Comedy of Errors Trivia

1. Egeus tells the Duke that, after the shipwreck, he and two of the twins were taken up by men of...?

From Quiz A Quick "Comedy" Quiz

Answer: Epidaurus

"Of Corinth that, of Epidaurus this..." The Corinthian ship took up Aemilia and the other twins. They were sailing from Epidamnum when they were wrecked. I just chucked Athens in there for the sake of it.

From Quiz The Comedy of Errors

Answer: Plautus

The comic plays of Plautus and Terence were popular in the grammar schools of Elizabethan England such as the one the boy Shakespeare is generally believed to have attended. They were popular not only because the action is very funny but also because the Latin is - and this is really true - relatively easy to understand in context. Early Elizabethan playwrights in London liked to make actable English versions of them, and Shakespeare in "The Comedy of Errors" was following in this tradition. It has not always been realised, though, how much Shakespeare, in writing the play, added to his unashamedly farcical original. D.A. Traversi asserts very bluntly, early on in his well-known book "An Approach to Shakespeare", that "'The Comedy of Errors' is a farcical work completely in the manner of Plautus." The recorded stage history of "The Comedy of Errors" suggests, in line with this, that the farcical elements have often tended to drown out others in performance, but something valuable is lost when this happens. Stanley Wells, who evidently studied the play more sensitively than Traversi did, points out that there are in it "many humanising episodes which count in the scale against a purely farcical classification." Human virtues such as kindness, generosity and love have no place, as I understand it, in Plautus's comic universe. Between Plautus and Shakespeare, writes H.B.Charlton in his book "Shakespearian Comedy", "are the centuries in which chivalry and its achievements in life and letters had evolved the love which makes earth and man anew", so that when Shakespeare writes a wooing scene "he is putting into words a way of looking on the relationship of man and woman differently from the point of view expressed in Roman comedy and in its English imitations." "The Comedy of Errors" is not only considerably longer than its Plautine source and contains a much more brilliant, intricate and complicated plot with a greater number of major characters, but it also maintains simultaneously a romantic tone and tragic potential: as Stanley Wells remarks, Shakespeare encloses the farcical action "within the the framework of a serious story", adding many elements that are foreign to Plautus.

From Quiz A Quick "Comedy" Quiz

Answer: 5 years

"Five summers have I spent in farthest Greece..." That's quite a long time, when you think about it.

From Quiz The Comedy of Errors

Answer: Ephesus

To place the action in Ephesus is an innovation of Shakespeare's: his original source, Plautus, places it elsewhere, in the city of "Epidaurus". Stanley Wells reminds those of us who may have forgotten that the city of Ephesus was "biblically associated with witchcraft and magic": various characters at various times come to think that they, or other characters, are dreaming, or mad, or bewitched in some evil way - this, suggests Wells, helps "to divert our attention from the failure of central characters to deduce the true cause of the errors" which bedevil their progress through the play. "We talk with goblins, owls and sprites./ If we obey them not, this will ensue:/They'll suck our breath, or pinch us black and blue," complains Dromio of Syracuse, and his master, after remarking that "Lapland sorcerers inhabit here," develops the theme: "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 think you have all drunk of Circe's cup," exclaims the Duke as the final dénouement approaches. Shakespeare may also have chosen to locate his play in Ephesus in order to remind his audiences of one or two passages in St Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians - since even the unlettered members of his audiences will have had their heads full of the Bible - which are relevant to the debate which takes place during the play about the proper roles of husband and wife. "Wives, submit youselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord," says St Paul, and "Husbands, love your wives...he that loveth his wife loveth himself." Relevant, too, to the various interchanges in the play between the Antipholuses and their respective Dromios, are those passages in Paul's Epistle in which the proper relationship between masters and their servants or slaves is discussed ("Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters...and, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening"). (All quotations are taken from the King James Bible.) It need hardly be added that the characters in this play habitually fall comically short of compliance with Paul's moral injunctions.

From Quiz A Quick "Comedy" Quiz

Answer: The head

"And he will bless that cross with other beating: Between you I shall have a holy head." There is plenty of breaking of pates across in this play, both in reference and in action.

