1 00:00:02,340 --> 00:00:08,970 OK, so today's lecture is on comedy of errors. So comedy goes is written towards the beginning of Shakespeare's career. 2 00:00:08,970 --> 00:00:11,790 That's one of the things I'm going to talk about, about it. 3 00:00:11,790 --> 00:00:20,340 And it's first printed in the First Folio that Posthumus collected edition of Shakespeare's plays in sixteen twenty three. 4 00:00:20,340 --> 00:00:22,680 If you've been to any of the previous lectures in this area, 5 00:00:22,680 --> 00:00:30,120 you'll know that the premise of the of the lectures is to try and distil quite a lot of critical areas into one question and then to use 6 00:00:30,120 --> 00:00:38,820 that question on the play to reopen some different kinds of methodologies and lines of enquiry that we might use to focus our attention. 7 00:00:38,820 --> 00:00:45,060 So my question about comedy of errors, my attempt to condense what critics have said about it is quite a simple one. 8 00:00:45,060 --> 00:00:48,780 Should we bother with it? Should we bother with comedy of errors? 9 00:00:48,780 --> 00:00:53,940 Most criticism, I think, has been asking that question. Is it is it a serious play? 10 00:00:53,940 --> 00:01:02,840 Are there ways we can take it seriously? So the lecture today is about seriousness, where the comedy of errors is serious, 11 00:01:02,840 --> 00:01:09,910 whether players should be serious and whether seriousness is the only thing that should grab our attention. 12 00:01:09,910 --> 00:01:17,980 So, of course, since I'm barely a minute into the lecture, my premise for the next 50 or so minutes is then whether it is worth bothering with. 13 00:01:17,980 --> 00:01:22,630 But you you will make your own judgement about that. 14 00:01:22,630 --> 00:01:27,850 I'm going to start, as I will, in all the lectures with an outline of the plot of the play, in case you're not familiar with that. 15 00:01:27,850 --> 00:01:40,420 So the play begins quite darkly. GM, who is a merchant, is under arrest and threat of death because he is an enemy from Syracuse in Ephesus, 16 00:01:40,420 --> 00:01:46,810 the Duke pronounces that he has only until evening to find the ransom. 17 00:01:46,810 --> 00:01:54,970 Eugene tells us that 33 years ago, a shipwreck divided his family so that he was parted from his wife, Amelia, 18 00:01:54,970 --> 00:02:08,080 and his twin sons until Phyllis and until Phyllis were also separated, as were their twin servants, Tromeo and Chromeo. 19 00:02:08,080 --> 00:02:14,010 The other twins, Antipolice and Tromeo, they're both they have both ended up in Syracuse. 20 00:02:14,010 --> 00:02:21,760 So we'll try and call them articles and drama Syracuse. But in some ways, muddling these characters up is part of the point of the play. 21 00:02:21,760 --> 00:02:25,850 So I wouldn't really try too hard to keep them absolutely separate. 22 00:02:25,850 --> 00:02:34,630 You see some of the implications of that later. So I Villus of Syracuse and Romeo of Syracuse have also like AIG and left Syracuse and spent 23 00:02:34,630 --> 00:02:41,660 their adult life looking for their missing brothers and Deji and has now come to look for them. 24 00:02:41,660 --> 00:02:43,730 So we need stimulus of emphasis. 25 00:02:43,730 --> 00:02:51,280 The one who was lost and went to emphasise who is married to Adriano, who is very discontented, that he pays no attention. 26 00:02:51,280 --> 00:02:59,330 She complains to her unmarried sister, Lucy Ana. And this Yamina becomes the object of the other two, Phyllis's affections. 27 00:02:59,330 --> 00:03:02,450 And as apparels of romance plot for the Drogo twins, 28 00:03:02,450 --> 00:03:13,500 which involves a person Gargantua in person called Now who we never see Antibalas of FSS has various business associates, 29 00:03:13,500 --> 00:03:14,660 wasn't going to talk about later. 30 00:03:14,660 --> 00:03:24,350 This is a very city play and it has quite a lot of unexpected resonances with city comedy as practised by later writers. 31 00:03:24,350 --> 00:03:34,220 Middleton, Marston and Decker and his various business associates include Angelo Goldsmith, from whom he's commissioned the gold chain. 