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.
Self-estrangement has become so obvious a topic of Shakespearean commentary that it is often forgotten that it is peculiar to, and symptomatic of, his genius. Whether Shakespeare divined within himself the play of contraries, or whether it was the fruit of observation, is an open question. As a country boy come to London, as a player with aspirations to gentility, as a writer as well as an actor, he had ample scope for contemplation. We also have the interesting spectacle of an utterly practical and business-like man who was able to create a world of passion and of dream. That is perhaps the greatest mystery of all. He had within himself legions. He saw the human truth in any argument or controversy. All the evidence of his plays suggests that if he expressed a truth, or even an opinion, an opposing truth or opinion would then occur to him — to which he would immediately give assent. That was for him the natural condition of being a dramatist. It has often been noticed that in the plays there is no sense of Shakespeare’s personality, and that the characters themselves do all the thinking. It has also been suggested that there is a consistent and characteristic “doubleness” within the plays, whereby heroic or mighty action is duplicated by the fools and clowns. There are also occasions when an action can be interpreted in two different ways, or a passion such as sexual jealousy can seem both justified and unjustified. But doubleness is not the right word. Kings and clowns are all part of the essential singularity of his vision.
CHAPTER 34
They Thought It Good
You Heare a Play
In 1591 and 1592 it is likely that the young Shakespeare was working on more than one play at once for Pembroke’s Men. There is no reason why he could not move from comedy to history or tragedy, since he mingles these within individual scenes and even speeches. The Tragedy of King Richard III seems to have occurred to Shakespeare as he was completing The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York. The character emerges in the earlier drama but in subsequent revision, as we have observed, Shakespeare deepened and darkened the portrait in anticipation of the more accomplished play. It was a role for Burbage himself.
Richard Burbage did indeed become the principal interpreter of Shakespeare’s plays for the rest of the dramatist’s life. The recognised leader of the company, he specialised in heroic or tragic roles. It was written of him that
whatever is commendable in the grave orator is most exquisitely perfect in him; for by a full and significant action of body he charms our attention. Sit in a full theatre, and you will think you see so many lines drawn from the circumference of so many ears while the actor is centre … for what we see him personate we think truly done before us.1
It was he who played the first Lear, the first Hamlet and the first Othello. It is also likely that he introduced Romeo and Macbeth, Coriolanus and Prospero, Henry V and Antony, to the English stage. No other actor in the world has ever achieved so much. The naturalness and liveliness of his “personation” are often mentioned. He was considered to be a Proteus of changing identity, “so wholly transforming himself into his Part, and putting off himself with his Cloathes, as he never (not so much as in the Tyring-house) as-sum’d himself again until the Play was done … never falling in his Part when he had done speaking, but with his looks and gestures maintaining it still unto the heighth.”2 He was perhaps Shakespeare’s most familiar companion. The dramatist left him money to purchase a ring, but the names of Burbage’s children are perhaps a better token of their intimacy. He had a daughter named Juliet, who died young; he had a son called William and another daughter named Anne.
And so we see Burbage, at the age of twenty-one, walking onto the stage as Richard III. The medieval Vice was the traditional way of representing evil. Yet Richard seems to emerge fully armed even as Shakespeare thought of him, as if he had come from his imagination even as he had ripped his way out of his mother’s womb. For the first time on the English stage the Vice is capable of growth and change: Richard experiences the first faint stirrings of conscience on the eve of the battle of Bosworth. It is only momentary, but his powerful lines prefigure the agonies of Macbeth and Othello: “What do I feare? my selfe? theres none else by”.
Shakespeare was too great a dramatist to rest with the conventions. He had to reinvent the paths of human consciousness in order to stay true to his interior vision. He had transcended his sources and influences — Hall, Holinshed, Seneca with the rest — by combining them in fresh and unexpected ways. The high chant of formal rhetoric is mixed with comic asides, the melodramatic with the erotic. The rough wooing of Lady Anne springs to mind, although it is hard to think of any Shakespearian scene between the sexes that is not touched by malice or competition. He had not forgotten his lessons from Marlowe, and there are echoes of Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta in Richard III.