From Quiz The Comedy of Errors

Answer: entering Ephesus illegally

Solinus, the anachronistic Duke of Ephesus, explains in the first scene that because of summary executions of Ephesian merchants in Syracuse, his government is retaliating in kind on Syracusan travellers who cannot pay for their freedom. Egeon has arrived by chance in Ephesus looking for missing members of his family whom he has not seen for five years or more. Egeon's extremely long speech to the Duke telling him his family history and explaining his plight is a considerable challenge to the actor's hold on the attention of his audience, most of whom have, after all, come to see something more action-packed than this: in its manner the speech looks forward presciently to Prospero's long and unrealistic expository speech to Miranda early on in "The Tempest", but at least in the earlier play the information is entirely new to its recipient and therefore more easily justified. Stanley Wells remarks that the speech's "deliberately slow pace sets off the vivacity of the action that is to follow", as the play moves "from narrative into drama". Shakespeare makes much of old Egeon, a character whose inspiration comes not from Plautus but from a figure in John Gower's Middle English collection of stories in verse "Confessio Amantis", which later - as it happens - became the main source for Shakespeare's "Pericles". Andrew Dickson, discussing "The Comedy of Errors" in "The Rough Guide to Shakespeare", comments that "Egeon's very existence seems a counterbalance to the comic giddiness of the rest of the play...time...is there not simply as a comic propellant. Egeon's wait on Death Row hangs over the action; it is the ever-present tragedy that threatens to divert this 'Comedy'". Or in the elegant words of Professor Frank Kermode, Shakespeare "softens the hard Roman story with the romance tale of Aegeon".

From Quiz A Quick "Comedy" Quiz

Answer: great queen

Antipholus of Syracuse gets pretty enthusiastic in his protestations of love, likening Luciana to a mermaid, a siren and a god, but "great queen" is never spoken.

From Quiz The Comedy of Errors

Answer: two Antipholuses and two Dromios

The two Antipholuses are twin sons of Egeon, and the two Dromios twins who were born to a poor woman on the same night as Egeon's twins, and sold into Egeon's service. The family is soon afterwards separated by shipwreck, with one twin from each pair staying with Egeon's wife and the other two remaining with Egeon himself and returning to Syracuse to live. Five years ago Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse decided to leave home to look for their long-lost brothers. Now Egeon, alone and despairing, has gone to sea himself to try and find them, which is why he has turned up by chance in Ephesus. Unknown to him, not only are the Antipholus and Dromio he last saw as babies in a shipwreck now well-known figures in Ephesian society, but the other two (who left Syracuse to look for them) have themselves just arrived there. The scene is set for a wild jamboree of multiple mistaken identities and confusion, far wilder and more confusing than in Plautus's version because the twin Dromios, servants to their respective Antipholuses, are Shakespeare's original creation and - while on the face of it heightening the play's implausibility - in fact make the play much funnier than it would otherwise have been. (While the two sets of twins are notionally identical, clearly this should not really be so on stage since then the audience would not be able to distinguish one twin from another satisfactorily, which would rather destroy the joke.) What's more, "where Plautus concentrates solely on the crazy misunderstandings that drive his plot," as Andrew Dickson observes, "Shakespeare's characters are fleshed-out people." The differences of character between twin and twin, though not perhaps stressed with much force, are discernible in the text and can be drawn out in performance. Antipholus of Syracuse is dreamier and more introspective than his brother: unlike his brother, he is given some short soliloquies to deliver, the first one beginning "He that commends me to mine own content/Commends me to the thing I cannot get." Antipholus of Ephesus, on the other hand, is more of a man-about-town, known for his association with a courtesan and possessed of a violent and unpredictable temper, which is certainly tried and found somewhat wanting by the series of harrowing incidents that he gets involved in during the course of the play. Nevertheless, as H.B.Charlton comments wryly, "a man who conducts a domestic tiff by calling his wife a dissembling harlot, and by threats to pluck out her eyes, is not too sensitive a fellow and has a sufficient protection in the thickness of his skin."

From Quiz A Quick "Comedy" Quiz

Answer: Globe

Dromio of Syracuse utters this in Act 3, Scene 2, in reference to a woman who is making advances on him. This leads to him listing the different countries he can find on her body: Scotland is in the palm of her hand because it's barren, Spain is in her mouth because it stinks and Ireland is in her buttocks because they're...muddy...