32 00:03:34,220 --> 00:03:44,210 Balthasar, a merchant and a courtesan to whom he promises the sad gold chain, which he had originally intended for his wife. 33 00:03:44,210 --> 00:03:51,920 Dr. Pinche comes in at the end, who is a comic schoolteacher [INAUDIBLE] magician brought in to cure the apparent madness caused by 34 00:03:51,920 --> 00:03:59,510 the confusion between the two sets of twins until as of FSS is arrested for not paying for goods, 35 00:03:59,510 --> 00:04:06,590 which of course he has never received because they've gone to his brother in error in the play's final scene. 36 00:04:06,590 --> 00:04:12,970 And syphilis of episodes is interrogated about these debts and recognised by his father, Jian. 37 00:04:12,970 --> 00:04:19,520 But of course, he doesn't know it's his father. Eugene approaches him for the ransom money that he needs to save his life. 38 00:04:19,520 --> 00:04:23,590 But after lots of exercise, he doesn't know who he is. 39 00:04:23,590 --> 00:04:28,810 The abbess of another random person, apparently random person who comes in right at the end of the play. 40 00:04:28,810 --> 00:04:31,630 Promises to cure Antibalas is madness. 41 00:04:31,630 --> 00:04:38,830 But what she does is to introduce the other twin, Antibalas of Syracuse, who is also in her Abie, having fled there for sanctuary. 42 00:04:38,830 --> 00:04:46,330 So she reveals what's at the heart of all this. Unexpectedly, that there are two Idont, two sets of identical twins. 43 00:04:46,330 --> 00:04:54,340 The abbess, of course, has her own revelation, too. She is Emilia Jean's wife and therefore the mother of the antifascist twins. 44 00:04:54,340 --> 00:05:01,450 The confusion's of the day are untangled and she invites everyone to a belated christening party for her sons. 45 00:05:01,450 --> 00:05:06,280 Now is a summary. It's confusing. I do as I say, I think that's inevitable. 46 00:05:06,280 --> 00:05:13,480 Basically, the plot of comedy of errors tells us that whichever twin is on stage at any time, it's the wrong one. 47 00:05:13,480 --> 00:05:21,320 Shakespeare has taken a well-known play by the ancient Roman playwright Plautus, a play called Monak Me. 48 00:05:21,320 --> 00:05:26,500 Monogamy is pretty much a set text for Elizabethan grammar school boys, 49 00:05:26,500 --> 00:05:33,580 and therefore we might see this maybe alongside something like Titus Andronicus in its use of of it as a 50 00:05:33,580 --> 00:05:40,870 play which is particularly indebted to a kind of school grammar school repertoire of source material. 51 00:05:40,870 --> 00:05:44,350 So Shakespeare's taken this well-known play and he has doubled it. 52 00:05:44,350 --> 00:05:52,000 Plautus has only one set of twins, the equivalent of the until Phyllis's or maybe wish to call them and to fly, 53 00:05:52,000 --> 00:05:58,420 whereas Shakespeare introduced a second set to servant drome Yeo's. 54 00:05:58,420 --> 00:06:02,030 And there is also an honour mastic confusion, so on. 55 00:06:02,030 --> 00:06:06,920 On a mass stick's is the study of proper name. So in honour, mastic confusion. 56 00:06:06,920 --> 00:06:13,310 Glottis initially names his twin brothers monogamous and sausage, please. 57 00:06:13,310 --> 00:06:20,270 But in a long prologue, he explains that Sausage Liz has been renamed monogamous in memory of his lost brother. 58 00:06:20,270 --> 00:06:29,390 But there is some sense in Plautus that the twins have at least initially separate identities indicated by distinct proper names. 59 00:06:29,390 --> 00:06:32,690 As I want to set out as we go forward in this lecture, 60 00:06:32,690 --> 00:06:40,160 one reason we might want to pay attention to comedy of errors is that Shakespeare confounds this attempt at individual separation, 61 00:06:40,160 --> 00:06:47,930 even while though contradictorily in the long opening scene where GM tells us what's all this background, 62 00:06:47,930 --> 00:06:56,440 he tells us that the infant boys were so alike they could not be distinguished, but by names they could not be distinguished, but by names. 63 00:06:56,440 --> 00:07:02,630 And they're not distinguished by names that presumably they could not be distinguished, they could not be distinguished, but by names. 