A Pelican Book: This Is Shakespeare Read online

  Shakespeare has amplified the role of women in the play, in contrast to his later history plays where he seems to squeeze them out. Here we have Richard’s mother, the Duchess of York; the queen, Elizabeth, wife to Edward IV; Lady Anne; and, additionally, Queen Margaret, the widow of Henry VI. Margaret’s presence is decidedly ahistorical: the real Queen Margaret died in France, having been taken prisoner after the death of her husband. Shakespeare has resurrected her as a memory of the past, and in particular the past of his own Henry VI plays in which she is such a prominent character. As such she is one of the structural features that is constantly dragging the play backwards, away from its teleological resolution in Richmond, reminding Richard that he cannot forget the past casualties of his rise to power. The women are established as mourners for the dead, and their speeches are full of recollection and remembrance. At her first entrance Margaret reminds Richard, and us, of his actions: ‘Out, devil! I remember them too well. / Thou killed’st my husband Henry in the Tower, / And Edward, my poor son, at Tewkesbury’ (1.3.118–120). Richard responds in kind: ‘In all which time you … Were factious for the house of Lancaster; … Let me put in your minds, if you forget, / What you have been ere this, and what you are; / Withal, what I have been, and what I am’ (1.3.127–33). In part the struggle between Richard and the chorus of bereaved women in the play is a struggle over the historical past and who has the right to tell it.

  This indicative encounter between Richard and Margaret therefore takes on something of a meta-theatrical quality about the play itself as a version of history, and a contested one. Tudor historians since Sir Thomas More, writing in the reign of Richmond’s son, Henry VIII, had worked to demonize Richard III – and Shakespeare’s Richard embraces this vision enthusiastically: ‘I am determinèd to prove a villain,’ he declares in his opening soliloquy (1.1.30). The line is double-edged: ‘determinèd’ has the dual meaning both of human agency, and of some sort of cosmic direction. The question of whether Richard does determine his own fate or has it determined for him echoes through the play. There’s a related question about his physical body. Richard begins by describing himself as ‘not shaped for sportive tricks’, ‘Deformed, unfinished’ as he ‘descant[s] on mine own deformity’ (1.1.14–27). The precise nature of this impairment has been variously interpreted on the stage, and so too has its relation to his behaviour. Is Richard deformed because he is wicked, or wicked because he is deformed?

  So it is the women who take on the play’s own historian roles, recording and lamenting the past as in this exchange in Act 4:

  I had an Edward, till a Richard killed him;

  I had a husband, till a Richard killed him.

  Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard killed him;

  Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard killed him.

  (4.4.40–43)

  Their conversations are anti-teleological at many different levels. First, they usually do nothing to advance the plot, and in fact they often interrupt the action. The scene immediately before this one of lament has brought the exciting news of Richmond’s advancing forces, and when Richard enters, his question is apposite: ‘Who intercepts me in my expedition?’ (4.4.136). In its depiction of female grief the scene also has no historical precedent, so is itself a Shakespearean interpolation into the unfolding of events. And in its language, as the example above illustrates, it privileges circularity, retrospection and repetition over linearity and teleology. Even at this point when the play is hurtling towards its conclusion, that’s to say, there is a counter-movement. Associated with women, this undertow pulls away from the future towards the past. For Shakespeare, history is contradictory, with a backward movement to counterbalance forward momentum. Richmond may have won, but who remembers him?

