Language, magic, the Dromios, and The Comedy of Errors.(Critical essay)

Discussions of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors eventually tend to find their way to Dr. Pinch: although Pinch is "lean-fac'd," he casts a wide shadow. (1) He may appear only in one scene and speak only some dozen lines, but he registers an impression so lingering as to suggest something characteristic about the imaginative structure of the play. (2) Whether he is a "doting wizard," a schoolmaster, or a quack doctor familiar from dramatic tradition, he carries onto the stage, nonetheless, an aura slightly disturbing, even eerie (IV.iv.56). That sense of disturbance emanates not from his gaunt frame or "saffron face"; it derives, rather, from the way that Dr. Pinch becomes the physical manifestation of an idea, an anxiety, and an obsession (IV.iv.59). In him, the play's imaginings of demonic possession have finally called forth their bizarre material counterpart. Dr. Pinch thus enters the action from a realm more of fantasy than of narrative, and he stands for the fear that what one utters--by its own mere agency--might just turn into reality. As the proverb says, "Speak of the Devil and he will appear." (3)

But I am getting ahead of my story, and this is a story that involves a variety of characters, especially the Dromios, and, more broadly, the workings of language in the play. My argument is that words and thoughts in The Comedy of Errors unexpectedly acquire a certain magical agency and that the magical and the fantastical also acquire a certain potential for truth. I would suggest, that is, that the play delves beyond its own overt empiricism toward a substructure of fantasy and enchantment that conveys, paradoxically, a sense of the "real." This argument points toward a residual medievalism in Shakespeare, identifiable in elements such as fairies and sympathetic bewitchment. The magical resonates importantly, too, in The Comedy of Errors's expressions of copia and festivity. Instances of amplitude, doubleness, and repetition eddy through the scenic structure and language of the play as if bearing witness to some uncanny agency. The Dromios are the characters most sensitive to the magical, and, in their festivity and unruly speech and their earthiness and responsiveness, they enhance the sense of magic's odd realism. At the end, the rationalism of the denouement will draw a certain power from the penumbra of the magical.

The idea of magic arises in the action, of course, from the disturbing possibility that different characters might share the same identity. That possibility cannot be explained, at least initially, by empirical sense impressions: "What error drives our eyes and ears amiss," asks the alien Antipholus (II.ii. 184). With sense impressions baffled, the characters are launched into a "green world" of Ephesian enchantment--made that much more numinous by the reputation of Ephesus in the New Testament as a place of magic. (4) Conversely, in the last act's resolution, Egeon's declaration that his eyes and ears "cannot err" will help to bring the city back to its senses (V.i. 317). Thus, rational empiricism will finally unravel the truth, while magic will be understood as the false explanation for, as the Abbess puts it, "this sympathised one day's error" (V.i. 397). (5) But, of course, the very idea that an "error" could be "sympathised," that is, spread from character to character by some psychic force, does not seem itself altogether rational or empirical. Despite the play's Providential and Pauline denouement, magic acquires, I want to suggest, a certain agency and validity, a truth value.

ASPECTS OF MAGIC

Three aspects of magic stand out for our purposes: sympathy, language, and possession. Sympathetic magic in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance identified the belief that effects could be created on a remote being by performing them on another object representative of that being. (6) Dromio of Syracuse alludes to one form of sympathetic magic when he explains that devils usually ask for "the parings of one's nail, a rush, a hair, a drop of blood, a pin, a nut, a cherry-stone" (IV.iii. 69-71). With one such domestic trifle, a witch can work vicarious effects.

A related form of sympathetic magic involves what today we think of as voodoo dolls. A number of English witch trials in the years just before The Comedy of Errors give evidence of witches who configured wax effigies of their enemies and then mutilated them--for example, by stabbing the effigy in the midsection with stiff hairs in order to cause stomach pains in the victim. (7) Likewise, in 1591 the possibly deranged William Hacket was executed for seeking the queen's death in that he "did trayterously raze a certaine picture of the Q. Maiesties ... and ... did maliciously and traiterously put in and thrust an yron Instrument into that part of the sayde picture, that did represent the Brest and Hart of the Q. Majestie." (8) In April 1594, the year of The Comedy of Errors's first probable performance, Ferdinando Stanley, the fifth Earl of Derby died from bewitchment, according to some reports. Shakespeare surely had specific knowledge of the earl, the patron of Lord Strange's Men with whom Shakespeare was connected. (9) Surrounding the earl's death were peculiar events associated by some with bewitchment or Catholic revenge or both. The earl's demise reportedly involved a wax effigy, a wizard, and an apparition; and near to the earl during his illness, allegedly, was a "mumbling" woman who "seemed to be able to ease him of his vomiting and hiccough, but whenever she did so, became troubled in the same way herself." (10) The Comedy of Errors has no wax effigies or mumbling women, but it does have telepathic effects, especially between corresponding characters, in that the fears for the self that one character expresses can produce real afflictions for another. In this play, thoughts have the potential for sympathetic agency.

Magic also has a historic and histrionic association with language: spells, charms, incantations, and prayers. "The whole of Elizabethan culture testifies to the power imagined in words," states Jane Donawerth, but word magic inspired opposing judgments in contemporary rhetorical treatises and also on the stage. (11) Although radical thinkers such as Marsilio Ficino and Henry Cornelius Agrippa could argue for thaumaturgic effects in language, many Elizabethan rhetoricians were suspicious of word magic, given the attack by Protestants on what they considered the witchcraft of the Catholic Mass. (12) A dramatist such as Christopher Marlowe, however, could claim that eloquence has the power to bewitch. In Tamburlaine, for example, Theridamas finds himself charmed by Tamburlaine's blandishments: "What stronge enchantments tice my yeelding soule," he asks (I.ii. 224). (13) In Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 1, Joan la Pucelle's word magic is both defended and denied by other characters--and never quite discredited. More extensively in The Comedy of Errors, words take on magical lives of their own; they migrate and double; and they infuse themselves into and dominate the minds of characters.