64 00:07:02,630 --> 00:07:11,120 So let's go back those step and think about why. Why is that this doubt, the comedy of errors is a is a worthy or an interesting play. 65 00:07:11,120 --> 00:07:15,260 Why is the question that idea identified a critical question about it. 66 00:07:15,260 --> 00:07:23,910 I think it's the two reasons. Firstly, our attitude to the notion of early Shakespeare and the second, our attitude to comedy. 67 00:07:23,910 --> 00:07:26,610 Let's take the notion of early Shakespear first here. 68 00:07:26,610 --> 00:07:34,380 I think the discussion is parallel to something I discuss in the lecture on The Winter's Tale as a so-called late play there. 69 00:07:34,380 --> 00:07:41,910 I suggested that the notion of lateness in regard to Shakespeare is not simply a descriptive chronological term, 70 00:07:41,910 --> 00:07:48,660 but that it has evaluative connotations. And those connotations have to do with aspects of profundity and maturity. 71 00:07:48,660 --> 00:07:54,300 The artist draws on a wealth of experiences and he goes beyond it. 72 00:07:54,300 --> 00:08:01,910 Gordon McMullen's book Shakespeare and the idea of late writing is a really stimulating investigation of these cultural assumptions. 73 00:08:01,910 --> 00:08:07,410 But we might think that the notion of early two is a term that we should look at in more detail, 74 00:08:07,410 --> 00:08:18,330 since early in Shakespeare studies doesn't either indicate a simply chronological or descriptive category, but an evaluative one. 75 00:08:18,330 --> 00:08:28,550 Early Shakespeare denotes immaturity, apprentice work, latent themes which only become interesting when he does them better next time. 76 00:08:28,550 --> 00:08:31,170 Now, we might want to quibble with the idea of early work. 77 00:08:31,170 --> 00:08:35,940 In general, it's worth pointing out the pointing out that all of marlos plays, for instance, 78 00:08:35,940 --> 00:08:43,860 were completed in a period that had he lived longer, would have been called early and they were Shakespeare, Mahler born in the same year. 79 00:08:43,860 --> 00:08:49,960 They're all all male plays are completed before Shakespeare has written comedy of errors. 80 00:08:49,960 --> 00:08:54,070 There's been a mutually reinforcing critical discourse which has suggested that 81 00:08:54,070 --> 00:08:58,600 the comedy of errors is not very sophisticated and therefore it must be early. And it is not. 82 00:08:58,600 --> 00:09:06,160 And it is early and therefore not very sophisticated. You can see that it's hard to kind of break out of that kind of circularity. 83 00:09:06,160 --> 00:09:11,230 So is the comedy of errors all that early anyway? The Oxford Shakespeare useful thing. 84 00:09:11,230 --> 00:09:19,120 Lots of different Shakespeare. Complete Shakespeare editions. And you've probably got a sense what's useful to you already. 85 00:09:19,120 --> 00:09:21,850 One useful thing about the Oxford Shakespeare, the Wells and Taylor, 86 00:09:21,850 --> 00:09:28,390 particularly the second edition is that it places the works in a kind of connected chronological order. 87 00:09:28,390 --> 00:09:34,930 So their principle of organisation is the order in which they think Shakespeare wrote things as opposed to the principle of organisation in the Folio, 88 00:09:34,930 --> 00:09:41,080 which is to organise them by genre or, you know, any other kind of principle that you might you might think of. 89 00:09:41,080 --> 00:09:44,440 So the Oxford Shakespeare organises by character ology, and that's useful to us here, 90 00:09:44,440 --> 00:09:52,180 because if you want to look where a play comes in Shakespeare's chronology, you can see where it comes in the Oxford Shakespeare. 91 00:09:52,180 --> 00:10:03,160 And that edition dates Comedy of Errors to 15 Ninety-four 15 Ninety-four, the date of its first performance at Grais in one of the ends of court. 92 00:10:03,160 --> 00:10:10,300 So that suggests that before comedy of errors, we get two gentlemen of Verona, Taming of the Shrew, all three parts of Henry the Six, 93 00:10:10,300 --> 00:10:17,260 Richard the Third and Titus Andronicus, as well as the narrative poems, the rape of Luke Reese and Venus and Adonis. 