  The Richard III Society – ‘working since 1924 to secure a more balanced assessment of the king and to support research into his life and times’ – has long tried to challenge Shakespeare’s distorted portrait of the king. But the question of whether the portrait of Richard is historically accurate or not is less important than the fact that its charismatic power challenges historical narrative itself. Audiences at Richard III are drawn to Richard and kept at a distance from Richmond: and, like Shakespeare himself, none of us bothers to stick around to see what happens next. It is Richard, not Richmond, who begins and ends this story.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Comedy of Errors

  Writing in the late eighteenth century, George Steevens observed of The Comedy of Errors that ‘in this play we find more intricacy of plot than distinction of character.’ He didn’t mean it as a compliment. Complex, multi-faced characterization has become intrinsic to what we most value about Shakespeare, and at its most extreme, this critical method tends to minimize the plays’ plots or, at best, to read them solely as vehicles for the revelation and development of character. Shakespeare’s comedy about two sets of identical twins whirling around the ancient coastal city of Ephesus (situated in modern Turkey) certainly seems to prioritize plot over character, even though that plot is fairly simple. Separated at birth, the twins coincide but are ignorant of each other’s existence. Basically, whichever twin you think it is on stage at any one time, it’s actually the other one. Messages are not sent, goods are not paid for, wives are mistaken. Hilarity ensues – or, as the account of the play’s first performance as part of the Christmas revels at Gray’s Inn in 1594 put it, ‘nothing but confusion and errors; whereupon it was ever afterwards called “The Night of Errors”’. And given that The Comedy of Errors comes identifiably early in Shakespeare’s career, it has become associated with a youthful or apprentice mode in his writing. The Shakespeare of Errors, so this argument goes, has yet to mature into the poet of King Lear.

  There’s certainly some truth to the idea of this play as an immature work. For a start, the source, Menaechmi (c.200 BCE), by the ancient Roman playwright Plautus, was virtually a set-text for Elizabethan grammar school boys, and thus, like other of Shakespeare’s early plays, including Titus Andronicus, Errors seems particularly indebted to youthful reading. ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,’ wrote T. S. Eliot: here, the young Shakespeare’s response to his source is to duplicate. Plautus has only one set of twins – the equivalent of the Antipholuses (Antipholi?). Shakespeare introduces a second set, their servant duo of Dromios. The play is short by Shakespearean standards, has no subplot, and moves to a largely predictable conclusion in which the identity of the twins is revealed. It isn’t susceptible to theories of comedy as socially regenerative, or as a festive safety valve as in later plays, and nor does it play explicitly with issues of gender and sexuality, as in the popular cross-dressed heroines elsewhere in the comic canon. There are no sociologically interesting outsiders, no homosocial bonding, no parallel cases from social history, although there has been some interest in the master–servant dynamic in the play as it relates to contemporary England. Errors has tended to be understood in terms of what is missing, or in the way it anticipates the more sophisticated treatment of its themes in later plays – the reappearance of twins in Twelfth Night for instance, or the unity of time (where the length of the plot and the length of the actual play are aligned) in The Tempest.

  But on the other hand, Shakespeare had probably written half a dozen plays before Errors, as well as his wildly popular erotic narrative poem Venus and Adonis and a darker companion piece, Lucrece: he was hardly a newbie. Associations of immaturity rarely attach themselves to his next play, Richard II, not because it is distinct in time but because it is often asserted to be distinct in quality. There’s often a circularity to arguments about chronology and artistic value in which earliness becomes synonymous with a lack of aesthetic sophistication, and that perceived lack of sophistication is cited as evidence that the play must be early (in the chapter on The Tempest we’ll see the same argument, with different implications, proposed about the chronological and aesthetic quality of ‘lateness’).

  The Comedy of Errors has been consistent
ly under-appreciated, I’d argue, in part because we don’t know how to appreciate plot. Contemporary culture, the study and performance of Shakespeare, and our own intrinsic narcissism tend to encourage the view that character is destiny. Errors challenges this humanistic view of the world by emphasizing, in ways that anticipate the experience of modernity, the alienation of a mechanical universe. Think Charlie Chaplin on the accelerating assembly line in Modern Times (1936), and you have something of the comic terror captured in The Comedy of Errors.

