The Comedy of Errors Trivia Quiz

Answer: the early comedies

"The play of Errors" by "Shaxberd" is entered in the accounts of James I's court for December 28th, 1604, but it was not a new play by then, that being the tenth anniversary of the first recorded performance at Gray's Inn in the City of London. It may have been written at any time in the early 1590s, and there is an internal reference to the French civil wars of the time which would have been particularly piquant if staged in 1591-92. The witty speeches and uproarious plot seem, so far as we can tell, to have delighted equally the clever legal minds of the private audiences at the Inns of Court and the half-drunk rabble who patronised the public theatres.

Although "The Comedy of Errors" belongs to the earlier phase of Shakespeare's career as a dramatist, and is most memorable for its crazy escapades involving multiple mistaken identities, there are also some remarkable thematic parallels with his late "romance" plays, particularly "Pericles" and "The Tempest". Stanley Wells, one-time Director of the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, and a man who rated this play very highly, stresses in his introduction to the New Penguin edition that the "fundamental human emotions" underpinning the drama are "the simple and related ones of sorrow at separation and joy in reunion." Shakespeare, claims Wells, is able "to infuse into the story of mistaken identities an emotional reality and a sense of wonder" that prefigure his so-called "last plays".

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.

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.

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".

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."

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."

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."

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."

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.)

Answer: they make a dash for a nearby priory

When Antipholus and Dromio arrive a little earlier on stage, "their rapiers drawn", the other characters naturally think it is the same Antipholus and Dromio who have just exited bound hand and foot and destined for imprisonment in some dark room, and who have now freed themselves by miracle. Soon after they have disappeared into the anachronistic priory, presumably in order to claim religious sanctuary, the other pair of twins arrive having really freed themselves, adding to the bewilderment of everyone else on stage but not of the audience, who can still understand (more or less) what is going on. It is, at least, pretty well agreed among the other characters that both master and servant are as mad as hatters, and perhaps we should pause briefly to consider the broader significance of madness here. Andrew Dickson, comparing the treatment of Antipholus of Ephesus in this play with that of Malvolio in the later "Twelfth Night", remarks that "if everyone else thinks you're mad, you might as well be," a point amplified by Stanley Wells when he comments that "our sense of identity does not only come from within but depends too upon a high degree of constancy in the reactions of those around us. If we suddenly found ourselves not recognised by our family, madness could well result." Which is perhaps just another way of suggesting that there appears to be a whiff of tragedy hovering around the margins of this ostensibly purely farcical play.

The spirit of comedy triumphs in the end, however. Egeon is led onstage to his apparently inevitable execution, only to notice in the crowd his own son - but it is not, as he thinks, the Antipholus he last saw five or more years ago, but the one he lost as a baby - so this Antipholus does not recognise his own father: "I never saw my father in my life," he insists. The old man's response is understandably distraught:

"...O time's extremity,
Hast thou so crack'd and splitted my poor tongue
In sev'n short years that here my only son
Knows not my feeble key of untun'd cares?"

Everything falls into place in the end, however, when the other pair of twins emerge from the priory along with the Abbess, who then reveals herself as Egeon's long-lost wife and the mother of the two Antipholuses. Egeon is pardoned and freed; Antipholus of Syracuse proposes to Luciana; there is some delightful comic business as identities continue to be mistaken by all and sundry even with both sets of twins present onstage; everyone is gloriously happy and the two Dromios walk off hand in hand, hopefully to rounds of well-deserved applause. It is such a brilliantly executed drama that one must lament the fact that more often than not in the theatre the text and other aspects of the play have been mangled, as if undiluted Shakespeare were not good enough for this or that director. That very distinguished Shakespearean actor, director and critic G. Wilson Knight, lamenting this very thing when he reviewed a Commedia dell' Arte-style "Comedy of Errors" at Stratford, Ontario, in 1963, complained about "the smothering of the comedy under slapstick buffoonery of a lower order," about the use of masks which "when grotesque add nothing to what may be better done by skilful make-up," and about "the guying of Aegeon's opening and tragic speech...Shakespearean comedy is regularly...related to tragic feeling, and no use of a manner drawn from a different type of comedy justifies the distortion of a Shakespearean essence." (Masks were very much in evidence, too, in the bizarre Japanese "Kyogen of Errors" which was put on at the reconstructed Globe Theatre in London in the summer of 2001.)

Original creative shows taking the plot as their starting point are, no doubt, a different matter, and I think the celebrated musical "The Boys from Syracuse", which hit Broadway in 1938 - the first musical ever to be based on the plot of a Shakespeare play - could be a lot of fun for those who like catchy tunes interspersed with loud American humour: but it is undoubtedly a very different thing from the Bard's original conception.