94 00:10:17,260 --> 00:10:23,320 So that's what is it, seven plays and two narrative poems before we get to a comedy of errors. 95 00:10:23,320 --> 00:10:27,190 There will be an argument for saying comedy is not even particularly early. 96 00:10:27,190 --> 00:10:35,620 Richard, the second the play that the Oxford chronology puts right after a comedy of errors is not a play we very often talk about as being early. 97 00:10:35,620 --> 00:10:39,670 Certainly not in a dismissive or negative sense. You can see that in another way. 98 00:10:39,670 --> 00:10:43,330 That argument actually reinforces the associations between earliness and in. 99 00:10:43,330 --> 00:10:47,890 Substantiality is only by proposing a later date for comedy of errors than was previously 100 00:10:47,890 --> 00:10:54,430 assumed that we can reap the positive associations of accumulated wisdom and experience. 101 00:10:54,430 --> 00:10:59,320 Nobody. Nobody really. It's interesting how the critical argument has developed. 102 00:10:59,320 --> 00:11:02,590 Nobody is saying, yes, it is early and it is. 103 00:11:02,590 --> 00:11:05,740 Were that worthy of consideration? It's early and it's interesting. 104 00:11:05,740 --> 00:11:10,480 People are saying it's interesting and it's not so early so that there's Connexions. 105 00:11:10,480 --> 00:11:16,030 The connexion between earliness and immaturity are quite difficult to break. 106 00:11:16,030 --> 00:11:22,190 So I think we need to try and desegregate early and unsophisticated or early and uninteresting. 107 00:11:22,190 --> 00:11:28,310 And similarly, we need to find some new ways of understanding Shakespeare's comedy. 108 00:11:28,310 --> 00:11:34,490 Perhaps the most permanent critical appreciation of Shakespeare's comedies has come via either 109 00:11:34,490 --> 00:11:40,400 sort of structural or anthropological understandings of the play's relations to festival culture. 110 00:11:40,400 --> 00:11:46,610 Those theories of comedy as a kind of social safety valve. So I'm thinking there about something like s.L. 111 00:11:46,610 --> 00:11:50,260 Balboa's influential book, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy. 112 00:11:50,260 --> 00:12:04,400 And Barber argues that the play's kind of shadow, a sort of festive world of entertainment and subversion that exists in Elizabethan culture. 113 00:12:04,400 --> 00:12:09,440 So that's one way, that one prominent way with Mr. Shakespeare's comedies and the other is a more 114 00:12:09,440 --> 00:12:15,710 specifically sort socio historical or even theoretical work on gender and sexuality. 115 00:12:15,710 --> 00:12:25,670 So indicatively here I'm thinking of something like Valerie Tribes' Book, Desire and Anxiety Circulation's of sexuality in Shakespearean drama. 116 00:12:25,670 --> 00:12:33,200 And these are this kind of work says, you know, what's interesting about the comedies is the way comedies play with ideas of sexuality, 117 00:12:33,200 --> 00:12:42,030 perhaps particularly through cross-dressing, through female agency, through disguise and a kind of romance plot. 118 00:12:42,030 --> 00:12:45,560 Now, I can perhaps see, by the way, I've outlined those two critical methodologies, 119 00:12:45,560 --> 00:12:50,390 that comedy of errors is not very easily assimilated into either of these frameworks. 120 00:12:50,390 --> 00:12:56,360 It doesn't really take up rituals of inversion in the festive comedy sense. 121 00:12:56,360 --> 00:13:02,360 It doesn't have status or gender disguises, the repeated beatings of the servant Romeos. 122 00:13:02,360 --> 00:13:10,250 Actually, it seemed to me to reinforce social hierarchies, even as everything else takes on a sort of topsy turvy quality. 123 00:13:10,250 --> 00:13:16,540 And although the play does have in the characters of Louisiana and Adriana and in some ways even the courtesan, 124 00:13:16,540 --> 00:13:24,200 I say even the courtesan, because it's it's a really quite a small road across those three female roles and even the absent. 