  But before that almost industrialized sense of personal estrangement, first there is that problem of character. I want to suggest that it’s not so much that Shakespeare fails to develop character in this play (although I’m not averse to calling Shakespeare out for his failures); rather, that he rejects its causational significance. That’s to say, the play’s flat characterization is meaningful, not a mistake. It delivers a world in which humans are at the mercy of cosmic forces – and those cosmic forces are represented in this play as plot. The existence of the twins rejects notions of individual autonomy from the start: twins are, and are not, distinctly separate people. They confound ideas about the autonomy of the individual and exist as a visual challenge to our investment in our own uniqueness. The two Antipholuses and the two Dromios are separated situationally, but not in terms of their personalities: they exist as different people in plot terms, rather than psychological ones.

  And moments where we feel we may access something more specifically personal often turn out to be frustrating. Take Antipholus of Syracuse in 1.2. Having arrived in Ephesus to look for his long lost brother, he has a short soliloquy. So far, so good: aren’t soliloquies when we meet characters alone and enter a privileged relationship with them and their feelings? But Antipholus of Syracuse’s metaphor collapses that singularity even as it asserts it:

  I to the world am like a drop of water

  That in the ocean seeks another drop,

  Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,

  Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.

  (1.2.35–8)

  His image of the water drop is hardly a propitious one for asserting individuality. It’s not simply that he is indistinguishable from his twin brother, which will be the burden of the unfolding plot, but something more existential. It is that he is also indistinguishable from everything else – not just the one close sibling he looks exactly like, but the whole indeterminate wash of humanity. The fact that he has a twin is simply a cruel amplification of his general unremarkability in this indistinct tide. The erasure of individualism is complete, and it is enacted through the contorted syntax of his final phrase,

  So I, to find a mother and a brother,

  In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.

  (1.2.39–40)

  Embedded in these lines is the phrase ‘I lose myself’, but this statement of loss is itself dissipated, divided by the intervening inverted clauses. Even when he’s alone, Antipholus is psychically at sea: it’s like something Estragon might say in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. And as if to confirm that the language of Antipholus’ stunted soliloquy is about commonality rather than individuality, Shakespeare gives it again to another character. When Adriana encounters – as she thinks – her husband (it’s not, which both comically undermines her sentiment about their indissoluble bond, and tragically enacts the image of individual blurring intrinsic to her imagery), she reminds him of the inviolability of two made one through marriage in a similar image: ‘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’ (2.2.128–32). Marriage is here indistinguishable from the watery commingling that seems to be the recurrent difficulty of individuation.

  What The Comedy of Errors seems instead to suggest is that characterization is a property not of the internal but of the external. Things outside us bolster or secure our identity. In particular, it is in being recognized by others that identity is fixed; it is by operating within a social system that personhood is achieved and secured. The twins get their identity from place – they are ‘of Syracuse’ or ‘of Ephesus’: two states separated by ‘enmity and discord’. But part, then, of his existential crisis is that when we meet Antipholus of Syracuse he is in, or even (confusingly) of, Ephesus. By giving both sets of twins a shared name, despite Egeon’s perplexing statement that, as babies, they were so alike ‘As could not be distinguished but by names’ (1.1.52), Errors indicates that the proper name has lost its function. It is precisely not doing its job of distinguishing one person from another. Names as signals of individual identity break down here, both in the themes of the plot, and in the apparatus of the play: reading the play in its first printing in the First Folio – try it! – is almost impossible, not least because the editorial standardization of the Antipholuses and Dromios into ‘of Ephesus’ and ‘of Syracuse’, which gives the modern reader a kind of mastery over the confusion, is absent. The experience of reading the play in its first printed edition must, intentionally or not, have mirrored the disconcerting confusions of the play on the stage.

