Shakespeare's Comedy of Love

Alexander Leggatt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136556562
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

First published in 1987.
This study removes some of the critical puzzles that Shakespeare's comedies of love have posed in the past. The author shows that what distinguishes the comedies is not their similarity but their variety - the way in which each play is a new combination of essentially similar ingredients, so that, for example, the boy/girl changes in The Merchant of Venice are seen to have a quite different significance from those in As You Like It.

1 The Comedy
of Errors

In the second scene of The Comedy of Errors, Dromio of Ephesus meets Antipholus of Syracuse for the first time, and rebukes him for not coming home to dinner. Antipholus ignores the rebuke (which means nothing to him) and turns to a more urgent matter:

ANTIPHOLUS S:		Stop in your wind, sir; tell me this, I pray:
		Where have you left the money that I gave
		you?
DROMIO E:		O – sixpence that I had a Wednesday last
		To pay the saddler for my mistress' crupper?
		The saddler had it, sir; I kept it not.
		(I. ii. 53–7)

We settle ourselves for a couple of hours of farce. The confusion seems to be on a purely material level – mistaken persons and mislaid goods. Shakespeare is keeping to the spirit of his source, the Menaechmi of Plautus, where the action takes place in a hard southern daylight and the issues are all practical ones.

But at the end of this first scene of confusion, Shakespeare introduces a new note. In Plautus, Epidamnum is seen as a place of danger, but danger of a prosaic and familiar kind:

For assure your selfe, this towne Epidamnum, is a place of outragious expenses, exceeding in all ryot and lasciviousness: and (I heare) as full of Ribaulds, Parasites, Drunkards, Catchpoles, Cony-catchers, and Sycophants, as it can hold: then for Gurtizans, why here's the currantest stamp of them in the world. Ye may not thinke here to scape with as light cost as in other places.

(II.i. p. 17)¹

Antipholus of Syracuse sees Ephesus in quite a different way:

They say this town is full of cozenage;

As, nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,

Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,

Soul-killing witches that deform the body,

Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,

And many such-like liberties of sin.

(I. ii. 97–102)

The sleight of hand that deceives the eye, the cunning of the confidence trick, shades into something deeper and more sinister, deception and shape-shifting that attack not merely the purse but the body and soul. There are no such overtones in Plautus. Nor is there much sense of wonder in the characters; only a temporary bewilderment that is easily explained away. Shakespeare's Antipholus of Syracuse, addressed by name by a woman he has never seen before, asks, ‘How can she thus, then, call us by our names, / Unless it be by inspiration?’ (II. ii. 165–6). In the parallel incident in Menaechmi, the courtesan's cook addresses Menaechmus by name, and an explanation (wrong, but reasonable) is immediately forthcoming:

These Courtizans as soone as anie straunge shippe arrive at the Haven, they send a boye or a wench to enquire what they be, what their names be, whence they come, wherefore they come, &c. If they can by any meanes strike acquaintance with him, or allure him to their houses, he is their owne.

(II. i. p. 19)

No such reassuring explanations are offered to Shakespeare's characters. At times even the audience is left in the dark, for Shakespeare takes fewer pains than Plautus to give a logical underpropping to his comic fantasy. There is nothing improbable in identical twins, but identical twins with the same name take some explaining, and Plautus is ready with the answer: ‘When it was tolde us that you and our father were both dead, our Graundsire (in memorie of my fathers name) chaunged mine to Menechmus’ (V. i. p. 38). Shakespeare provides two sets of twins with the same name, and not a word of explanation.

