OK, so today's lecture is on comedy of errors. So comedy goes is written towards the beginning of Shakespeare's career. That's one of the things I'm going to talk about, about it. And it's first printed in the First Folio that Posthumus collected edition of Shakespeare's plays in sixteen twenty three.
If you've been to any of the previous lectures in this area, you'll know that the premise of the of the lectures is to try and distil quite a lot of critical areas into one question and then to use that question on the play to reopen some different kinds of methodologies and lines of enquiry that we might use to focus our attention. So my question about comedy of errors, my attempt to condense what critics have said about it is quite a simple one.
Should we bother with it? Should we bother with comedy of errors? Most criticism, I think, has been asking that question. Is it is it a serious play? Are there ways we can take it seriously? So the lecture today is about seriousness, where the comedy of errors is serious, whether players should be serious and whether seriousness is the only thing that should grab our attention.
So, of course, since I'm barely a minute into the lecture, my premise for the next 50 or so minutes is then whether it is worth bothering with. But you you will make your own judgement about that. I'm going to start, as I will, in all the lectures with an outline of the plot of the play, in case you're not familiar with that.
So the play begins quite darkly. GM, who is a merchant, is under arrest and threat of death because he is an enemy from Syracuse in Ephesus, the Duke pronounces that he has only until evening to find the ransom. Eugene tells us that 33 years ago, a shipwreck divided his family so that he was parted from his wife, Amelia, and his twin sons until Phyllis and until Phyllis were also separated, as were their twin servants, Tromeo and Chromeo.
The other twins, Antipolice and Tromeo, they're both they have both ended up in Syracuse. So we'll try and call them articles and drama Syracuse. But in some ways, muddling these characters up is part of the point of the play. So I wouldn't really try too hard to keep them absolutely separate.
You see some of the implications of that later. So I Villus of Syracuse and Romeo of Syracuse have also like AIG and left Syracuse and spent their adult life looking for their missing brothers and Deji and has now come to look for them. So we need stimulus of emphasis. The one who was lost and went to emphasise who is married to Adriano, who is very discontented, that he pays no attention.
She complains to her unmarried sister, Lucy Ana. And this Yamina becomes the object of the other two, Phyllis's affections. And as apparels of romance plot for the Drogo twins, which involves a person Gargantua in person called Now who we never see Antibalas of FSS has various business associates, wasn't going to talk about later. This is a very city play and it has quite a lot of unexpected resonances with city comedy as practised by later writers.
Middleton, Marston and Decker and his various business associates include Angelo Goldsmith, from whom he's commissioned the gold chain. Balthasar, a merchant and a courtesan to whom he promises the sad gold chain, which he had originally intended for his wife.
Dr. Pinche comes in at the end, who is a comic schoolteacher [INAUDIBLE] magician brought in to cure the apparent madness caused by the confusion between the two sets of twins until as of FSS is arrested for not paying for goods, which of course he has never received because they've gone to his brother in error in the play's final scene. And syphilis of episodes is interrogated about these debts and recognised by his father, Jian.
But of course, he doesn't know it's his father. Eugene approaches him for the ransom money that he needs to save his life. But after lots of exercise, he doesn't know who he is. The abbess of another random person, apparently random person who comes in right at the end of the play. Promises to cure Antibalas is madness. But what she does is to introduce the other twin, Antibalas of Syracuse, who is also in her Abie, having fled there for sanctuary.
So she reveals what's at the heart of all this. Unexpectedly, that there are two Idont, two sets of identical twins. The abbess, of course, has her own revelation, too. She is Emilia Jean's wife and therefore the mother of the antifascist twins. The confusion's of the day are untangled and she invites everyone to a belated christening party for her sons. Now is a summary. It's confusing. I do as I say, I think that's inevitable.
Basically, the plot of comedy of errors tells us that whichever twin is on stage at any time, it's the wrong one. Shakespeare has taken a well-known play by the ancient Roman playwright Plautus, a play called Monak Me. Monogamy is pretty much a set text for Elizabethan grammar school boys, and therefore we might see this maybe alongside something like Titus Andronicus in its use of of it as a play which is particularly indebted to a kind of school grammar school repertoire of source material.