125 00:13:24,200 --> 00:13:28,340 Now, perhaps it has some interesting articulation of women's role in society. 126 00:13:28,340 --> 00:13:33,440 But it isn't prominently arranged around female characters, female quest, female experience. 127 00:13:33,440 --> 00:13:41,360 As we come to expect Shakespeare's romantic comedies to be so that oft quoted generic distinction comic women, 128 00:13:41,360 --> 00:13:48,440 tragic men, useful title of Lynda Bambas book doesn't really apply here. 129 00:13:48,440 --> 00:13:51,650 Or perhaps it does. We'll come back to that. 130 00:13:51,650 --> 00:13:59,030 So Adriana and Lucy Ana are given some role, particularly articulating a wistful sense of disappointment about the men around them. 131 00:13:59,030 --> 00:14:01,790 But they're not prominent or active in the way that, say, 132 00:14:01,790 --> 00:14:08,390 Rosalind in As You Like It or Viler in Twelfth Night will be the people in this play who are travelling, 133 00:14:08,390 --> 00:14:12,770 who move from one world to another in order to change themselves. 134 00:14:12,770 --> 00:14:21,110 And it can recognise that as a really common Shakespearean device, that people move quickly, comic device, move from one place to another. 135 00:14:21,110 --> 00:14:26,000 The Travellers' to be able to do that in this play are not female as they are elsewhere. 136 00:14:26,000 --> 00:14:32,630 We don't get anything like Rosalind's. Well, this is the forest of Ardern where she indicates that they've moved or violence early. 137 00:14:32,630 --> 00:14:40,250 What country friends is this? Instead, we've gotten syphilis and Romeo, who are the questing figures and errors, 138 00:14:40,250 --> 00:14:54,410 obviously has some kind of etymological connexion with Irving and with Arendt with with moving around, with travelling as well as with mistakes. 139 00:14:54,410 --> 00:15:01,100 So nor is comedy that is really about society healing and reproducing itself through the trope of romance leading to marriage. 140 00:15:01,100 --> 00:15:07,250 It will be easy to imagine a play in which the errant syphilis has been dallying with. 141 00:15:07,250 --> 00:15:13,970 The courtesan is reunited with his wife, Adriana, and his twin brother is married to her sister, Lucy Ana. 142 00:15:13,970 --> 00:15:17,720 But that's not how play. So it'll be quite an obvious ending to have. 143 00:15:17,720 --> 00:15:28,130 It's not the ending we get the play gestures towards a romantic comedy conclusion in that it's got two pairs of two two pairs of partners. 144 00:15:28,130 --> 00:15:31,940 But it doesn't really get there. Instead, it's central opposite sex couple. 145 00:15:31,940 --> 00:15:38,460 In its conclusion are the older, reunited husband and wife, Jean and Emilia. 146 00:15:38,460 --> 00:15:41,910 In this way, the ad, the play ends, 147 00:15:41,910 --> 00:15:49,840 I think it with a kind of nod towards or something which we can see more clearly by thinking about Shakespeare's later play. 148 00:15:49,840 --> 00:15:58,710 So here we're getting the old couple say parallelise and Thay's from apparently is all they aunties and Dominy from The Winter's Tale. 149 00:15:58,710 --> 00:16:03,190 But we're not also getting the younger couple that we have in those plays, too. 150 00:16:03,190 --> 00:16:12,490 There are lots of ways, I think, comedy of errors. Most most interestingly, links with the play Shakespeare's writing at the end of his career. 151 00:16:12,490 --> 00:16:18,060 It's another way in which I think there's chronological distinctions and not perhaps all that useful. 152 00:16:18,060 --> 00:16:22,260 So comedy that has not been susceptible to theories of comedy as socially regenerative, 153 00:16:22,260 --> 00:16:27,120 nor does it play explicitly with the issues of gender and sexuality. There are no outsiders. 154 00:16:27,120 --> 00:16:29,370 There's not really much homosocial bonding. 155 00:16:29,370 --> 00:16:36,360 There are no parallel cases from social history, although there has been some work on master servant relationships. 