Handout for The Comedy of Errors, Acts 3-5

Below is the handout I wanted to give out in class to facilitate our discussion of the final three acts. Look over this and we'll discuss these ideas next week. Might help you with the upcoming Second Paper assignment! 

 I. COMEDY AS SOCIAL CONFUSION

From Susan Wills, The BBC Shakespeare Plays

1.) “You can do anything in the right place at the right time. If you do the right thing at the wrong time you look silly and the audience is pleased...Cellan-Jones [the director of the 1983 BBC Comedy of Errors] emphasized the public nature of the private actions: the beating of servants, the fetching of husbands home to lunch or to be exorcised of demons, the arrests happen in the street, for comedy depends on the public setting.”

From Arthur F. Kinney, “The Comedy of Errors: A Modern Perspective” (pp.179-195)

2.) “If it were not so funny, Shakespeare’s first comedy would read like a schizophrenic nightmare: identities are lost, split, engulfed, halucinated, imploded. Apparently solid citizens (solid at least to themselves) suffer ‘ontological uncertainty’ in acute forms. wandering about unrecognized by all they encounter” (182). 

II. COMEDY AS A MIRROR OF SOCIETY

1.) “...the gold chain that is disputed in The Comedy of Errors was just the sort of acquisition that Londoners themselves focused on; both identity and status depended increasingly on one’s material goods. Because the society was more and more cognizant that what one was was largely determined by what one owned, the chief emphasis in The Comedy of Errors on possessions, on being possessed (by marriage, witchcraft, or grace) and on being dispossessed unites the play’s Ephesus with Shakespeare’s London” (184-185).

From Act 3, Scene 2: Dromio discusses his “wife” to his master, Antipholus of Syracuse, pages 77-81

2.) DROMIO: Marry, sir, she’s the kitchen wench, and all grease, and I know not what use to put her to but to make a lamp of her and run from her by her own light. I warrant her rags and the tallow in them will burn a Poland winter. If she lies till doomsday, she’ll burn a week longer than the whole world” (77).

* QUESTION TO CONSIDER: In a modern production, these can still be very funny lines, as he’s horrified by his fat, dirty, oily, horrific wife (really, the other Dromio’s wife). But isn’t this also a bit misogynistic? He’s making of a woman by equating her to “the globe,” and relating different parts of her body to the stereotypes of different countries/people. What does this say about the attitudes of Shakespeare’s time, and their view of women as possessions which were either valued or devalued?