The Comedy of Errors Read online

  THIRD SERIES

  General Editors: Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, David Scott Kastan and H.R. Woudhuysen

  THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

  ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL

  edited by G.K. Hunter*

  ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

  edited by John Wilders

  AS YOU LIKE IT

  edited by Juliet Dusinberre

  THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

  edited by Kent Cartwright

  CORIOLANUS

  edited by Peter Holland

  CYMBELINE

  edited by J.M. Nosworthy*

  DOUBLE FALSEHOOD

  edited by Brean Hammond

  HAMLET, Revised

  edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor

  HAMLET, The Texts of 1603 and 1623

  edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor

  JULIUS CAESAR

  edited by David Daniell

  KING HENRY IV PART 1

  edited by David Scott Kastan

  KING HENRY IV PART 2

  edited by James C. Bulman

  KING HENRY V

  edited by T.W. Craik

  KING HENRY VI PART 1

  edited by Edward Burns

  KING HENRY VI PART 2

  edited by Ronald Knowles

  KING HENRY VI PART 3

  edited by John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen

  KING HENRY VIII

  edited by Gordon McMullan

  KING JOHN

  edited by E.A.J. Honigmann*

  KING LEAR

  edited by R.A. Foakes

  KING RICHARD II

  edited by Charles Forker

  KING RICHARD III

  edited by James R. Siemon

  LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST

  edited by H.R. Woudhuysen

  MACBETH

  edited by Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason

  MEASURE FOR MEASURE

  edited by J.W. Lever*

  THE MERCHANT OF VENICE

  edited by John Drakakis

  THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR

  edited by Giorgio Melchiori

  A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

  edited by Harold F. Brooks*

  MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, Revised

  edited by Claire McEachern

  OTHELLO, Revised

  edited by E.A.J. Honigmann, Introduction Ayanna Thompson

  PERICLES

  edited by Suzanne Gossett

  ROMEO AND JULIET

  edited by René Weis

  SHAKESPEARE’S POEMS

  edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones and H.R. Woudhuysen

  SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

  edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones

  THE TAMING OF THE SHREW

  edited by Barbara Hodgdon

  THE TEMPEST, Revised

  edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan

  TIMON OF ATHENS

  edited by Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton

  TITUS ANDRONICUS

  edited by Jonathan Bate

  TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, Revised

  edited by David Bevington

  TWELFTH NIGHT

  edited by Keir Elam

  THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA

  edited by William C. Carroll

  THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN, Revised

  edited by Lois Potter

  THE WINTER’S TALE

  edited by John Pitcher

  * Second series

  THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

  Edited by

  KENT CARTWRIGHT

  Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare

  An Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  The Editor

  Kent Cartwright is Professor of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1999) and Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double: The Rhythms of Audience Response (University Park, Pa., 1991), and of various essays on Shakespeare and sixteenth-century drama. In addition, he has edited A Companion to Tudor Literature (Oxford, 2010) and co-edited Othello: New Perspectives (Rutherford, NJ, 1991). He has served as department chair in the University of Maryland, trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America and, in 2015, president of the Association of Departments of English.

  To

  Theresa M. Coletti

  Theodore B. Leinwand

  Maynard Mack, Jr

  inspiring colleagues

  CONTENTS

  General editors’ preface

  Preface and acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Error and identity

  The idea of error: ‘What error drives our eyes and ears amiss?’

  Dim inwardness: ‘if that I am I’

  Deceptive outwardness: ‘reverend reputation’

  Metamorphosis: ‘Transform me’

  The cultural world

  Magic: ‘Dark-working sorcerers’

  Language: ‘your words’ deceit’

  Objects: ‘The chain, unfinished’

  The marketplace and religion: ‘redemption – the money in his desk’

  Time and marriage: ‘a time for all things’

  Poetic geography, travel, Dark Ephesus

  Genre and style

  Different generic hats

  Verbal shape-shifting

  Technicalities in scansion

  Sources and influences

  Plautus

  Italian cinquecento comedy

  Apollonius: Gower and Twine

  The Bible: Acts and Ephesians

  Tudor drama

  Allusions: Elizabethan urban writings

  Staging

  The ‘lock-out’ scene (3.1)

  To double actors or not

  Pacing

  Early performances

  Afterlife: image, stage and screen

  Image

  Stage: the Restoration and the nineteenth century

  Stage: four twentieth-century productions and an adaptation

  Stage: other modern productions and adaptations

  Screen

  THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

  Scene 1.1

  Scene 1.2

  Scene 2.1

  Scene 2.2

  Scene 3.1

  Scene 3.2

  Scene 4.1

  Scene 4.2

  Scene 4.3

  Scene 4.4

  Scene 5.1

  Longer notes

  Appendices

  1 Date of composition

  External evidence

  Internal evidence

  2 The text and editorial procedures

  The text

  The Comedy of Errors in the First Folio

  The printer’s copy: authorial ‘foul papers’? A text suitable for performance?

