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
Ros King: “this variation invariably has dramaturgical function. It creates a sense of characters really talking and listening to each other, repeating each other’s rhythms… or capping each other’s rhymes.” She quotes Brennan O’Donnell, who says the tri-syllabic rhyme in these lines, is “the verbal equivalent of a slammed door”,
Are you there wife? You might have come before.
Your wife, sir knave? Get you from the door.Epheseus, the town where the action takes place, is a metaphor for the theatre: a place of unstable identity.
Error was a Renaissance preoccupation. In The Faerie Queene, The Redcrosse Knight has to battle the monster Error, who strews errors around her, representing Catholic doctrine.
Error means: wandering; mistakes of ignorance; wrong belief. Errors has what Spenser called an “endless train” of all these sorts of errors.
Errors is full of merchants. The background of the plot is a trade war. The action hinges on a luxury commodity. It is a trader’s need to call in a debt that tips the plot into frenzy. (Debt can also have religious and emotional connotations.)
Words like “juggler”, “sorcerer”, and “mist” were often used as insults towards Catholic practices just as exorcism, veneration of the Host, and intercessory prayer for souls in Purgatory. When Antipholus of Syracuse says “Nimble jugglers” the audience would know this was an abuse against Catholic priests.
Unlike other Shakespearean comedies, there is no town/county divide, no Forest of Arden, in Errors. Both realms exist in one: it is an uncanny play: the ordinary and the magical are interfused.
In De fabula, an essay printed in editions of Terence’s comedies, it is said that comedy has a three-part structure: protasis, epistasis, catastrophe. In the epistasis, occurs, “the increase and progression of the turbulations and the whole, as I might say, knot of error.” The rope near the end is, according to the Arden editor, almost an allegory of that idea.
In 1996, the RSC did a production that emphasised the serious side of the play. Benedict Nightingale wrote abut Antipholus’ “inner need verging on compulsion” to find his twin and said audiences would “find the magic and may even be moved” by the final reconciliation.
Syracuse and Epheseus were significant cities to Elizabethans. Damnation and salvation were central problems of the Reformation. The New Testament refers several times to the difficulty of converting the Epheseans (see Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians). In the sixteenth century, it was a significant Christian site under Turkish rule. It was also significant to the ancients, and had a Temple of Diana; it was famous for witchcraft. Diana was goddess of both chastity and childbirth. Aemilia, at the end, is both nun and mother. It is a place of duality, suitable to Reformation transitions.
In IV.iv, the Ephesians believe Antiphous and Dromio are possessed, and bring in an exorcist. (They are confronted with the Syracusean doubles, who already think the island is a den of witchery). This has a basis in the Acts of the Apostles, 19: 13-18, Geneva Bible version.
Then certain of the vagabond Jews, exorcists took in hand to name over them which had evil spirits, the name of the Lord Jesus, saying, We adjure you by Jesus, whom Paul preacheth.(And there were certain sons of Sceva a Jew, the Priest, about seven which did this.) And the evil spirit answered, and said, Jesus I acknowledge, and Paul I know: but who are ye? And the man in whom the evil spirit was, ran on them, and overcame them, and prevailed against them, so that they fled out of that house, naked and wounded. And this was known to all the Jews and Grecians also which dwelt at Ephesus, and fear came on them all, and the Name of the Lord Jesus was magnified, And many that believed, came and confessed, and showed their works.
Whether Errors “takes sides” in the Reformation is hard to say. A.D. Nuttall points out that the marrying of a nun at the end might be a mockery of Luther (who attracted controversy for marrying a nun), but Aemilia was already married. The phrase “locked out” in the scene outside the house has been seen as a commentary of the Act of Uniformity—but that statute compelled people to attend church. It could, in fact, be a critique of the Catholic practice of excommunication. The taking of communion, in the Catholic church, is the literal taking of the body and blood of Christ, from which the possessed are locked out.
The dispute between Adriana and Luciana in Act II echoes the contemporary argument about “companionate marriage”, the idea that marriage is not a sacrament, but a worldly office, to be enjoyed, and that although it still involves a hierarchy, it should be an affectionate partnership. It was common to summarise Paul’s injunctions in the Epistle to the Ephesians to the phrase: wives be obedient, husbands be kind.2
Ros King says Doctor Pinch echoes all different churches, and seems to be a commentary not on any one of them, but on the impossibility for any church to avoid falling into error. The solution to error, in this play, is not doctrinal, but family reconciliation.
