Shakespeare

Here, as in Titus Andronicus, we also see the germs or seeds of his later work. The contrast between the court and the forest is one that he would fully exploit, as he began imaginatively to enlarge the English stage beyond the confines of unified time and space. The scene of elopement in the play here prefigures Romeo and Juliet. There are elements of Shakespeare’s imagination – preoccupations, perhaps – that did not change.

It seems almost inevitable that he turned quickly to The Comedy of Errors, another comedy in a hurry. At one point he mixes up the names of the characters from both plays, as if The Two Gentlemen of Verona was still on his mind. All of the characters in the play are in a hurry. The author was in a hurry. In her diary Virginia Woolf once confessed that “I never yet knew how amazing his stretch amp; speed amp; word coining power is, until I felt it utterly outpace amp; outrace my own … even the less known amp; worser plays are written at a speed that is quicker than anybody else’s quickest; amp; the words drop so fast one can’t pick them up.”² There is a stage-direction in The Comedy of Errors, probably added by Shakespeare himself, concerning an exit: “Runne all out, as fast as may be”.

The Comedy of Errors is a mad play about suspected madness and mistaken identity, with two sets of twins being continually misrecognised to farcical effect. Shakespeare here went back to his earliest dramatic reading, in the plays of Plautus he had studied as a schoolboy, but characteristically goes a stage further in complication and intrigue. It is in terms of structure, however, a perfectly “correct” Roman play. Unusually among his plays it observes the “unities” of time and place as adumbrated by Aristotle, with a single action occurring in a single place during the course of a single day. It was played upon a stage with three doors, or “houses,” in a row like the set of some classical comedy. It is as if he had decided to prove, to his university-educated contemporaries, that he was not as unlearned as they assumed.

So The Comedy of Errors is for him an exercise in ingenuity as much as in comedy. His is a predominantly verbal humour, rapid, elaborate and ingenious. It is, as Coleridge put it, “in exactest consonance with the philosophical principles and character of farce.”³ In that respect it requires a writer of the highest intelligence and sensitivity to maintain the pace and direction of the action. It might be seen as a slightly derivative and old-fashioned play, written by a schoolmaster of genius, since there are also elements of the morality play in its composition. As a schoolboy Shakespeare used the volume of Plautus edited by Lambinus, in which there are manifold references to various “errors.” Hence perhaps the title. But the play is not entirely derived from memories of the classroom. He is still close to Marlowe and to Lyly, from whom he lifts lines and situations. T. S. Eliot once suggested that bad poets borrow while good poets steal; Shakespeare managed to do both.

It has the distinction of being Shakespeare’s shortest play, but it is not without its subtleties of characterisation. We see here what might be called the natural bent of Shakespeare’s imagination, with the superiority of servants over their masters and the natural good sense of women contrasted with the wilful obtuseness of men. There also appears, in this comedy of twinship, the theme of self-division that runs through much of Shakespeare’s mature drama:

… oh how comes it,

That thou art then estranged from thy selfe? (500-l)

The fact that these lines are uttered by a wife, who believes that she has been abandoned by her husband, may add a private note of self-communing. In this play, as in so many others of Shakespeare, a family is reunited after many vicissitudes, and lost children are restored.