So Shakespeare's taken this well-known play and he has doubled it. Plautus has only one set of twins, the equivalent of the until Phyllis's or maybe wish to call them and to fly, whereas Shakespeare introduced a second set to servant drome Yeo's. And there is also an honour mastic confusion, so on. On a mass stick's is the study of proper name. So in honour, mastic confusion. Glottis initially names his twin brothers monogamous and sausage, please.
But in a long prologue, he explains that Sausage Liz has been renamed monogamous in memory of his lost brother. But there is some sense in Plautus that the twins have at least initially separate identities indicated by distinct proper names.
As I want to set out as we go forward in this lecture, one reason we might want to pay attention to comedy of errors is that Shakespeare confounds this attempt at individual separation, even while though contradictorily in the long opening scene where GM tells us what's all this background, he tells us that the infant boys were so alike they could not be distinguished, but by names they could not be distinguished, but by names.
And they're not distinguished by names that presumably they could not be distinguished, they could not be distinguished, but by names. So let's go back those step and think about why. Why is that this doubt, the comedy of errors is a is a worthy or an interesting play. Why is the question that idea identified a critical question about it. I think it's the two reasons. Firstly, our attitude to the notion of early Shakespeare and the second, our attitude to comedy.
Let's take the notion of early Shakespear first here. I think the discussion is parallel to something I discuss in the lecture on The Winter's Tale as a so-called late play there. I suggested that the notion of lateness in regard to Shakespeare is not simply a descriptive chronological term, but that it has evaluative connotations. And those connotations have to do with aspects of profundity and maturity. The artist draws on a wealth of experiences and he goes beyond it.
Gordon McMullen's book Shakespeare and the idea of late writing is a really stimulating investigation of these cultural assumptions. But we might think that the notion of early two is a term that we should look at in more detail, since early in Shakespeare studies doesn't either indicate a simply chronological or descriptive category, but an evaluative one. Early Shakespeare denotes immaturity, apprentice work, latent themes which only become interesting when he does them better next time.
Now, we might want to quibble with the idea of early work. In general, it's worth pointing out the pointing out that all of marlos plays, for instance, were completed in a period that had he lived longer, would have been called early and they were Shakespeare, Mahler born in the same year. They're all all male plays are completed before Shakespeare has written comedy of errors. There's been a mutually reinforcing critical discourse which has suggested that
the comedy of errors is not very sophisticated and therefore it must be early. And it is not. And it is early and therefore not very sophisticated. You can see that it's hard to kind of break out of that kind of circularity. So is the comedy of errors all that early anyway? The Oxford Shakespeare useful thing. Lots of different Shakespeare. Complete Shakespeare editions. And you've probably got a sense what's useful to you already.
One useful thing about the Oxford Shakespeare, the Wells and Taylor, particularly the second edition is that it places the works in a kind of connected chronological order. So their principle of organisation is the order in which they think Shakespeare wrote things as opposed to the principle of organisation in the Folio, which is to organise them by genre or, you know, any other kind of principle that you might you might think of.
So the Oxford Shakespeare organises by character ology, and that's useful to us here, because if you want to look where a play comes in Shakespeare's chronology, you can see where it comes in the Oxford Shakespeare. And that edition dates Comedy of Errors to 15 Ninety-four 15 Ninety-four, the date of its first performance at Grais in one of the ends of court.
So that suggests that before comedy of errors, we get two gentlemen of Verona, Taming of the Shrew, all three parts of Henry the Six, Richard the Third and Titus Andronicus, as well as the narrative poems, the rape of Luke Reese and Venus and Adonis. So that's what is it, seven plays and two narrative poems before we get to a comedy of errors. There will be an argument for saying comedy is not even particularly early.
Richard, the second the play that the Oxford chronology puts right after a comedy of errors is not a play we very often talk about as being early. Certainly not in a dismissive or negative sense. You can see that in another way. That argument actually reinforces the associations between earliness and in. Substantiality is only by proposing a later date for comedy of errors than was previously assumed that we can reap the positive associations of accumulated wisdom and experience.