  The printer’s copy: the question of performance venue

  Editorial procedures

  3 Casting and doubling

  Doubling

  Abbreviations and references

  Abbreviations used in the notes, introduction and appendices

  Works by and partly by Shakespeare

  Editions of Shakespeare collated

  Other works cited

  GENERAL EDITORS’ PREFACE

  The earliest volume in the first Arden series, Edward Dowden’s Hamlet, was published in 1899. Since then the Arden Shakespeare has been widely acknowledged as the pre-eminent Shakespeare edition, valued by scholars, students, actors and ‘the great variety of readers’ alike for its clearly presented and reliable texts, its full annotation and its richly informative intro
ductions.

  In the third Arden series we seek to maintain these well-established qualities and general characteristics, preserving our predecessors’ commitment to presenting the play as it has been shaped in history. Each volume necessarily has its own particular emphasis which reflects the unique possibilities and problems posed by the work in question, and the series as a whole seeks to maintain the highest standards of scholarship, combined with attractive and accessible presentation.

  Newly edited from the original documents, texts are presented in fully modernized form, with a textual apparatus that records all substantial divergences from those early printings. The notes and introductions focus on the conditions and possibilities of meaning that editors, critics and performers (on stage and screen) have discovered in the play. While building upon the rich history of scholarly activity that has long shaped our understanding of Shakespeare’s works, this third series of the Arden Shakespeare is enlivened by a new generation’s encounter with Shakespeare.

  THE TEXT

  On each page of the play itself, readers will find a passage of text supported by commentary and textual notes. Act and scene divisions (seldom present in the early editions and often the product of eighteenth-century or later scholarship) have been retained for ease of reference, but have been given less prominence than in previous series. Editorial indications of location of the action have been removed to the textual notes or commentary.

  In the text itself, elided forms in the early texts are spelt out in full in verse lines wherever they indicate a usual late twentieth-century pronunciation that requires no special indication and wherever they occur in prose (except where they indicate non-standard pronunciation). In verse speeches, marks of elision are retained where they are necessary guides to the scansion and pronunciation of the line. Final -ed in past tense and participial forms of verbs is always printed as -ed, without accent, never as -’d, but wherever the required pronunciation diverges from modern usage a note in the commentary draws attention to the fact. Where the final -ed should be given syllabic value contrary to modern usage, e.g.

  Doth Silvia know that I am banished?

  (TGV 3.1.214)

  the note will take the form

  214 banished banishèd

  Conventional lineation of divided verse lines shared by two or more speakers has been reconsidered and sometimes rearranged. Except for the familiar Exit and Exeunt, Latin forms in stage directions and speech prefixes have been translated into English and the original Latin forms recorded in the textual notes.

  COMMENTARY AND TEXTUAL NOTES

  Notes in the commentary, for which a major source will be the Oxford English Dictionary, offer glossarial and other explication of verbal difficulties; they may also include discussion of points of interpretation and, in relevant cases, substantial extracts from Shakespeare’s source material. Editors will not usually offer glossarial notes for words adequately defined in the latest edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary or Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, but in cases of doubt they will include notes. Attention, however, will be drawn to places where more than one likely interpretation can be proposed and to significant verbal and syntactic complexity. Notes preceded by *discuss editorial emendations or variant readings.

  Headnotes to acts or scenes discuss, where appropriate, questions of scene location, the play’s treatment of source materials, and major difficulties of staging. The list of roles (so headed to emphasize the play’s status as a text for performance) is also considered in the commentary notes. These may include comment on plausible patterns of casting with the resources of an Elizabethan or Jacobean acting company and also on any variation in the description of roles in their speech prefixes in the early editions.

  The textual notes are designed to let readers know when the edited text diverges from the early edition(s) or manuscript sources on which it is based. Wherever this happens the note will record the rejected reading of the early edition(s) or manuscript, in original spelling, and the source of the reading adopted in this edition. Other forms from the early edition(s) or manuscript recorded in these notes will include some spellings of particular interest or significance and original forms of translated stage directions. Where two or more early editions are involved, for instance with Othello, the notes also record all important differences between them. The textual notes take a form that has been in use since the nineteenth century. This comprises, first: line reference, reading adopted in the text and closing square bracket; then: abbreviated reference, in italic, to the earliest edition to adopt the accepted reading, italic semicolon and noteworthy alternative reading(s), each with abbreviated italic reference to its source.

