iView, and I am completely obsessed with the 2020 adaptation of Emma which is the most sublime rom-com ever made. BUT, Shakespeare’s comedies? I’m yet to be convinced. And if I’m honest, The Comedy of Errors did not help me move to a positive conclusion. Possibly it did the reverse.
This review will be short, much like The Comedy of Errors (thankfully). I knew when I read the character list that this was going to be a very silly play – two sets of identical twins who (of course) have the same names, how could it not be? Shakespeare loves twins – he even had a pair himself, very clever. As I’ve said before, my little project of reading all of Shakespeare’s plays chronologically is prompted by the fact that I have a bit more time on my hands this year, and because I want to see the development of his skill as a writer. The latter focus was very interesting as I read this play. I just couldn’t get over how simple the play is in comparison to the complexity (at least in terms of narrative and characters, but also, I think, thematically) of the preceding histories and tragedy. It’s just so simple. Obviously there are the two sets of characters with the same names and everyone on stage being confused, but I feel like the audience isn’t confused – right from the start we know what is happening (because Shakespeare has a character tell us) and we have a good idea how the play will end. Being a comedy, it’s going to end with laughter, forgiveness and marriages/new love. Those of us who have read Shakespeare’s more famous comedies (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Taming of the Shrew) know this structure well, but in The Comedy of Errors what is missing is the big ideas and the clever, beautiful language.
If you haven’t read The Comedy of Errors, the plot goes like this: a merchant and his wife from Syracuse have twin sons and on the same day a poor woman also has twin sons. The merchant and his wife agree to take her sons and raise them with their two – presumably to be the other twins’ servants. As the family are sailing out on the ocean (I don’t know why), they get stuck in a tempest which destroys their boat. The merchant ties himself plus one baby son and one baby servant to a mast, and somehow the husband and wife (with their respective babies) get separated by pirates or mean sailors, so the children are raised in separate countries, not knowing if the others are alive. The play starts 30 years later with the father accidentally turning up on Ephesus (where two of the sons are, but he doesn’t know) and getting arrested because he’s from Syracuse and is banned from Ephesus. Little does he know, his other two sons – well, one son and one slave – from Syracuse (the ones he raises on his own) are also on Ephesus because they are looking for the other brothers. The rest of the play involves the identical twins (both the two Antipholus and the two Dromio) running into people who mistake them for the other which causes much frustration and bewilderment (and lots of being beaten for the Dromio slaves). As the audience we know why this is happening, but we also question how the Syracuse Antipholus and Dromio can be so stupid as to not work out what is happening given their purpose for being in Ephesus was to find their twin brothers. I assume that all this silliness being played out on stage would be very funny and whilst it’s obvious the actors would have had fun with the stagecraft (up on the balcony, hiding behind the pillars), I found reading this play far less enjoyable than I wanted to.
The language is very simple (in terms of the type of highly descriptive, inventive, evocative language we have come to associate with Shakespeare), with lots of shared couplets which makes the dialogue quick and presumably very fun to play with on stage. It’s obvious that it’s from the comedies that we get most of Shakespeare’s wonderful ‘insults’ – there are some very funny ones used in The Comedy of Errors, even if the ones about Dromio’s kitchen-hand wife are a bit cruel and fatist. Given that this is a comedy, and therefore it is light, quick and a bit shallow, the conceptual depth we come to expect of Shakespeare is missing mostly, except for a really great scene between Antipholus and Dromio of Syracus about Time. This was not only clever and interesting, but also really funny. It starts off with jokes about bald men (of course Shakespeare has his character advocate for the intelligence of bald men over those with hair, I wonder if that means he had started to lose a bit of his own hair by the time he wrote this play) and ends up arguing that Time is bald (‘Not a man of those but he hath the wit to lose his hair… Why, thou didst conclude hairy men plain dealers without wit… Time himself is bald, and therefore, to the world’s end will have bald followers.’). This reminds me, the interplay between the twins as sort of arguer and interlocutor is one of the strengths of the play – and I quite like that Shakespeare has the servant, Dromio, as the one with the better wit and arguments. There are a lot of references to the language of argument and logic (with the introduction of our common expression today ‘What is the matter?’ being used more literally to reference the ‘matter’ of the argument) and this reminds me of a lot of John Donne. In fact, there were a couple of lines where I was like ‘what?!!!’ is that from Donne or did Donne steal it from Shakespeare? It just really illustrates similarities between style amongst these two young writers. The one that really got me was Adrian’s argument about why she might be able to cheat on her husband if he is cheating on her – it’s basically Donne’s argument as to why he should be allowed to sleep with his love in The Flea, check it out: My blood is mingled with the crime of lust; For if we too be one, and thou play false, I do digest the poison of thy flesh, Being strumpeted by thy contagion. Oh, and Adriana and Dromio of Syracuse pick up on the theme of Time later in their own repartee:
ADRIANA.
As if time were in debt! how fondly dost thou reason!
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE.
Time is a very bankrupt, and owes more than he’s worth to season.
Nay, he’s a thief too: have you not heard men say
That Time comes stealing on by night and day?
If he be in debt and theft, and a sergeant in the way,
Hath he not reason to turn back an hour in a day?
Overall, I was glad this play was short because (as I’ve said in my title) it is silly and a little simple. I would love to see it live on stage as I know it would be hilarious, and I can understand why Shakespeare was such a popular playwright if he wrote scripts like this for his audiences to enjoy on a balmy English day, a little bit drunk, smooshed into a packed house with a bunch of other people, all looking for a good time.
