The Comedy of Errors

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THE NEW FOLGER LIBRARY

SHAKESPEARE

Designed to make Shakespeare’s great plays available to all readers, the New Folger Library edition of Shakespeare’s plays provides accurate texts in modern spelling and punctuation, as well as scene-by-scene action summaries, full explanatory notes, many pictures clarifying Shakespeare’s language, and notes recording all significant departures from the early printed versions. Each play is prefaced by a brief introduction, by a guide to reading Shakespeare’s language, and by accounts of his life and theater. Each play is followed by an annotated list of further readings and by a Modern Perspective written by an expert on that particular play.

Barbara A. Mowat is Director of Research emerita at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Consulting Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, and author of The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare’s Romances and of essays on Shakespeare’s plays and their editing.

Paul Werstine is Professor of English at the Graduate School and at King’s University College at Western University. He is a general editor of the New Variorum Shakespeare and author of Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare, as well as many papers and essays on the printing and editing of Shakespeare’s plays.

The Folger Shakespeare Library

The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., is a privately funded research library dedicated to Shakespeare and the civilization of early modern Europe. It was founded in 1932 by Henry Clay and Emily Jordan Folger, and incorporated as part of Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, one of the nation’s oldest liberal arts colleges, from which Henry Folger had graduated in 1879. In addition to its role as the world’s preeminent Shakespeare collection and its emergence as a leading center for Renaissance studies, the Folger Shakespeare Library offers a wide array of cultural and educational programs and services for the general public.

EDITORS

BARBARA A. MOWAT

Director of Research emerita

Folger Shakespeare Library

PAUL WERSTINE

Professor of English

King’s University College at Western University, Canada

From the Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library

It is hard to imagine a world without Shakespeare. Since their composition more than four hundred years ago, Shakespeare’s plays and poems have traveled the globe, inviting those who see and read his works to make them their own.

Readers of the New Folger Editions are part of this ongoing process of taking up Shakespeare, finding our own thoughts and feelings in language that strikes us as old or unusual and, for that very reason, new. We still struggle to keep up with a writer who could think a mile a minute, whose words paint pictures that shift like clouds. These expertly edited texts are presented as a resource for study, artistic exploration, and enjoyment. As a new generation of readers engages Shakespeare in eBook form, they will encounter the classic texts of the New Folger Editions, with trusted notes and up-to-date critical essays available at their fingertips. Now readers can enjoy expertly edited, modern editions of Shakespeare anywhere they bring their e-reading devices, allowing readers not simply to keep up, but to engage deeply with a writer whose works invite us to think, and think again.

The New Folger Editions of Shakespeare’s plays, which are the basis for the texts realized here in digital form, are special because of their origin. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., is the single greatest documentary source of Shakespeare’s works. An unparalleled collection of early modern books, manuscripts, and artwork connected to Shakespeare, the Folger’s holdings have been consulted extensively in the preparation of these texts. The Editions also reflect the expertise gained through the regular performance of Shakespeare’s works in the Folger’s Elizabethan Theater.

I want to express my deep thanks to editors Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine for creating these indispensable editions of Shakespeare’s works, which incorporate the best of textual scholarship with a richness of commentary that is both inspired and engaging. Readers who want to know more about Shakespeare and his plays can follow the paths these distinguished scholars have tread by visiting the Folger either in person or online, where a range of physical and digital resources exist to supplement the material in these texts. I commend to you these words, and hope that they inspire.