  If the play locates identity in exteriors, it also understands selfhood through property. The Comedy of Errors is an unusually prop-dependent play for Shakespeare: a gold chain, rope and money all participate in encounters that hopelessly confuse both sets of twins. These objects indicate connection and interaction, metaphorically or literally, but they also stand in for personal identity. When the goldsmith spots Antipholus wearing his gold chain, he immediately identifies him as the man who has taken delivery of the chain and not paid for it: it’s the chain rather than anything more personal about him that (erroneously) fixes his identity. The plot’s confusions are confusions less of individuals than of props: it’s the fact that the man doesn’t know anything about the money he was given that identifies him as a different man from the one who does. Part of the play’s insight is thus that character is expressed not through the inner but the outer. It makes no claim for the specific or autonomous individual: rather, its cleverly constructed clockwork plot moves towards the reunion of a family, the restitution of those persons into their rightful social places. As individuals they are insubstantial: within a comic network each is stabilized by interconnections with the others.

  In some ways this is a more general point about Shakespearean comedy, where individuals find their true selves in romantic, social and economic ties within communities and the movement of the drama is towards joint celebration (like the banquet that is always the last panel in the Asterix stories) rather than – as in tragedies – isolation and death. But it might be possible for us to think about this in a more explicitly psychoanalytical way and thus to link The Comedy of Errors with something that Shakespeare explores elsewhere in his work: the idea of a split personality, or a self refracted across several characters. This was a common idea in medieval theatre, known as the psychomachia (literally, spirit battle, or conflict of the soul). In works such as the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman about the soul’s preparation for a righteous death, actors played not individuals but personified aspects of behaviour. The cast of Everyman includes actors embodying Good Deeds, Knowledge, Beauty, Kindred and Discretion. Thus their dramatic interactions are less about the encounters of human beings, and more a series of allegorized behaviours that together make up a single subject: essentially, a psychomachic play takes place inside a human mind. Although Shakespeare is usually credited with the break away from these old-fashioned kinds of characterization and the discovery of a more modern, interior psychology, it might be useful to see Errors as a secularized form of the psychomachia. Perhaps the two Antipholuses and the two Dromios are less separate and complete pairs of people and more images of one person divided, seeking not the other but the self. In later comedies, Shakespeare will disguise this quest as a romantic one: it’s in the beloved that the self finds completion. But here the psychic solipsism is more naked. These guy
s are not looking for partners but for themselves. Searching for his family, Antipholus of Syracuse will lose himself: it is less his mother and brother that he is looking for than a sense of his own plenitude.

  Often in recent productions the play has been performed with a single actor doubling the role of the twins, particularly in the Dromio scenes. The 1983 BBC television production, for instance, has Michael Kitchen playing both Antipholuses and Roger Daltry as the two Dromios. This technique has the paradoxical effect of adding a sort of verisimilitude – of course everyone’s confused because the twins look so alike – and also of creating an uncanny disjunction. Later in Shakespeare’s career this sense of doubling is used in some interesting ways: as the chapter on A Midsummer Night’s Dream discusses, it’s common to double the earthly rulers Theseus and Hippolyta with their fairy counterparts Oberon and Titania, and in a play so concerned with the sleeping and waking worlds, this equivalence tends to suggest that the forest in that play is the dreamscape of Athens in which repressed or hidden personalities can emerge. This seems a helpful insight into The Comedy of Errors too. Antipholus of Syracuse is able to experience all manner of vicarious behaviours without taking responsibility for them. As a traveller in an unfamiliar city, he encounters a friendly courtesan, has another man’s wife welcome him into her bedroom, and is given expensive consumer goods without payment. What’s not to like? Ephesus is, for him, a fantasy world of actions without apparent consequence: adultery without punishment or guilt, gold chains without a bill. Typically the plot of the play works by making one brother take the rap for what the other has done: in the case of the Dromios it’s a beating, and for the Antipholus twins an ear-bashing from a disgruntled associate. The play offers a dance of actions and displaced or ducked consequences. The twins seem a kind of wish-fulfilment device, or an id-indulgence, where repression is lifted and behaviour liberated. Under the guise of being someone else, even unwittingly, the characters are able to rehearse alternative selves and alternative behaviours.