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‘Were it not against our laws’: oppression and resistance in Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Eric Heinze
Eric Heinze*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Laws, Queen Mary University of London
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Abstract

The Comedy of Errors, always loved on the stage, has long been deemed less substantial than Shakespeare's ‘mature’ works. Its references to private and public law have certainly been noted: a trial, a breached contract, a stand-off between monarchical and parliamentary powers. Yet the play's legal elements are more than historical curios within an otherwise light-hearted venture. The play is pervasively structured by an array of socio-legal dualisms: master–servant, husband–wife, native–alien, parent–child, monarch–parliament, buyer–seller. All confront fraught transitions from pre-modern to early modern forms. Those fundamentally legal relationships fuel character and action, even where no conventionally legal norm or procedure is at issue. ‘Errors’ in the play serve constantly to highlight unstable and shifting relationships of dominance and submission. Law undergoes its own transition from feudal–aristocratic to commercial forms. Through a theatrical framing device, it thereby re-emerges to remind us that those dualisms, even in their new incarnations, will remain squarely within law's ambit.

Type
Research Article
Information
Legal Studies , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , June 2009 , pp. 230 - 263
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Legal Scholars 2009

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References

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11 ibid, pp lxiii–lxiv.

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33 The words ‘Comical’ or ‘Comicall’ appear in some early versions (though not in the Folio) in the title of The Merchant of Venice – the only real rival to Comedy of Errors in unsettling socio-legal norms of dominance and exclusion. See Norton, p 3343.

34 See also Martin, above n 3, p xxvi (linking ‘error’ to the Latin errare, which hints at the play's themes of wandering and uprootedness).

35 Cf, eg, Barber, CL Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959) p 29 Google Scholar (examining the simultaneously comic and subversive elements of Cade's rebellion, in Henry VI, Part II, as a form of Saturnalia). See also ibid at p 206 (examining Saturnalian elements in the second tretralogy).

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49 Foakes, above n 2, p 16.

50 Cf Shakespeare, above n 2, p 49; Shakespeare, above n 3, p 33.

51 Wells, above n 48, pp 115–116.

52 See, eg, Parker, above n 9, p 58 (commenting on earlier approaches).

53 See, eg, Plato Protagoras 329b in Cooper, above n 23, pp746–790 at p 762; Plato Gorgias 449b in ibid, pp 791–869 at pp 794–795.

54 See generally Aristotle [W Rhys Roberts (transl)] Rhetoric III.xiv in Barnes, above n 17, pp 2152–2269 at pp 2258–2261 (examining introductions to oratorical addresses).

55 Rhetoric III.xiv.1415a13-14 in ibid, p 2259.

56 ‘We may describe wrong-doing as injury voluntarily inflicted contrary to law’: Rhetoric I.x. 1268b7–8 in ibid, p 1278. Accordingly, if injury contrary to law was not voluntarily, then it is not legal wrong-doing. Cf. Rhetoric I.xiii.1373b28–29 in ibid, p 2187.

57 Charles Whitworth writes, ‘Storm, shipwreck and loss at sea, the very stuff of romance, become metaphors for spiritual and emotional incompleteness, hopelessness, self-doubt, loss of one's identity’: C Whitworth ‘Introduction’ in William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) pp 1–79 Google Scholar at p 51, and, one might add, for economic and socio-political transformation from an older, aristocratic time, into a brave new world.

58 Artistotle Rhetoric I.ii.1356a1–7 in Barnes, above n 17, p 2155.

59 Rhetoric I.ii.1356a7 in ibid.

60 Rhetoric II.i.1377b24-26 in ibid, p 2194.

61 Rhetoric II.i.1378a6–9 in ibid.

62 See J Candido ‘Dining out in Ephesus: food in The Comedy of Errors ’ in Miola, above n 9, pp 199–225.

63 Rhetoric II.viii, 1385b13–15 in Barnes, above n 17, p 2207. Cf, eg, Beiner, G Shakespeare's Agnostic Comedy: Poetics, Analysis, Criticism (Rutherford: Farleigh Dickenson University Press, 1993) p 95 Google Scholar (noting the rhetorical device of force beyond one's control visiting disaster upon a benign individual).

64 Rhetoric II.viii.1386a10 in ibid, p 2208.

65 Cf Parker, above n 9, p 57 (calling the ‘harsh law’ a ‘familiar beginning of Shakespearean comedy’).

66 See, eg, Whitworth, above n 57, pp 49–50. But on the literary and historical significance of Ephesus, see, eg, Parker, above n 9, pp 55–57; L Maguire ‘The girls from Ephesus’ in Miola, above n 9, pp 355–391 at 360–366.

67 See, eg, Maguire, ibid, pp 360–366; Leggatt, A Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London: Methuen, 1974)Google Scholar ch 1.

