Comedy of Errors - Romance
What is so interesting about Shakespeare's first play, The Comedy of Errors, are the elements it shares with his last plays. The romances of his final period (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest) all borrowed from the romantic tradition, particularly the Plautine romances. So here, as in the later plays, we have reunions of lost children and parents, husbands and wives; we have adventures and wanderings, and the danger of death (which in this play is not as real to us as it is in the romances). Yet, for all these similarities, the plot of The Comedy of Errors is as simple as the plots of the later plays are complex. It is as though Shakespeare's odyssey through the human psyche in tragedy and comedy brought him back to his beginnings with a sharper sense of yearning, poignancy, and the feeling of loss. But to dismiss this play as merely a simplistic romp through a complicated set of maneuvers is to miss the pure theatrical feast it offers on the stage - the wit and humor of a master wordsmith, the improbability of a plot that sweeps us along despite any misgivings we might have, the razzle-dazzle of its juxtapositioning of so many characters kept just out of reach of one another, and Shakespeare's sense of comedy as a movement towards a new society, a renewal of life, indeed explicitly a rebirth as parents rediscover children! And how can we fail to be thrilled at the catharsis that occurs when twins come face to face with mirror images of themselves - not once but twice!
Roman comedy was noted for its horseplay, coarse verbal humor, beatings, and the twists and turns of its plot, all of which we have come to expect from farce. Among the stock characters of this form of comedy, perhaps one of the more interesting ones was the tricky slave, often more clever than his master, and certainly the wittiest character in the play. He it was who usually could unravel the complication, but, being too clever by far, was often also responsible for it in the first place, and therefore ended up with a beating - which was also the standard treatment he received throughout the play. The tricky slave emerges from a tradition embraced by the mythologies of most cultures, represented often by trickster deities. Although they challenge the norm, causing chaos, their actions also have the effect of forcing society to re-evaluate its standards, and thus maintain a balance between conservatism and liberalness. In their antics we experience the vicarious joy that comes from a yearning to break free of the restraints imposed on us. In the theatre we can identify with them and caper harmlessly by their side as they wreak havoc on the cherished monuments of society.
The trickster has had a fascinating tradition of reincarnation in the history of the theatre, from the vice of morality plays, through the harlequin of the commedia dell'arte, and onto the vaudeville stages of the late 19th century. Shakespeare's Falstaff is a highly evolved specimen from this tradition. In his wit, horseplay, sexual freedom, and gormandizing he is the very epitome of the trickster. In our day, we can recognize the slave and his master in a host of situations, among them the comedy acts of Laurel and Hardy, and Abbot and Costello. Whenever Hardy beats Laurel (who usually gets the better of his partner, it should be noted), he is echoing a theatrical tradition as ancient as the mimes of Greek theatre. Thus, by transporting our production to a 1940s vaudevillian setting, we are merely following Shakespeare's example of revitalizing an ancient plot!
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