Nobody. Nobody really. It's interesting how the critical argument has developed. Nobody is saying, yes, it is early and it is. Were that worthy of consideration? It's early and it's interesting. People are saying it's interesting and it's not so early so that there's Connexions. The connexion between earliness and immaturity are quite difficult to break. So I think we need to try and desegregate early and unsophisticated or early and uninteresting.
And similarly, we need to find some new ways of understanding Shakespeare's comedy. Perhaps the most permanent critical appreciation of Shakespeare's comedies has come via either sort of structural or anthropological understandings of the play's relations to festival culture. Those theories of comedy as a kind of social safety valve. So I'm thinking there about something like s.L. Balboa's influential book, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy.
And Barber argues that the play's kind of shadow, a sort of festive world of entertainment and subversion that exists in Elizabethan culture. So that's one way, that one prominent way with Mr. Shakespeare's comedies and the other is a more specifically sort socio historical or even theoretical work on gender and sexuality. So indicatively here I'm thinking of something like Valerie Tribes' Book, Desire and Anxiety Circulation's of sexuality in Shakespearean drama.
And these are this kind of work says, you know, what's interesting about the comedies is the way comedies play with ideas of sexuality, perhaps particularly through cross-dressing, through female agency, through disguise and a kind of romance plot. Now, I can perhaps see, by the way, I've outlined those two critical methodologies, that comedy of errors is not very easily assimilated into either of these frameworks. It doesn't really take up rituals of inversion in the festive comedy sense.
It doesn't have status or gender disguises, the repeated beatings of the servant Romeos. Actually, it seemed to me to reinforce social hierarchies, even as everything else takes on a sort of topsy turvy quality. And although the play does have in the characters of Louisiana and Adriana and in some ways even the courtesan, I say even the courtesan, because it's it's a really quite a small road across those three female roles and even the absent.
Now, perhaps it has some interesting articulation of women's role in society. But it isn't prominently arranged around female characters, female quest, female experience. As we come to expect Shakespeare's romantic comedies to be so that oft quoted generic distinction comic women, tragic men, useful title of Lynda Bambas book doesn't really apply here. Or perhaps it does. We'll come back to that.
So Adriana and Lucy Ana are given some role, particularly articulating a wistful sense of disappointment about the men around them. But they're not prominent or active in the way that, say, Rosalind in As You Like It or Viler in Twelfth Night will be the people in this play who are travelling, who move from one world to another in order to change themselves. And it can recognise that as a really common Shakespearean device, that people move quickly, comic device, move from one place to another.
The Travellers' to be able to do that in this play are not female as they are elsewhere. We don't get anything like Rosalind's. Well, this is the forest of Ardern where she indicates that they've moved or violence early. What country friends is this? Instead, we've gotten syphilis and Romeo, who are the questing figures and errors, obviously has some kind of etymological connexion with Irving and with Arendt with with moving around, with travelling as well as with mistakes.
So nor is comedy that is really about society healing and reproducing itself through the trope of romance leading to marriage. It will be easy to imagine a play in which the errant syphilis has been dallying with. The courtesan is reunited with his wife, Adriana, and his twin brother is married to her sister, Lucy Ana. But that's not how play. So it'll be quite an obvious ending to have.
It's not the ending we get the play gestures towards a romantic comedy conclusion in that it's got two pairs of two two pairs of partners. But it doesn't really get there. Instead, it's central opposite sex couple. In its conclusion are the older, reunited husband and wife, Jean and Emilia. In this way, the ad, the play ends, I think it with a kind of nod towards or something which we can see more clearly by thinking about Shakespeare's later play.
So here we're getting the old couple say parallelise and Thay's from apparently is all they aunties and Dominy from The Winter's Tale. But we're not also getting the younger couple that we have in those plays, too. There are lots of ways, I think, comedy of errors. Most most interestingly, links with the play Shakespeare's writing at the end of his career. It's another way in which I think there's chronological distinctions and not perhaps all that useful.
So comedy that has not been susceptible to theories of comedy as socially regenerative, nor does it play explicitly with the issues of gender and sexuality. There are no outsiders. There's not really much homosocial bonding. There are no parallel cases from social history, although there has been some work on master servant relationships. Largely, therefore, the things we have found susceptible to literary analysis in comedy in Shakespeare's comedies do not seem to be present in this play.
