Friday, March 8, 2013

The Comedy of Errors Act 1 – "I to the world am like a drop of water 
that in the ocean seeks another drop…”



The Comedy of Errors Act 1 – "I to the world am like a drop of water 
that in the ocean seeks another drop…”

"I to the world am like a drop of water

That in the ocean seeks another drop,

Who, falling there to find his fellow forth…
confounds himself." (Act, 1, Sc. 2, Lines 35-38)

After, for at least a year, bearing the ins and outs of people around him dying of the plague, and suffering the hardship of getting no income from play performances (even though starvation and the bills from Stratford-Upon-Avon would have been paid for by some of the money that came in from Southampton, the likely patron of his poems), Shakespeare and the people of London were ready for a good, quick comedy.

‘The Comedy of Errors’ is Shakespeare’s shortest play. It has the puns and word play that Shakespeare had become so adept at using in his earliest comedies but Shakespeare had also learnt so much more from writing History plays, narrative poetry and reading pamphlets from the book market. His year of writing poetry and not having his plays performed had strengthened and fine-tuned Shakespeare as a writer. His verse is tighter, ‘mouth-crammed’ with poetic and dramatic devices, some intuitive but some heavily influenced by the Italian commedia dell arte. This has led some to claim that he went to Italy during 1593. Fanciful and highly unlikely but it is obvious that he has either seen or read com media pieces during this period or, more likely, heard detailed stories and seen drunken unemployed actors reenact lazzi and sequences in the long hours and nights spent in 1594 in one of the two makeshift ‘not-so-legal’ taverns in Bishopsgate.

The play of 'The Comedy of Errors' is an old fashioned farce and one of the few of his plays that observes Aristotle’s classical dramatic unities. Shakespeare is a genius and we think of him as a genius because he is one who breaks the rules but in 1594, he was a genius because he fulfilled the rules. The three dramatic unities of Aristotle, if I remember correctly, are action (the drama has one major plot or sequence of actions), place (the action happens in one place) and time (the action of the drama happens over a single 24 hour period). The comedy of 'The Comedy of Errors' relies ostensibly on mistaken identity and two sets of identical twins that were separated at birth (Ancient Roman would have loved this plot).

Now let's see how good my precise skills are. In Ephesus (an Ancient Greek city that exists only in Shakespeare’s imagination and in the mildew-ridden oak walls of the Rose Theatre), Egeon is about to be executed by Solinus (Duke of Ephesus) because he can’t pay the fine of one thousand marks which any Syracusan found within the city walls of Ephesus must pay (gee, I got a lot into one sentence there). Egeon welcomes death since he claims it will bring an end to his woes.
… proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall,
And by the doom of death end woes and all… “ (I.i.1-2)
(So glad to use a quote since it saves so many words and moves the plot along). Of course, after Shakespeare has given us a hit of a rhyming couplet like that, Solinus’ curiosity gets the better of him and he asks Egeon to tell his story.
Egeon tells the story of his prosperous life and marriage and how his loving wife gave birth to identical twins on the same day as other twins were born.
A joyful mother of two goodly sons…
The one so like the other…
That very hour, and in the self-same inn,
A meaner woman was delivered
Of such a burden, male twins, both alike…
Egeon, being very fond of twins, bought the ‘lowly’ newborns, intending to have them as servants for his twin sons (of course nowadays people buy other trendy gifts for their twin sons such as twin goats in Somalia).

However, on the return boat journey, a storm hits and their ship is wrecked (Shakespeare, never living by the sea at any point in his life, will use this device many times in his lifetime). Egeon’s wife strapped herself, with one of her sons and one of the twin servants, to one of the ship’s masts. Being very original in thought and action, Egeon did the same. A rock splits the parties apart and Egeon and his crew go in one direction and his wife and her entourage go in another. A Corinthian ship rescues Egeon’s mob while Egeon sees an Epidaurian ship pick up his wife’s mob.
Of course Egeon’s son, when he grows up, being bored with Egeon's stories and puns, wants to find his mother and brother, so the son and the servant set off. Egeon, being very original in thought and action, follows suit. The Duke, being either bored or intrigued by Egeon's story, grants Egeon a day’s liberty to see if he can raise the ransom funds to secure his release. Egeon hits the town.

Same Bat-town, same Bat-time. Egeon's son, Antipholus (oblivious to the fact that his father is in the same town, monitoring his mobile phone), befriends Antipholus who advises him to lie about where he comes from to avoid arrest. Antipholus, who is a bit dim because of the genes he has inherited from Egeon, sends his servant, Dromio, to an inn to get the money (fortuitously one thousand marks) and his baggage (this is not meant as a metaphor or a pun). Antipholus, bemoans the fact that he cannot find his brother. Well, his brother is in fact now a prosperous citizen of (wait for this) the self same town of Ephesus, served by his own Dromio of Ephesus. Antipholus of Ephesus is married to a woman named Adriana, and he is a great favorite of Duke Solinus.
Confusion proliferates. Dromio has mistaken this Antipholus for Antipholus of Ephesus, and Antipholus S., in turn, mistakes this Dromio for his own servant. How did an audience cope with this confusion (perhaps they arrived late from the bear-baiting). Hencew, at this points states:
"I to the world am like a drop of water

That in the ocean seeks another drop,

Who, falling there to find his fellow forth…
confounds himself." (Act, 1, Sc. 2, Lines 35-38)

More bizarre confusion proliferates. Act 1 ends in madness.

No comments:

Post a Comment