The Roman comedy of confusion takes place in a practical world, where nothing is inexplicable, and where the issues at stake are largely the material ones of who owns what and where the next meal is coming from. The play has a single vision and a uniform texture. But Shakespeare gives us a play in a more mixed dramatic idiom. The market-place atmosphere of Plautus is still present, but it no longer monopolizes the play; it is varied by suggestions of fantasy and mystery, and the result is a mixture of styles that goes much deeper than changes from prose to verse, or the varying of metres. It is a mixture of different ways of viewing the world, of which different dramatic styles are ultimately a reflection. Nor is the decision to mix idioms in this way artificially imposed; it springs from Shakespeare's own fresh and imaginative meditation on the central idea of Plautus, the idea of confusion. The Comedy of Errors is unusual in that mistaken identity is itself the primary motif, not (as in As Tou Like It or Twelfth Night) a technical device to aid the presentation of some other issue. Perhaps Shakespeare, before he could use mistaken identity as an instrument, had to give it a thorough examination. And in exploiting the situations arising from it, Shakespeare demonstrates that confusion, the gap of understanding between one mind and another, can exist at a deeper level than who's-got-the-chain or whichtwin-is-it-this-time. These questions are important to the action, and much of the play's immediate comic life depends on them; but they are also signals of a deeper breakdown of understanding; the characters seem at times to inhabit different worlds, different orders of experience.

Some of this effect is created by the mingling – and, at times, the collision – of dramatic styles. In II. ii Adriana, meeting the man she thinks is her husband, attacks him passionately for straying from her, urging him to recognize that as husband and wife they are bound together in a single being, and that consequently she shares in his corruption. Taken out of context, the speech is passionate and earnest, idealistic in its view of marriage and urgent in its emotional response to the breaking of that ideal. But the context is all-important. Adriana's speech follows immediately – with no transition whatever – a racy comic turn between Dromio and Antipholus on time, falling hair and syphilis; she breaks in on two characters who are operating in quite a different dramatic world. And any chance we might have of making the transition from one mode to another and taking Adriana's speech seriously is killed by the fact that all her high talk about the closeness of the marriage bond is directed at the wrong Antipholus, who – after listening to about forty lines on how closely he and Adriana are bound together – asks innocently, ‘Plead you to me, fair dame?’ (II. ii. 146). Or consider the following passage:

ANTIPHOLUS S:		The fellow is distract, and so am I;
		And here we wander in illusions.
		Some blessed power deliver us from hence!
		[Enter a Courtezan.
COURTEZAN:		Well met, well met, Master Antipholus.
		I see, sir, you have found the goldsmith now.
		Is that the chain you promis'd me to-day?
ANTIPHOLUS S:		Satan, avoid! I charge thee, tempt me not.
DROMIO S:		Master, is this Mistress Satan?
ANTIPHOLUS S:		It is the devil.
		(IV. iii. 37–45)

Here, the attitude of each character is comically dislocated. The courtesan is simply living her casual, material life, while Antipholus is struggling between heaven and hell, in a metaphysical nightmare where even a call for ‘some blessed power’ is met by (for him) a fresh appearance of evil, and (for the audience) a comic anticlimax. The contrast is driven home, once again, by the different styles of speech – the casual chatter of the courtesan, the explosive horror of Antipholus and, on the side, Dromio's more familiar recognition of the powers of evil. This introduces us to a device we will see Shakespeare using throughout his comedies: a speech is comically dislocated by being placed in the wrong context, usually through being addressed to an unsympathetic or uncomprehending listener. The comic value of this device is obvious, and is exploited throughout the play. Yet, as with many such devices, it requires only a twist of emphasis, or a new situation, to make the effect pathetic or disturbing. The gaps of understanding between us are not always amusing. While we laugh easily enough when Adriana fires a long, emotional speech at the wrong Antipholus, it is not so funny when, later in the play, Aegeon pleads with his son to save his life, and his son refuses to acknowledge him.

The effect is to show how frail and vulnerable our attitudes and assumptions are, to bring into sharp focus the incompleteness of anything we may say or do, the fact that, however serious or important it may seem to us, there is always another viewpoint from which it is wrong, or trivial, or incomprehensible. The collisions of different minds that take place throughout The Comedy of Errors help to suggest this. When, for example, Adriana strikes a posture ...