From Quiz The Comedy of Errors

Answer: Adriana

"The sometimes tortured relationships between men and women," comments Andrew Dickson, "are ruthlessly scrutinised in this play," as a prelude - he adds - to a more extensive such scrutiny by the Bard in 'The Taming of the Shrew'". Stanley Wells, for his part, observes that "marital responsibility is a topic towards which Shakespeare's material easily led him, and his attitude to it is much developed from Plautus's easy cynicism." Although of course he is using boy actors, Shakespeare already at this early stage of his career is able to make his stage women utterly three-dimensional, distinct from one another and believable. His women are not brought on stage merely to serve as novelistic or dramatic victims in the "courtly love" tradition of so much medieval literature. They sparkle with their own independent life. I like to think of Shakespeare sitting at his desk with something in his mind closely akin to the words written by Walt Whitman in North America some 250 years later:"I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,/And I say it is as great to be a woman as it is to be a man." Adriana feels herself as a most put-upon wife, and there is a continuing debate as the play progresses between her and her calmer and more sensible sister, Luciana, about the correct course to take in the light of her husband's evidently inconsiderate behaviour. There is a perceived danger that Adriana - very human in her frustrations and errors of conduct - is becoming shrewish and vindictive. At the play's end it is the wise - albeit anachronistic - Abbess Emilia (or Aemilia) - soon to reveal herself, in a final fantastical twist of the plot, to be Egeon's long-lost wife - who persuades Adriana to take a gentler course with her husband, and Adriana (if not so obviously her husband) may be seen as growing in wisdom towards the end of the play, and learning how better to steer clear of avoidable mistakes: "not all the 'errors' of the title," as Andrew Dickson neatly points out, "are the result of external confusion."

From Quiz A Quick "Comedy" Quiz

Answer: He is not named

None of the characters refer to him by name, and in the stage directions he is simply called "2nd Merchant".

From Quiz The Comedy of Errors

Answer: he discovers that his wife has locked him out

Antipholus's wife and her sister are entertaining the other Antipholus, of Syracuse, under the misapprehension that he is the Antipholus who lives there. Instructions have been left with Dromio of Syracuse to bar the door, and not on any account to let anybody else in. This task he fulfils with enormous panache, to the fury of Antipholus of Ephesus who finds himself not only forbidden to enter his own house but loudly insulted into the bargain by an unknown servant within. Dromio of Syracuse, by the way, finds himself during the course of the action on the receiving end of beatings not only at the hands of both Antipholuses but at Adriana's hands as well, understandably goading him into this amusing outburst (which incidentally contains one of only two occurrences of the word "football" in the Bard's entire output): "Am I so round with you as you with me That like a football you do spurn me thus? You spurn me hence, and he will spurn me hither. If I last in this service you must case me in leather." This is a play, remarks H.B. Charlton, "in which fisticuffs [and he might have added kickings] are the regular means of intercourse."

From Quiz A Quick "Comedy" Quiz

Answer: The Porpentine

"Bring it, I pray you, to the Porpentine, for there's the house..." Antipholus of Ephesus' house is the Phoenix. The Centaur is the inn where Antipholus of Syracuse intends to stay and the Elephant is the inn frequented by Sebastian and Antonio in "Twelfth Night".

From Quiz The Comedy of Errors

Answer: "spherical, like a globe"