Instead, what we have, what critics have seen is a play with a high proportion of features. We don't tend to appreciate in literary terms, slapstick action, no subplot, unpoetic or language, flat characters. Okay, so that's a lot of negative cluster of ways of thinking about the play that suggests that it is only of interest in the way that it anticipates the more sophisticated treatment of themes in later plays. Coleridge called this play a poetical farce, a poetical farce.
I don't think he meant it entirely as a compliment, but I think there are some literary analysis and some forms and some things we can bring to bear on comedy of errors which will make it reveal itself into more interesting ways. One of things I want to try and do is to introduce some alternative theories of comedy, some non anthropological or non sophs socio historical theories of comedy to help us appreciate it.
And he suggests, in fact, that we use a decidedly anachronistic theory of comedy to try to think about what Shakespeare is doing here. I think I may use only Bergson. French modernist philosopher who's writing at the beginning, very beginning of the 20th century. Bergsten's most famous essay is Laria or laughter. It's very, very widely available on Google Books and stuff.
So you just Google it and find the full text very, very easily. But I've taken out a few quotations that I think are going to be useful for us here. So Bergson is trying to develop a theory of what makes us laugh and what laughter means. Basically, his idea is that while laughter can only be generated by humans because he says, we only laugh at human things and if we laugh, say, at an animal, it's because we're anthropomorphising it.
So we laugh at human things. But the laughter arises from a situation in which the human body behaves in a way which is not human. More precisely that it behaves like a machine or an automata. The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that, as that body reminds us of a mere machine. The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion, as that body reminds us of, of a mere machine.
Bergsten says that comedy enables us to see man as a jointed puppet. And he describes it as something mechanical encrusted upon the living, something mechanical encrusted upon the living. We can see that the elasticity of Mr Bean or the implausible physicality of a silent comedian like Buster Keaton or something would seem to embody Bergsten's central idea. Bergsten's idea is that rigidity, physiological primarily, but also social and cultural, is at the root of the comic.
We laugh, says Burg's, and every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing, we laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being thing. I've said that this is an anachronistic theory to apply to the comedy of errors, although I don't in any way suggest it is anachronistic and therefore we shouldn't do it. But we could compare it quite interestingly with a non anachronistic theory. Sidney, in the defence of poetry.
This is Sydney's discussion of laughter is quite an interesting and slightly sobering passage. Our comedians think there is no delight without laughter, which is wrong for though laughter may come with delight. Yet it come as not of delight, as though delight should be the cause of laughter. But well, death one thing breed both together, nay, rather in themselves. So that's delight and laughter. They have, as it were, a kind of contre riot tea for delight.
We scarcely do, but in things that have a convenience to ourselves or the general nature. Laughter almost ever cometh of things more disproportionately to ourselves and nature delight to have a joy in it, either permanent or present. Laughter hath only a scornful tickling. For example, we are ravished with delight to see a fair woman. And yet far from being moved to laughter. We laugh at deformed creatures wherein we certainly cannot delight so disproportionately.
I think he has something of the quality. It's it is were disproportionate. It has something of the quality of Bergsten's rigidity. And both Sydney and as I'm going to show Bergsten's share, the idea that to laugh at something is to be is to lack pity, for it is to be unempowered, thick. So Sydney's analysis shows us that, of course, that what is funny or what prompts laughter is culturally and historically specific.
Laughter is a cultural and not a physiological response. We talk about bursting out laughing or not being able to stop laughing as if these are in some way involuntary responses was is in fact their deeply learnt and deeply cultural. But there in Bergsten's definitions, there is, in addition, a kind of dehumanising, as we saw, echoed in Sydney. I think Bergesen intends to think about laughter as a as a kind of dehumanising property of modernity.
You might want to think back to, you know, anxieties about modernism and mechanical processes and dehumanising industrial scale warfare. For example, in the First World War, we can see Bergsten's theory in action, perhaps most clearly in Charlie Chaplin's film Modern Times, where Chaplin becomes part of the unremitting mechanical production line in the factory where he works. Bergsten suggests then that comedy requires the dehumanising of its object.