156 00:16:36,360 --> 00:16:37,080 Largely, therefore, 157 00:16:37,080 --> 00:16:44,910 the things we have found susceptible to literary analysis in comedy in Shakespeare's comedies do not seem to be present in this play. 158 00:16:44,910 --> 00:16:49,890 Instead, what we have, what critics have seen is a play with a high proportion of features. 159 00:16:49,890 --> 00:17:00,030 We don't tend to appreciate in literary terms, slapstick action, no subplot, unpoetic or language, flat characters. 160 00:17:00,030 --> 00:17:05,550 Okay, so that's a lot of negative cluster of ways of thinking about the play that suggests that it is only 161 00:17:05,550 --> 00:17:11,400 of interest in the way that it anticipates the more sophisticated treatment of themes in later plays. 162 00:17:11,400 --> 00:17:16,980 Coleridge called this play a poetical farce, a poetical farce. 163 00:17:16,980 --> 00:17:25,860 I don't think he meant it entirely as a compliment, but I think there are some literary analysis and some forms and some things we can bring 164 00:17:25,860 --> 00:17:31,300 to bear on comedy of errors which will make it reveal itself into more interesting ways. 165 00:17:31,300 --> 00:17:35,760 One of things I want to try and do is to introduce some alternative theories of comedy, 166 00:17:35,760 --> 00:17:45,470 some non anthropological or non sophs socio historical theories of comedy to help us appreciate it. 167 00:17:45,470 --> 00:17:55,040 And he suggests, in fact, that we use a decidedly anachronistic theory of comedy to try to think about what Shakespeare is doing here. 168 00:17:55,040 --> 00:18:02,940 I think I may use only Bergson. French modernist philosopher who's writing at the beginning, very beginning of the 20th century. 169 00:18:02,940 --> 00:18:08,020 Bergsten's most famous essay is Laria or laughter. 170 00:18:08,020 --> 00:18:11,430 It's very, very widely available on Google Books and stuff. 171 00:18:11,430 --> 00:18:19,840 So you just Google it and find the full text very, very easily. But I've taken out a few quotations that I think are going to be useful for us here. 172 00:18:19,840 --> 00:18:25,750 So Bergson is trying to develop a theory of what makes us laugh and what laughter means. 173 00:18:25,750 --> 00:18:31,510 Basically, his idea is that while laughter can only be generated by humans because he says, 174 00:18:31,510 --> 00:18:39,220 we only laugh at human things and if we laugh, say, at an animal, it's because we're anthropomorphising it. 175 00:18:39,220 --> 00:18:47,260 So we laugh at human things. But the laughter arises from a situation in which the human body behaves in a way which is not human. 176 00:18:47,260 --> 00:18:52,750 More precisely that it behaves like a machine or an automata. 177 00:18:52,750 --> 00:19:02,950 The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that, as that body reminds us of a mere machine. 178 00:19:02,950 --> 00:19:10,540 The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion, as that body reminds us of, of a mere machine. 179 00:19:10,540 --> 00:19:16,510 Bergsten says that comedy enables us to see man as a jointed puppet. 180 00:19:16,510 --> 00:19:25,450 And he describes it as something mechanical encrusted upon the living, something mechanical encrusted upon the living. 181 00:19:25,450 --> 00:19:30,730 We can see that the elasticity of Mr Bean or the implausible physicality of a silent 182 00:19:30,730 --> 00:19:36,400 comedian like Buster Keaton or something would seem to embody Bergsten's central idea. 183 00:19:36,400 --> 00:19:45,100 Bergsten's idea is that rigidity, physiological primarily, but also social and cultural, is at the root of the comic. 184 00:19:45,100 --> 00:19:51,820 We laugh, says Burg's, and every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing, 185 00:19:51,820 --> 00:20:00,760 we laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being thing. I've said that this is an anachronistic theory to apply to the comedy of errors, 186 00:20:00,760 --> 00:20:06,250 although I don't in any way suggest it is anachronistic and therefore we shouldn't do it. 187 00:20:06,250 --> 00:20:12,700 But we could compare it quite interestingly with a non anachronistic theory. Sidney, in the defence of poetry. 188 00:20:12,700 --> 00:20:19,450 This is Sydney's discussion of laughter is quite an interesting and slightly sobering passage. 