At this point one's attempts to construct a feminist Shakespeare take a bit of a hammering. It is perhaps fair to say that the Bard's perceived empathy with his female characters does not always extend to women in the lower echelons of society. In the kitchen Dromio has encountered the betrothed of his namesake and twin, a woman whose (according to him) enormous physical proportions are as terrifying as her amorous intentions towards himself. He discusses her in a horrified tone with his master in a dialogue of rather dubious, though no doubt topical (and mildly xenophobic) wit: "She is spherical, like a globe. I could find out countries in her." "In what part of her body stands Ireland?" "Marry, sir, in her buttocks. I found it out by the bogs." "Where Scotland?" "I found it by the barrenness, hard in the palm of her hand." ... "Where Spain?" "Faith, I saw it not, but I felt it hot in her breath." Whatever their intrinsic merits such jesting episodes as these in the play, as Stanley Wells perceptively comments, "give the audience a breathing-space before the next mistaken encounter." Meanwhile, at the dining table, Antipholus has found himself bemused and confused to be entertained by a woman who insists on calling him "husband", but whom he does not find very attractive since his eyes have alighted on her sister Luciana, to whom - much to her consternation and embarrassment, if not actually dismay - he proceeds to pay court. (Perhaps we can be grateful that Shakespeare somehow restrained himself from making the two young women identical twin sisters!) For all this fascinating new "love interest" of his, however, the master can scarcely believe that any of it is really happening ("Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell?/Sleeping or waking/ Mad or well advis'd?" he asks himself in an aside), and he is quick to agree with his servant at the end of the scene that since Ephesus is evidently a place of lunatics and witches, the sooner they find a ship to take them away from there the better for them both. Dromio, nevertheless, remarks ruefully that "but for the mountain of mad flesh that claims marriage of me, I could find in my heart to stay here still, and turn witch."

From Quiz A Quick "Comedy" Quiz

Answer: 500 ducats

"500 ducats, villain, for a rope?" That's a lot of money. Back then, 500 ducats would have been equivalent to tens of thousands of dollars.

From Quiz The Comedy of Errors

Answer: Dr Pinch

This cadaverous Doctor is described retrospectively by Antipholus of Ephesus: "...one Pinch, a hungry, lean-fac'd villain, A mere anatomy, a mountebank, A threadbare juggler and a fortune-teller, A needy, hollow-ey'd, sharp-looking wretch, A living dead man." The actor playing Pinch will have to do his bit to live up to this vivid characterisation of himself. He seems to be intended as a very English comic character imported into this ostensibly Roman play, and a high degree of ostentatious over-acting on the part of the player assigned to his cameo role is probably desirable. With a physical appearance like his it is pleasant to speculate that he may originally have been performed by the same member of Shakespeare's company who went on to play the highly comical "rude mechanical" Starveling in "A Midsummer Night's Dream". Dr Pinch makes himself very unpopular straight away with Antipholus of Ephesus, who hits him hard ("He strikes Pinch," orders the stage direction before the unfortunate doctor has had a chance to speak a word). "I charge thee, Satan, hous'd within this man,/To yield possession to my holy prayers," Pinch then intones, but since Antipholus is not strictly mad at all, as the audience well knows, the doctor merely makes himself ridiculous and his treatment does not work at all. He orders both Antipholus and Dromio to be "bound and laid in some dark room", and they are indeed bound and taken away. Later, however, they escape, and finding Pinch again exact a terrible revenge - the most violent event of the whole play - which takes place offstage and is then related to us by a Messenger: "[His] beard they have sing'd off with brands of fire, And ever as it blaz'd they threw on him Great pails of puddl'd mire to quench the hair. My master preaches patience to him, and the while His man with scissors nicks him like a fool." Master and man have evidently decided that if they are going to be treated as lunatics they will make sure that they enjoy the freedom lunacy confers on them - or perhaps they are now genuinely going insane - but the action is moving at such a hectic pace that there is scarcely any time for the audience to dwell on such niceties. (I like to fancy too that Shakespeare may have toyed with the idea of bringing the exciting incident of the fire and the puddle water and the scissors onstage, but was - politely or otherwise - dissuaded from doing so by the long-suffering actor at the centre of it all.)

From Quiz A Quick "Comedy" Quiz

Answer: Abbess

"And here the abbess shuts the gets on us and will not suffer us to fetch him out." She lives in an abbey. Therefore she is an abbess. Obviously.

From Quiz A Quick "Comedy" Quiz

Answer: It is his shortest play

At around 1800 lines, it's easily Shakespeare's shortest work. His longest, Hamlet, is close to 4000 lines. The last play Shakespeare wrote without a collaborator was The Tempest. The play with the most prose is The Merry Wives of Windsor. Comedy of Errors has a small number of characters in comparison to the history plays. Well, that's it. Hope you enjoyed it.

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