The comic in this reading is the opposite of the sentimental. Comedy and sentiment are complete opposites. The sentimental evokes feeling and empathy. The comic demands separation and coldness. Something in one of my favourite bits in the Bergersen comedy requires the momentary anaesthesia of the heart, the momentary anaesthesia of the heart.
So the idea that comedy might demand such a momentary anaesthesia is challenging to our feel good ideas about laughter, but also to our response to Shakespeare, where warmth towards characters and their situations is a large part of audience pleasure, particularly in the comedies. But perhaps Bergsten's there might help us look at the way that the comedy of errors refuses.
That kind of empathic engagement refuses for the most part to offer us characters in recognisable situations with whom we can empathise and how the play cultivates. Instead, this anaesthesia of the heart that enables comedy to take place. Or to put it another way. Comedy of Errors is pure comedy because we don't care about the anti Phyllis's or the dramas or which is which. It is a kind of cardiac and the anaesthesia in five act.
Now, part of the critical issue with the play and its rejection of audience empathy is that its characterisation, the play's characterisation has seemed apparently so flat. The two ambivalences and the two drome CEOs are separated situationally, so they belong to different places and they do slightly different things, but they're not separated in terms of their personality, or at least not substantially.
We never, in fact, really see their personalities. They exist as different people in the structure of the plot. Not in a kind of social or psychological imaginary. And the very moments where we begin to feel that we might access something which is more specific and personal, often turn out in this play to be quite frustrating.
Let's take antipolice of Syracuse in Act one scene to having arrived in Ephesus to look for his long lost brother until Phyllis sends off his servant to their lodging place and has a momentary soliloquy alone on stage. So far then, so good soliloquies are when we meet characters alone and enter into a new privileged relationship with them. But Antiviolence of Syracuse is metaphore. In his soliloquy collapses that claim to singularity even as it asserts it, I.
To the world I'm like a drop of water. But in the ocean seeks another drop. Who falling there? To find his fellow fall. Some additions have failing there to find his fellow fourth unseen, inquisitive, confound himself. So I. To find a mother and a brother in quest of them unhappy. Lose myself to the world. I'm like a drop of water. The image of the water drop is hardly, we might think, a propitious one for asserting individuality.
And it's not simply here that Amphipolis has the specific challenge to his identity, that he is an identical twin. So he isn't saying I'm a drop of water and there is another one drop of water just like me. So it's not the specific plot that we have here that the this man is half of a pair of twins, but something somehow more existential.
The fact that he's with twins seems hardly to matter. What the speech says is that he and syphilis is indistinguishable from everybody else, not just the person he looks exactly like, but the whole indeterminate ocean of humanity, the erasure of individualism. Then just in that short speech is complete. And I think it's enacted through the contorted syntax of that final phrase. So I to find a mother and a brother in quest of them unhappy, lose myself.
Even the phrase I lose myself is itself lost, divided and alienated by those intervening clauses. So until Valencia's brief soliloquy is not a moment of connexion or revelation. But in fact, a moment of alienation. It's like something Estragon might say in Waiting for Godot. And in fact, the absurdist theatre of the mid 20th century is, I think, an interesting parallel for the bleaker and more existential aspects of comedy of errors.
And as if to confirm that the language of antipolice is stunted, soliloquy is about commonality, not individuality. Shakespeare actually gives it again to another character. When Adriana encounters as she thinks her husband in fact, is of course her husband's brother, she reminds him of the inviolability of their marriage bond in a similar image.
No, my love, as easy may still fall a drop of water in the breaking Gulf and take on mingled dents that drop again without additional diminishing as take me from thyself marriage here indistinguishable from more general watery commingling seems the epitome of a recurrent difficulty of individuation. So what comedy of errors, I think suggests is that character and characterisation is not the property of the internal, but the external.
That seems to me a theme which recurs in Shakespeare and it recurs. Therefore, in these lectures, it's by. In this play, identity is fixed when someone recognises you as yourself. So it's kind of in the eye of the beholder in some way. But it's by operating within a social system that personhood is achieved and secured.
If you look at the early printed texts that shape of Shakespeare's plays up quartos where they exist, or as with comedy of errors, the folio, we can often see Shakespeare's view of a character fluctuating within and between scenes such that they're given name, that their proper name is often less important than their social status. So Claudius in Hamlet is only ever called King Edmund in Lear only ethical bastard. The character of Angelo in Comedy of Errors is called Goldsmith.