(I would add that this becomes the overwhelming theme of Shakespeare’s work, with Aemilia’s reveal echoed in plays like Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale, and noting that his tragedies are often about the ways families refuse or are prevented from reconciliation.)
In a 1991 programme note, the eminent Shakespeare scholar Anne Barton wrote:
The anguish of the dead man is real, even if the verse he speaks delicately suggests to a theatre audience that his loss will not prove irredeemable… there is something consciously absurd about this reunion which happens not only beyond hope but beyond any expectation explicitly generated by the play. Almost always, the theatre audience laughs when Aemilia identifies (Egeon), but the laughter is not the laughter of farce.
Here is some tumbling verse. III.i, 11-85
DROMIO OF EPHESUS
Say what you will, sir, but I know what I know.
That you beat me at the mart I have your hand to show;
If the skin were parchment and the blows you gave were ink,
Your own handwriting would tell you what I think.
ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS
I think thou art an ass.
DROMIO OF EPHESUS
Marry, so it doth appear
By the wrongs I suffer and the blows I bear.
I should kick being kicked and, being at that pass,
You would keep from my heels and beware of an ass.
ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS
You’re sad, Signior Balthasar. Pray God our cheer
May answer my goodwill and your good welcome here.
BALTHASAR
I hold your dainties cheap, sir, and your welcome dear.
ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS
O Signior Balthasar, either at flesh or fish
A table full of welcome makes scarce one dainty dish.
BALTHASAR
Good meat, sir, is common; that every churl affords.
ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS
And welcome more common, for that’s nothing but words.
BALTHASAR
Small cheer and great welcome makes a merry feast.
ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS
Ay, to a niggardly host and more sparing guest.
But though my cates be mean, take them in good part.
Better cheer may you have, but not with better heart.⌜He attempts to open the door.⌝
But soft! My door is locked. ⌜To Dromio.⌝ Go, bid them let us in.
DROMIO OF EPHESUS
Maud, Bridget, Marian, Ciceley, Gillian, Ginn!
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE, ⌜within⌝
Mome, malt-horse, capon, coxcomb, idiot, patch!
Either get thee from the door or sit down at the hatch.
Dost thou conjure for wenches, that thou call’st for such store
When one is one too many? Go, get thee from the door.
DROMIO OF EPHESUS
What patch is made our porter? My master stays in the street.
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE, ⌜within⌝
Let him walk from whence he came, lest he catch cold on ’s feet.
ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS
Who talks within there? Ho, open the door.
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE, ⌜within⌝
Right, sir, I’ll tell you when an you’ll tell me wherefore.
ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS
Wherefore? For my dinner. I have not dined today.
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE, ⌜within⌝
Nor today here you must not. Come again when you may.
ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS
What art thou that keep’st me out from the house I owe?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE, ⌜within⌝
The porter for this time, sir, and my name is Dromio.
DROMIO OF EPHESUS
O villain, thou hast stolen both mine office and my name!
The one ne’er got me credit, the other mickle blame.
If thou hadst been Dromio today in my place,
Thou wouldst have changed thy face for a name, or thy name for an ass.
Enter Luce ⌜above, unseen by Antipholus of Ephesus and his company.⌝
LUCE
What a coil is there, Dromio! Who are those at the gate?
DROMIO OF EPHESUS
Let my master in, Luce.
LUCE
Faith, no, he comes too late,
And so tell your master.
DROMIO OF EPHESUS
O Lord, I must laugh.
Have at you with a proverb: shall I set in my staff?
LUCE
Have at you with another: that’s—When, can you tell?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE, ⌜within⌝
If thy name be called “Luce,” Luce, thou hast answered him well.
ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS, ⌜to Luce⌝
Do you hear, you minion? You’ll let us in, I hope?
LUCE
I thought to have asked you.
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE, ⌜within⌝
And you said no.
DROMIO OF EPHESUS
So, come help. Well struck! There was blow for blow.
In Ephesians 5: 22-30 Paul sets out a mutual idea of marriage:
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church: For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones.
At 6: 5-9, his injunction to servants echoes what he says about marriage:
Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; Not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; With good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men: Knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free. And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him.