189 00:20:19,450 --> 00:20:26,830 Our comedians think there is no delight without laughter, which is wrong for though laughter may come with delight. 190 00:20:26,830 --> 00:20:30,840 Yet it come as not of delight, as though delight should be the cause of laughter. 191 00:20:30,840 --> 00:20:35,530 But well, death one thing breed both together, nay, rather in themselves. 192 00:20:35,530 --> 00:20:40,960 So that's delight and laughter. They have, as it were, a kind of contre riot tea for delight. 193 00:20:40,960 --> 00:20:46,900 We scarcely do, but in things that have a convenience to ourselves or the general nature. 194 00:20:46,900 --> 00:20:56,320 Laughter almost ever cometh of things more disproportionately to ourselves and nature delight to have a joy in it, either permanent or present. 195 00:20:56,320 --> 00:21:03,100 Laughter hath only a scornful tickling. For example, we are ravished with delight to see a fair woman. 196 00:21:03,100 --> 00:21:14,080 And yet far from being moved to laughter. We laugh at deformed creatures wherein we certainly cannot delight so disproportionately. 197 00:21:14,080 --> 00:21:21,010 I think he has something of the quality. It's it is were disproportionate. It has something of the quality of Bergsten's rigidity. 198 00:21:21,010 --> 00:21:25,540 And both Sydney and as I'm going to show Bergsten's share, 199 00:21:25,540 --> 00:21:34,300 the idea that to laugh at something is to be is to lack pity, for it is to be unempowered, thick. 200 00:21:34,300 --> 00:21:40,990 So Sydney's analysis shows us that, of course, that what is funny or what prompts laughter is culturally and historically specific. 201 00:21:40,990 --> 00:21:49,210 Laughter is a cultural and not a physiological response. We talk about bursting out laughing or not being able to stop laughing as if these are in 202 00:21:49,210 --> 00:21:56,470 some way involuntary responses was is in fact their deeply learnt and deeply cultural. 203 00:21:56,470 --> 00:22:04,430 But there in Bergsten's definitions, there is, in addition, a kind of dehumanising, as we saw, echoed in Sydney. 204 00:22:04,430 --> 00:22:12,710 I think Bergesen intends to think about laughter as a as a kind of dehumanising property of modernity. 205 00:22:12,710 --> 00:22:24,260 You might want to think back to, you know, anxieties about modernism and mechanical processes and dehumanising industrial scale warfare. 206 00:22:24,260 --> 00:22:33,290 For example, in the First World War, we can see Bergsten's theory in action, perhaps most clearly in Charlie Chaplin's film Modern Times, 207 00:22:33,290 --> 00:22:40,960 where Chaplin becomes part of the unremitting mechanical production line in the factory where he works. 208 00:22:40,960 --> 00:22:46,310 Bergsten suggests then that comedy requires the dehumanising of its object. 209 00:22:46,310 --> 00:22:54,020 The comic in this reading is the opposite of the sentimental. Comedy and sentiment are complete opposites. 210 00:22:54,020 --> 00:23:01,220 The sentimental evokes feeling and empathy. The comic demands separation and coldness. 211 00:23:01,220 --> 00:23:14,960 Something in one of my favourite bits in the Bergersen comedy requires the momentary anaesthesia of the heart, the momentary anaesthesia of the heart. 212 00:23:14,960 --> 00:23:21,890 So the idea that comedy might demand such a momentary anaesthesia is challenging to our feel good ideas about laughter, 213 00:23:21,890 --> 00:23:24,080 but also to our response to Shakespeare, 214 00:23:24,080 --> 00:23:32,030 where warmth towards characters and their situations is a large part of audience pleasure, particularly in the comedies. 215 00:23:32,030 --> 00:23:37,460 But perhaps Bergsten's there might help us look at the way that the comedy of errors refuses. 216 00:23:37,460 --> 00:23:43,610 That kind of empathic engagement refuses for the most part to offer us characters 217 00:23:43,610 --> 00:23:49,190 in recognisable situations with whom we can empathise and how the play cultivates. 218 00:23:49,190 --> 00:23:55,580 Instead, this anaesthesia of the heart that enables comedy to take place. 