We don't know the name of the Duke in measure for measure, except by reference to the list of characters appended at the end. Social statuses and social roles come first. Proper names come second in Shakespeare. Very often it is not being called by our name that identifies as not least because clearly in the history, plays of the characters seem to have hundreds of confusingly hundreds of different names.
So it's not been called by our name. That is a primary mode of identification, but by being firmly in a particular role in society. Now we know that this is a kind of preoccupation of only modern culture. It's it's a part why social mobility and things like the sumptuary laws, those ineffective edicts which try and say what different classes of person are allowed to where they have such an anxious hold on.
On the early modern imagination, because being if your identity is tied up with where you are in society, movements or fluidity in society become much more frightening. Comedy of errors, I think, amplifies this insight by giving both sets of twins that shared name. The proper name, therefore, is precisely what does not distinguish them. Names are signals of individual identity break down here, both in the themes of the plot and in the apparatus of the play.
If you try to read the play in that first printing in the Folio, it's almost impossible, not least because the editorial standardisation of The Antiflu says and the Drolma goes into of Ephesus or of Syracuse. That's the way modern editors give us a sort of mastery over what's happening. So at any time, we do know who's speaking. That's not part of the folio. So we just got a character who is largely called until our character called Tromeo. They're not differentiated in that way.
The experience of reading the play is a much more confusing one in that format than modern editors make it for us. So if the play locates identity and exteriors, it also understands selfhood through property. Comedy of Errors is an unusually prop dependent play for Shakespeare. Sometimes it can be a really useful job, actually, to just set out a list of what props you would really absolutely need to perform any any particular play.
There are lots and lots of play for which you need really no props at all. Here we do need props because they're this that they're that they're not decorative, that they're actual tokens of transactions and of identity, particularly things like the gold chain, the rope and the money. They're all objects which indicate connexion and interaction between characters, both metaphorically or literally.
When the goldsmith in comedy of errors spots antipolice wearing the gold chain, he immediately and naturally identifies him as the man who has taken delivery of that chain and not paid for it. In fact, he isn't that man. But the gold chain seems to indicate that he is the play. The plots confusion's thus are confusion's of props, giving money to the wrong man, extracting payment from the wrong man. And in this we might want to see comedy of errors as Shakespeare's only city comedy.
That genre which become so popular really around a decade after comedy of errors, which has a similar dependence on props. A similar interest in character types rather than an individual personality. And in fact, a similar cast of merchants, courtesans and cuckolds. So the play's in sight, I think, is that character is not expressed through dinner, through the out, but through the outer. The play makes no claim for the specific or autonomous individual.
Rather, it's clever plot moves towards the reunion of a family. It's by resituated these people in their proper roles in relation to each other, in the family that the play can be resolved. It might be possible for us to read these figures in a more explicitly psychoanalytical way and therefore to link comedy of errors with something that Shakespeare explores elsewhere.
The idea of split personality or a self refracted across several characters, rather, in the manner of that mediæval dramatic form. Psycho. I've talked about this before, but let's just recap. Psycho Makela is a form of theatre in which actors play not individuals, but aspects of behaviour and their interactions are there a lot. Thus less the interactions of full human beings and rather an allegory ised play of possible behaviours for a kind of representative human subject.
Shakespeare is usually credited with a break away from these kinds of characterisation and the discovery of a more interior psychology. But it might be useful to return to that split form of characterisation in a more secular form here and to see the two ambivalences and the two drome is less as pairs of people and more as split or divided people. Each seeking not the other, but the self.
One reason Comedy of Errors is not a romantic comedy is that the search is directed inward rather than outward. These guys are not looking for partners. Searching for his family. Antithesis of Sciorra clues, cues will lose himself. It is less his mother and his brother that he is looking for than some sense of personal completeness. Now, often this play has been performed with a single actor doubling the role of the twins. That's been particularly popular for the dreamier characters.
The BBC television production, for instance, has one actor who plays both Phyllis's and one playing the drone. Meer's is an easier thing to do on film. But it's not impossible to do it in the theatre. And there are quite a number of examples of that. It's an interesting technique because it adds on the one hand, the kind of verisimilitude. Of course, everybody is confused because the twins look so alike. They look so alike because they are the same person.
