Twenty-five facts about The Comedy of Errors
"the laughter is not the laughter of farce."
As usual, this is taken from the Cambridge and Arden editions. If you want to join the book club meeting about Midsummer Night’s Dream, on 23rd March at 19.00 UK time, become a paid subscriber.
Errors has been one of the least admired plays, among the least performed and discussed. It is the shortest play.
In 1709, Rowe said Errors had “doggerel rhymes” and that Shakespeare lacked Latin. In 1728, Pope said only a few of the scenes could possibly be by Shakespeare. Hazlitt called it “not the most pleasing.”
Charles Armitage Brown said: Error’s “action is serious” and its “mistakes… are ludicrous.” Of an 1838 performance, he wrote, “the audience in their laughter rolled about like waves.”
The source is Plautus’s Menaechmi, from which Shakespeare derived the Antipholus twin plot. He added the second set of Dromio twins from another Plautus play Amphitryon. Plautus was a set text at grammar schools.
Errors was written in the late 1580s, perhaps 1590. Shakespeare became the father of twins (Judith and Hamnet) in 1585.
Menaechmi has seventeen errors. Shakespeare has more like fifty.
Ros King in the Cambridge editions points to the many contradictions of religion and spiritualism, identity and confusion, morality and excess. It is a joke and it is serious. Knockabout humour is achieved through precise control of language. Errors is about domesticity, social morality, middle-class values, family separation, political conflict,—but the story is romance and fairy tale.
Plautus’s prologue to the Amphitryon defends tragi-comedy, the only known classical usage of that term. The non-Aristotelian mode of Shakespeare’s drama has one origin here.
Errors has a lot of poetry, as much as Richard III or Love’s Labour’s Lost, and is as experimental as Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is 87% verse, of which, 25% is rhyming.
Errors opens in iambic pentameter, and goes on to include: blank verse, heroic couplets, quatrains, hexameter, stichomythia, short lines, and tumbling verse (which has a regular number of stressed, but irregular number of unstressed syllables). Tumbling verse is lower class, and spoken by servants; blank verse and heroic couplets are spoken by higher class characters.1