  Conventions used in these textual notes include the following. The solidus / is used, in notes quoting verse or discussing verse lining, to indicate line endings. Distinctive spellings of the base text follow the square bracket without indication of source and are enclosed in italic brackets. Names enclosed in italic brackets indicate originators of conjectural emendations when these did not originate in an edition of the text, or when the named edition records a conjecture not accepted into its text. Stage directions (SDs) are referred to by the number of the line within or immediately after which they are placed. Line numbers with a decimal point relate to centred entry SDs not falling within a verse line and to SDs more than one line long, with the number after the point indicating the line within the SD: e.g. 78.4 refers to the fourth line of the SD following line 78. Lines of SDs at the start of a scene are numbered 0.1, 0.2, etc. Where only a line number precedes a square bracket, e.g. 128], the note relates to the whole line; where SD is added to the number, it relates to the whole of a SD within or immediately following the line. Speech prefixes (SPs) follow similar conventions, 203 SP] referring to the speaker’s name for line 203. Where a SP reference takes the form, e.g. 38+ SP, it relates to all subsequent speeches assigned to that speaker in the scene in question.

  Where, as with King Henry V, one of the early editions is a so-called ‘bad quarto’ (that is, a text either heavily adapted, or reconstructed from memory, or both), the divergences from the present edition are too great to be recorded in full in the notes. In these cases, with the exception of Hamlet, which prints an edited text of the Quarto of 1603, the editions will include a reduced photographic facsimile of the ‘bad quarto’ in an appendix.

  INTRODUCTION

  Both the introduction and the commentary are designed to present the plays as texts for performance, and make appropriate reference to stage, film and television versions, as well as introducing the reader to the range of critical approaches to the plays. They discuss the history of the reception of the texts within the theatre and scholarship and beyond, investigating the interdependency of the literary text and the surrounding ‘cultural text’ both at the time of the original production of Shakespeare’s works and during their long and rich afterlife.

  PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This edition fell to me upon the untimely death of its initial editor, the distinguished scholar Gareth Roberts. Although it made sense to me to restart the project from scratch, I have consulted Professor Roberts’s work with profit, especially his draft of commentary notes for the first three acts, and I have shared his interest in magic in the play. I am also indebted to the remarkable editorial work on The Comedy of Errors by ancients such as Pope, Theobald and Capell and by contemporaries such as Charles Whitworth, Standish Henning (who made his pre-publication work on the Variorum available to me) and the late R.A. Foakes. Foakes’s edition for the Second Series of The Arden Shakespeare remains a classic. In addition, I owe much to the scholarship of Robert Miola on Errors and related subjects, and to him personally for his interest and help.

  At Arden, the indefatigable publisher, Margaret Bartley, has overseen this project with a helpful sense of both urgency and camaraderie. Copy-editor Jane Armstrong’s sense of exactitude improved the edit
ion invaluably. To Henry Woudhuysen, the series general editor with whom I have worked most closely, I owe my greatest debt. He responded to my arguments and conjectures with a rigorous sense of evidence and logic, and offered sound advice on a host of matters, from the typographical to the conceptual. Any muddles that remain are of my own doing. I am thankful to David Scott Kastan for approaching me about undertaking this project. Richard Proudfoot provided important editorial feedback and insight in the edition’s early stages, as did George Walton Williams, in conversation and with notes and postcards. Ann Thompson made helpful comments as the edition reached the stage of a completed draft. Emily Hockley assisted efficiently with illustrations and permissions.

  I am especially indebted to William Carroll for ongoing discussions of Shakespeare and all aspects of early comedy and for his counsel, encouragement and friendship. I have turned to his scholarly work and his model editing again and again. Bill kindly commented on an early, long version of the Introduction, as did my colleague Karen Nelson on a later one. Paul Werstine graciously reviewed Appendix 2: The text and editorial procedures. Paul’s remarkable bibliographical work, buoyed by that of the helpful William Long, has significantly influenced my understanding of the text of The Comedy of Errors.

  I have discussed Errors with numerous colleagues; regrettably, only a few can be mentioned here. During a year of residency at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Patricia Parker generously shared with me ideas about the play and about editing. In that period, Mariko Ichikawa likewise shared her vast knowledge of staging issues. Valerie Wayne has been a regular source of editorial fellowship and encouragement. Robert Hornback, in numerous conversations over many years, has inspired me with his fertile ideas about Errors and comedy in general. Stuart Sillars and his Bergen Shakespeare and Drama Network have provided multiple occasions for me to present work. Stuart himself has repeatedly shared his insight about paintings and illustrations of Shakespeare’s works, along with his invaluable friendship and good humour. Fernando Cioni has listened to my travails, worked with me on various aspects of Shakespearean comedy, provided scholarly assistance and extended his warm friendship.