But it links that verisimilitude with a really unsettling, kind of uncanny and Heimlich kind of dream. The treat the twins both are and are not separate people. Perhaps we could link this sense of psychic split with, for instance, the common doubling in Midsummer Night's Dream of the earthly rulers, Theseus and Hippolyta with their fairy counterparts, Oberon and to Tanya. So doubling them means the same actors play the same, the two sets of characters.
This tends. This has become almost a cliché in readings of Midsummer Night's Dream and in performances of that play as a way of suggesting that the forest there is the dreamscape of Athens in which repressed or hidden personalities can emerge. If we take this to comedy of errors, an interesting phenomenon emerges. Um, syphilis of Syracuse, the visiting twin to visit Syracuse, is able to experience all manner of vicarious behaviour without taking any responsibility for it.
He's able to have encounters with the courtesan, encounters with his brother's wife. He's able to take goods without paying for them and so on. Typically, the plot of this play worked by making one brother take the rap, literally a beating, always in the case of the drome years and a kind of ear bashing for the. Until it didn't. Until I brothers one brother takes the rap for what the other has done. So we'll see that again and again. A kind of performance of substitution.
It's a dance of actions and displaced or ducked consequences. The current National Theatre production with Lenny Henry is Phyllis. Has Adriana enticed her husband? But in fact, it's her husband's brother to bed in what one reviewer identified nicely, I think, as a. Phyllis's guilty pleasure. I think this makes the twins kind of wish fulfilment device a sort of ID function.
They allow repression to be lifted and behaviour liberated by pushing the blame onto a kind of alter ego or not alternate self. Under the guise of being someone else, even unwittingly, the characters are able to rehearse alternative selves and alternative behaviours. In this reading, what the plot reveals, though, is that such liberation can only be temporary. There is extremes, increasing stress and anxiety in this play.
Another review of the of the National Theatre production talks about the director's substantial achievement to orchestrate a gradually mounting mania, a gradually mounting mania. It's a great phrase and a great description of that production, but also of the play. The Folio stage direction at the end of Act four has excellent omnis as fast as may be frighted as fast as may be.
Frighted look very often get in stage directions, an indication of the emotion that's to be to be given in any one action. Do it. If you think about that, we very rarely get Sock's of adverbs or descriptions in that in that way. And it's quite striking on as fast as maybe frightened events catch up with the bewildered Antibalas and Drummy of Syracuse such that they have to seek sanctuary in the abbey.
We don't have to be fully paid up Freudians, to see that. What happens next is that a chaste nun stroke mum sorts it all out. If we push this idea a bit further, then we can see that the these errors are not too far from terrors. The scene in which I'm DeVillers of Ephesus returns to his home to find his way Baade because his servant tells him he is already inside. Supping with his wife is a kind of parable of self alienation. It's funny, but it's funny because its implications are frightening.
And the place very interested, I think, in the way identity, witchcraft, possession, both in the idea of being possessed by something outside yourself and having a kind of self-possession work. Shakespeare has relocated the action of the play from Plautus. His location, Eppy, dumbness to emphasis and emphasis, has strong associations in the Bible with exorcism, with evil spirits and with confusion. The frequency with which this play employs a lexicon of magic and the supernatural is striking.
More mentions of witches and witchcraft than in Macbeth, for instance, more mentions of conjuring and magic than in Midsummer Night's Dream. More references to Satan and the devil than in any other Shakespeare play. So on the edges of this slapstick farce, isn't is a real abiding linguistic interest in magic, supernatural, the supernatural and devilry.
Dr Pinches attempts to exercise this madness at the end of the play, bring out comedy of errors, preoccupation with possessions, madness and other forms of South Los. So what I've been talking about so far, there are ways to suggest that there is more to comedy of errors than the dismissal of it as an immature or trivial work might suggest. So the answer to my opening question, should we bother with comedy of errors? Seems to be yes. Because really, it's Hamlet or Lear. But just in microcosm.