68 William Shakespeare The Comedy of Errors (James Cellan Jones, director, BBC Time-Life, 1983). See also, eg, JG Fink (1983) 35 Theatre Journal 415 (reviewing Robert Woodruff's production, 1983); C Whitworth (1983) 24 Cahiers Elisabéthains 116 (reviewing Adrian Noble's production, 1983).

69 Norton, p 738 n 8. The concepts of ‘devil’ and ‘diabolical’ derive from the Greek ‘diaballein ’, which means, literally, to ‘throw across’, from dia- ‘across, through’ and ballein ‘to throw’. Together with references to ‘spirits’, ‘sprites’ and ‘goblins’, references to the devil (4.2.33, 4.3.46) form part of the play's lexicon of subversion.

70 Norton, p 738 n 2.

71 See generally, eg, Freedman, above n 9; Whitworth, above n 57, pp 51–56. See also, eg, MacCary, T The Comedy of Errors : a different kind of comedy’ (1978) 9(3) New Literary History 525.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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76 Punning on ‘last’, which also means ‘a wooden model of a foot used in making leather shoes’: Norton, p 733 n 9 (col 1).

77 Cf ibid, p 733 n 8.

78 Cf Parker, above n 9, pp 66–67 (examining Dromio's physical descriptions of Nell).

79 See n 74 above.

80 Norton, p 734 n 3.

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83 Cf Hall, ibid, pp 42–43. Cf also, eg, Macdonald, above n 75, p 2 (noting an ‘opportunistic venality’ in the merchant world).

84 Punning on ‘common’ in the sense of ‘[l]and belonging to the whole community’, hence Antipholus' suggestion that ‘Dromio maintains an egalitarian spirit at inappropriate times’: Norton, p 734 n 6.

85 Ibid, p 734.

86 See S Freud Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, in Gesammelte Werke vol 4 (Frankfurt a.M: Fischer Verlag, 1999) (explaining the systematic and meaningful quality of seemingly random errors). See also, eg, Freeman, above n 9, pp 284–293 (discussing psychoanalytic readings of the play). Waller notes that ‘Shakespearean comedy is a dramatization of common wish-fulfilment fantasies’: Waller, above n 8, p 10. However, in limiting that dimension to the more obvious elements of the comedies – ‘we want our love affairs to be fulfilling, our families to experience harmony and...young men and women to overcome their anxieties... and find their own kinds of happiness’ (p 10) – Waller overlooks Freud's fundamentally subversive notion of wish fulfilment.

87 ‘[M]an is a political creature’: Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics IX.ix.1169b18–19 in Barnes, above n 17, p 1848, but the legitimately dominant (ie Greek) male most completely so. See text accompanying n 12 above.

88 See, eg, Aristotle Generation of Animals II.iii.736b27, above n 24, p 1143 (identifying ‘reason alone’, most present in the legitimately dominant (ie Greek) male, as the element of the soul that is ‘divine’).

89 Heidegger, M Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1979) p 165 Google Scholar: ‘The later conceptualising of this definition of the human being in the sense of animal rationale, “living thing having reason”, is indeed not “false”, but conceals the phenomenal ground from which that definition of Dasein [“being-there”] is derived’.

90 Ibid.

91 Whitworth, above n 57, p 43. Cf above n 74.

92 Norton, p 735 n 2.

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96 See Candido, above n 62, p 208 (criticising Luciana's ‘didactic and self-assured’ attitude).

97 See Wolfensperger, above n 93, pp 21–26 (noting misogynist and dismissive interpretations of Adriana).

98 GR Elliott ‘Weirdness in The Comedy of Errors ’ in Miola, above n 9, pp 57–69 at p 63.

99 Dorsch, TS ‘Introduction’ in William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) pp 1–38Google Scholar at p 15 (emphasis added).

100 Tillyard, Emw Shakespeare's Early Comedies (London: Athlone Press, 1965) p 58.Google Scholar

101 Ibid.

102 Ibid.

103 Ibid.

104 WT MacCary ‘The Comedy of Errors’ in Waller, above n 8, p 33.

105 Ibid.

106 Cf Parker, above n 9, p 66 (noting the role of Luce).

107 Hall, above n 82, p 40.

108 Candido, above n 62, p 208.

109 Maguire notes that The Comedy of Errors ‘provides a range of examples of womankind: wife, sweetheart, kitchen maid, courtesan, mother/nun/priestess’: Maguire, above n 66, pp 360–361.

110 Cf Parker, above n 9, p 80 (noting Emilia's ‘superintendant’ role).

111 Cf ibid, p 80 (noting Adriana's role in imprisoning her husband).

112 Hegel, above n 28, p 111 (original emphasis): ‘Decisive for the relationship of these two self-conscious beings is that they prove themselves and each other through a struggle of life and death. They must enter into this struggle, since they must elevate, as to the other and to themselves, their certainty of being for themselves ’.