The Comedy of Errors: Act 1

Once upon a time, words were free of the need for speed and clarity and debasement. They gamboled through the meadows of imagination, without dictionaries or grammar critics, rhyming and reasoning as they wished.

In that rich season of language, Will Shakespeare played.

Though it might take a few acts to get back into the proper frame of mind to read The Comedy of Errors without tripping over the past twenty years of practical language immersion, I feel the old ease quickly coming back. If you're struggling as we set out on this adventure, may I make a few suggestions?

First, slow down. If you are reading a well-annotated edition, read the footnotes carefully. If you don't have a well-annotated version, check out No Fear Shakespeare, which has a facing-page modern English version of the early modern English original. I stumbled across it when trying to purchase an ebook version of the play on my Nook, my Complete Pelican Shakespeare being too bulky for my bag. Wary of cheap ebook editions riddled with errors, I sprang for the No Fear Shakespeare. The Shakespearean text is clear and typo free (at least so far), and it's easy to compare a modernized version of sentences that challenge our more rigid modern syntax and less creative vocabulary.

Second, reread. We are taking a month to read a play that's 20 pages long. There's time to read every act or scene over several times.

Third, read it aloud. Trying to put the em-PHA-sis on the right syl-LA-ble (as my sister says) slows you down even more and adds an auditory reinforcement to whatever your eyes are telling you.

If you're having no trouble at all with the early modern English of the play, then I don't like you very much.

As I contemplated what to write for this first post, two points rose to the top.

Villain. What a great word! When we think of villains, we think of Nero fiddling while Rome burned or Voldemort's copious use of the avada kedavra curse or Emperor Palpatine, whose prominence in the ninth episode of Star Wars caused much righteous indignation in the fandom. But in our play, Antipholus of Syracuse (or Antipholus S.) uses the word...unconventionally, to our modern ears.

After his trusty servant Dromio S. departs, he tells the nameless merchant, "A trusty villain, sir, that very oft, / When I am dull with care and melancholy, / Lightens my humor with his merry jests" (I.ii.19-21).

Clearly, Antipholus is using the word quite differently in Scene ii than in Scene iii, when he calls Dromio of Ephesus (or Dromio E.) a "villain" (96) who's stolen his money.

The closeness of these two versions of the word is significant, methinks. English majors get very excited when repetition-with-variation occurs. Sort of like we get excited reading about cigars or staffs or anything remotely phallic. It might mean something. 

Villain comes from an old French (or Anglo-French) word typically spelled villein in the middle ages when writers typically spelled words any ol' way they felt like it. In the feudal sense, villein simply meant a servant tied to the land, not quite a slave but not free, either. As often happens, words gather additional meanings over time, and in this case, villain acquired new--and very negative--connotations that eventually became solid definitions. During Shakespeare's time, the word held both meanings and thus enriches the drama (or comedy) of the confused identities that are the heart of this play.

A second point that jumped out at me was the theme of the play. Mistaken-identity comedies are a dime a dozen, and while I knew from reading the Pelican introduction to The Comedy of Errors that it was, indeed, of this subgenre of plays, I still found myself rather arrogantly (okay, very arrogantly) rolling my eyes when the obviousness of the setup during Act 1, Scene i.

My family just finished re-watching The Princess Bride, one of the best movies of all time, and at the beginning a young Fred Savage's sick-boy character gets all shirty with his grandfather (played by Peter Falk) about the old-fashioned book his grandfather brought to read to him. Eventually, the boy gets drawn into the story and begins to care about the characters.

My eye-roll reactions was immediately distasteful to me. I am NOT one of those childish critics, I sternly told myself. I squelched the impulse and judgment, and kept reading in a much more helpful--open and receptive--frame of mind.

The world is much more fun when you're not a prune.

Now I've blathered on enough. What were your initial responses to The Comedy of Errors? How are you feeling about diving back into a more challenging read? Is this a more challenging read for you? What's going on in your head as it relates to the play? Please share!

Also, on a bookkeeping note, I'm going to try to create a private Facebook page, which might be easier for most of you to comment and make conversations about the readings easier. My initial attempts didn't yield a private page, however, so it may take a bit for me to figure that out. I'm working on it.