When Hamlet tells Laertes he shouldn't be blamed for Polonius his death, he does it by suggesting it was not Hamlet, but his madness. Lear gets the answer Lear's shadow when he asks, who is it that can tell me who I am? So these are expressions of South division we're used to seeing in tragedies or that we think of the hallmark of tragedies that are already present in a different key in comedy of errors. As I think it's always attributed to John Mortimer, as John Mortimer wrote, Farce.
It's tragedy at a thousand revolutions per minute, farce is tragedy at a thousand revolutions per minute. The speeded up comedy of errors is only half the length of these later tragedies, but claims some of the same existential territory. So the gain here, interpretively, interpretively, has been to identify the players worthy of study because it is serious. And how better to do that than to link it with the major tragedies? That's what we've gained.
What we might have lost is an idea of comedy. It's not very useful truism as truism to say that most theorising of comedy is not very funny. I don't know whether we could should be concerned that the critical movement to understand comedy tends to find it interesting precisely in proportion to the ways it finds it no longer funny. So interesting and funny seem difficult for us to reconcile. We might then here we might think. And this is my final point about laughter more generally.
Firstly, comedy is not only about laughter. I've talked a bit about that distinction in the lecture on measure for measure. When I talk about the difference in comic form and structure on the one hand and comic tone on the other, and I'm sure we'll come back to that when we talk about all's well that ends well later on this term. But laughter is itself a complicated force, which I think is, above all, non-trivial. Bergsten writes that laughter is, above all, a corrective.
We laugh at things as a coercive attempt to realign behaviours with social norms. Again, as with the echo of Sydney Bergson has, Bergesen is not an entirely anachronistic force here. The historian Keith Thomas recognises something about early modern laughter in quite similar terms. For all its affirmation of shared values, laughter could be a powerful source of social cohesion in the close knit village communities. Mockery and derision. Sounds a bit like Oxford colleges to me.
In the first close knit village communities, mockery and derision were indispensible means of preserving Orthodox values and condemning unorthodox behaviour. So comedy or laughter seeks to manage unorthodox behaviour and bring us into line. We laugh at things in order to send out a signal that they're not acceptable. What kind of orthodox behaviour is being managed then by the comedy of comedy of errors?
Well, we could see that, as befits a play performed as part of entertainment in the homosocial world of the ins of court and a play which was almost certainly too short ever to be performed in the public theatre of the Globe. We can say that it reinforces certain attitudes about social rank. The serial beatings of the drama brothers can, in performance, take on an unreal. Tom and Jerry kind of quality of violence, which is inventive and in Bergsten's terms, not human or slapstick.
But they can also take on the more uncomfortable reality of the Tom and Jerry equivalent in The Simpsons cartoons. Itchy and scratchy. Itchy, scratchy. Remember, do draw real blood. The fact that they are real bodies being beaten and and battered is part of what's funny about that background sequence. We might also see that the behaviour in comedy varies that's being endorsed. It's pro merchant and indifferent to women. That's the start of how we might say that saying something is funny.
Can't be the end of the discussion. Why is this this way? Because it's funny because I ask him why something is funny. Almost always has a social or cultural reason which might now be difficult to recover. If you read reviews of this play, the current National Theatre production is well worth reading up about or seeing if you can. It's on live at the Phoenix at the beginning of March.
If you read reviews of the play, you can see some of the difficulties of translating the plays humour, but also on the ongoing significance, I think of bugs only and theories of the bodily and the mechanical. So I've asked whether we should bother with comedy of errors. I've tried to suggest that we should and that its pleasures and its sophistication are still underrated.
And that's such a rarity in Shakespeare studies, where everything seems to be so well trodden that that might in itself be something attractive to you. I've tried to suggest ways that comic theories might be applied to the play to make its apparent deficiencies of character or emotional depth into its most definitely, definitely managed features and then to cover some more general material on how we might understand comedy and its twin laughter.
Next week I'm lecturing on Richard the Third. This is a slightly random collection of plays, I admit, which is because I have now set myself the task of trying to do a lecture on pretty much every play, which is not the task I had set at the beginning. Had I said that at the beginning, I would have chosen the place in slightly different order. But I hope this randomness will give you something kind of fruitful to think about.
So I'm letting on Richard the third. The question I'm asking is, do we want Richmond to win?