Michael Witmore

Director, Folger Shakespeare Library

Contents

Editors’ Preface

Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors

Reading Shakespeare’s Language: The Comedy of Errors

Shakespeare’s Life

Shakespeare’s Theater

The Publication of Shakespeare’s Plays

An Introduction to This Text

Characters in the Play

The Comedy of Errors

Text of the Play with Commentary

Act 1

Scene 1

Scene 2

Act 2

Scene 1

Scene 2

Act 3

Scene 1

Scene 2

Act 4

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Act 5

Scene 1

Longer Notes

Textual Notes

The Comedy of Errors: A Modern Perspective

by Arthur F. Kinney

Further Reading

Key to Famous Lines and Phrases

Commentary

Act 1

Scene 1

Scene 2

Act 2

Scene 1

Scene 2

Act 3

Scene 1

Scene 2

Act 4

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Act 5

Scene 1

Editors’ Preface

In recent years, ways of dealing with Shakespeare’s texts and with the interpretation of his plays have been undergoing significant change. This edition, while retaining many of the features that have always made the Folger Shakespeare so attractive to the general reader, at the same time reflects these current ways of thinking about Shakespeare. For example, modern readers, actors, and teachers have become interested in the differences between, on the one hand, the early forms in which Shakespeare’s plays were first published and, on the other hand, the forms in which editors through the centuries have presented them. In response to this interest, we have based our edition on what we consider the best early printed version of a particular play (explaining our rationale in a section called An Introduction to This Text) and have marked our changes in the text—unobtrusively, we hope, but in such a way that the curious reader can be aware that a change has been made and can consult the Textual Notes to discover what appeared in the early printed version.

Current ways of looking at the plays are reflected in our brief prefaces, in many of the commentary notes, in the annotated lists of Further Reading, and especially in each play’s Modern Perspective, an essay written by an outstanding scholar who brings to the reader his or her fresh assessment of the play in the light of today’s interests and concerns.

As in the Folger Library General Reader’s Shakespeare, which this edition replaces, we include explanatory notes designed to help make Shakespeare’s language clearer to a modern reader, and we hyperlink notes to the lines that they explain. We also follow the earlier edition in including illustrations—of objects, of clothing, of mythological figures—from books and manuscripts in the Folger Shakespeare Library collection. We provide fresh accounts of the life of Shakespeare, of the publishing of his plays, and of the theaters in which his plays were performed, as well as an introduction to the text itself. We also include a section called Reading Shakespeare’s Language, in which we try to help readers learn to break the code of Elizabethan poetic language.

For each section of each volume, we are indebted to a host of generous experts and fellow scholars. The Reading Shakespeare’s Language sections, for example, could not have been written had not Arthur King, of Brigham Young University, and Randal Robinson, author of Unlocking Shakespeare’s Language, led the way in untangling Shakespearean language puzzles and generously shared their insights and methodologies with us. Shakespeare’s Life profited by the careful reading given it by S. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Theater was read and strengthened by Andrew Gurr and John Astington, and The Publication of Shakespeare’s Plays is indebted to the comments of Peter W. M. Blayney. We, as editors, take sole responsibility for any errors in our editions.

We are grateful to the authors of the Modern Perspectives; to Leeds Barroll and David Bevington for their generous encouragement; to the Huntington and Newberry Libraries for fellowship support; to King’s College for the grants it has provided to Paul Werstine; to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which provided him with a Research Time Stipend for 1990–91; to R. J. Shroyer of the University of Western Ontario for essential computer support; and to the Folger Institute’s Center for Shakespeare Studies for its fortuitous sponsorship of a workshop on Shakespeare’s Texts for Students and Teachers (funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and led by Richard Knowles of the University of Wisconsin), a workshop from which we learned an enormous amount about what is wanted by college and high-school teachers of Shakespeare today.

Our biggest debt is to the Folger Shakespeare Library: to Michael Witmore, Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, who brings to our work a gratifying enthusiasm and vision; to Gail Kern Paster, Director of the Library from 2002 until July 2011, whose interest and support have been unfailing and whose scholarly expertise continues to be an invaluable resource; and to Werner Gundersheimer, the Library’s Director from 1984 to 2002, who made possible our edition; to Deborah Curren-Aquino, who provides extensive editorial and production support; to Jean Miller, the Library’s Art Curator, who combs the Library holdings for illustrations, and to Julie Ainsworth, Head of the Photography Department, who carefully photographs them; to Peggy O’Brien, former Director of Education at the Folger and now Director of Education Programs at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and her assistant at the Folger, Molly Haws, who gave us expert advice about the needs being expressed by Shakespeare teachers and students (and to Martha Christian and other master teachers who used our texts in manuscript in their classrooms); to Jessica Hymowitz, who provides expert computer support; to the staff of the Academic Programs Division, especially Amy Adler, Mary Tonkinson, Lena Cowen Orlin, Linda Johnson, Kathleen Lynch, and Carol Brobeck; and, finally, to the staff of the Library Reading Room, whose patience and support are invaluable.

Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine

A map of the Mediterranean, with Ephesus, Syracuse, and Corinth. From Cornelis de Bruyn, A voyage to the Levant . . . (1702).

Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors

Shakespeare’s lively Comedy of Errors, widely agreed to be the slapstick farce of his youth, begins in a most unexpected way—as a nightmare. It introduces its audience to the old merchant Egeon, who lost his wife and one of his sons many years before, and who has been painfully searching for his other son for five years. As the play opens, the old man has just entered the city of Ephesus to continue the search, only to find himself immediately arrested and sentenced to death—not because he has committed a crime, but just because he is a Syracusan in Ephesus, a city whose relations with Syracuse have soured during the old man’s five-year quest. Egeon has for so long been distressed by the dispersal and loss of his family that he almost welcomes his own death, which he expects to come at the end of the day.

The gloom of Egeon’s suffering lifts after the first scene as the play catches us up in a swirl of events and becomes the farce of errors, or mistaken identifications, that its title promises us. The notion of farce carries with it a helpful cooking analogy in the verb to farce, which means to stuff a bird for roasting. Before we get very far into The Comedy of Errors, we find it as full of laughable complications as any bird was ever full of stuffing.

Shakespeare started off with a classical source, Plautus’s Menaechmi, a play about a pair of identical twins who, unknown to each other, find themselves in the same city after a lifetime apart, to their own confusion and to the confusion of all who know one but not the other. In the tradition of farce, Shakespeare then set out to multiply the opportunities for comic misidentification by stuffing into his play not one pair of twins but two, giving the twin Antipholuses twin servants, the Dromios. Borrowing from another play by Plautus, Amphitruo, Shakespeare has the wife of one Antipholus entertain the other Antipholus while her husband is locked out of his own house. He also gives one of the servants a memorably obese and lustful fiancée, whose attentions terrify the servant’s mystified twin brother. As each Antipholus meets the other’s Dromio and then his own Dromio, over and then over again, the play becomes so crammed with misunderstandings, with growing resentments, and with anxieties that we are hard-pressed to keep in mind that this comedy of errors carries within it rather simple solutions to its tangled questions. When the confusions lead to arrests for unpaid debts and to exorcisms for demonic possession, we begin to doubt that the play can be wound up in comic resolution, especially a resolution that includes the threatened old Egeon, who returns at the end for his appointment with the executioner, long after most of us have forgotten all about him.

Perhaps the most spirited character in this farce is Adriana, the wife of one of the Antipholuses. The play endows her with language rich in imagery and passionate in tone, language that explores her resentment at being under the domination of a husband who seems not to respect her, combined with devotion to the welfare and success of that very husband. In the conflicted speeches of Adriana, in some of Antipholus of Syracuse’s reflections, and in other places worth looking for, Shakespeare suggests complexities beyond the mere complications of farce.

After you have read the play, we invite you to read "The Comedy of Errors: A Modern Perspective," written by Professor Arthur F. Kinney of the University of Massachusetts, contained within this eBook.

Reading Shakespeare’s Language: The Comedy of Errors

For many people today, reading Shakespeare’s language can be a problem—but it is a problem that can be solved. Those who have studied Latin (or even French or German or Spanish) and those who are used to reading poetry will have little difficulty understanding the language of Shakespeare’s poetic drama. Others, though, need to develop the skills of untangling unusual sentence structures and of recognizing and understanding poetic compressions, omissions, and wordplay. And even those skilled in reading unusual sentence structures may have occasional trouble with Shakespeare’s words. More than four hundred years of static intervene between his speaking and our hearing. Most of his immense vocabulary is still in use, but a few of his words are not, and, worse, some of his words now have meanings quite different from those they had in the sixteenth century. In the theater, most of these difficulties are solved for us by actors who study the language and articulate it for us so that the essential meaning is heard—or, when combined with stage action, is at least felt. When reading on