219 00:23:55,580 --> 00:24:04,570 Or to put it another way. Comedy of Errors is pure comedy because we don't care about the anti Phyllis's or the dramas or which is which. 220 00:24:04,570 --> 00:24:10,570 It is a kind of cardiac and the anaesthesia in five act. 221 00:24:10,570 --> 00:24:17,230 Now, part of the critical issue with the play and its rejection of audience empathy is that its characterisation, 222 00:24:17,230 --> 00:24:22,470 the play's characterisation has seemed apparently so flat. 223 00:24:22,470 --> 00:24:32,490 The two ambivalences and the two drome CEOs are separated situationally, so they belong to different places and they do slightly different things, 224 00:24:32,490 --> 00:24:37,070 but they're not separated in terms of their personality, or at least not substantially. 225 00:24:37,070 --> 00:24:43,740 We never, in fact, really see their personalities. They exist as different people in the structure of the plot. 226 00:24:43,740 --> 00:24:48,610 Not in a kind of social or psychological imaginary. 227 00:24:48,610 --> 00:24:54,550 And the very moments where we begin to feel that we might access something which is more specific and personal, 228 00:24:54,550 --> 00:24:57,910 often turn out in this play to be quite frustrating. 229 00:24:57,910 --> 00:25:05,160 Let's take antipolice of Syracuse in Act one scene to having arrived in Ephesus to look for his long lost brother 230 00:25:05,160 --> 00:25:12,400 until Phyllis sends off his servant to their lodging place and has a momentary soliloquy alone on stage. 231 00:25:12,400 --> 00:25:21,430 So far then, so good soliloquies are when we meet characters alone and enter into a new privileged relationship with them. 232 00:25:21,430 --> 00:25:29,950 But Antiviolence of Syracuse is metaphore. In his soliloquy collapses that claim to singularity even as it asserts it, I. 233 00:25:29,950 --> 00:25:36,290 To the world I'm like a drop of water. But in the ocean seeks another drop. 234 00:25:36,290 --> 00:25:46,420 Who falling there? To find his fellow fall. Some additions have failing there to find his fellow fourth unseen, inquisitive, confound himself. 235 00:25:46,420 --> 00:25:50,980 So I. To find a mother and a brother in quest of them unhappy. 236 00:25:50,980 --> 00:25:56,400 Lose myself to the world. I'm like a drop of water. 237 00:25:56,400 --> 00:26:02,580 The image of the water drop is hardly, we might think, a propitious one for asserting individuality. 238 00:26:02,580 --> 00:26:10,890 And it's not simply here that Amphipolis has the specific challenge to his identity, that he is an identical twin. 239 00:26:10,890 --> 00:26:16,740 So he isn't saying I'm a drop of water and there is another one drop of water just like me. 240 00:26:16,740 --> 00:26:26,370 So it's not the specific plot that we have here that the this man is half of a pair of twins, but something somehow more existential. 241 00:26:26,370 --> 00:26:36,330 The fact that he's with twins seems hardly to matter. What the speech says is that he and syphilis is indistinguishable from everybody else, 242 00:26:36,330 --> 00:26:45,540 not just the person he looks exactly like, but the whole indeterminate ocean of humanity, the erasure of individualism. 243 00:26:45,540 --> 00:26:53,070 Then just in that short speech is complete. And I think it's enacted through the contorted syntax of that final phrase. 244 00:26:53,070 --> 00:26:59,400 So I to find a mother and a brother in quest of them unhappy, lose myself. 245 00:26:59,400 --> 00:27:08,520 Even the phrase I lose myself is itself lost, divided and alienated by those intervening clauses. 246 00:27:08,520 --> 00:27:13,200 So until Valencia's brief soliloquy is not a moment of connexion or revelation. 247 00:27:13,200 --> 00:27:19,050 But in fact, a moment of alienation. It's like something Estragon might say in Waiting for Godot. 248 00:27:19,050 --> 00:27:22,770 And in fact, the absurdist theatre of the mid 20th century is, I think, 249 00:27:22,770 --> 00:27:28,670 an interesting parallel for the bleaker and more existential aspects of comedy of errors. 250 00:27:28,670 --> 00:27:35,220 And as if to confirm that the language of antipolice is stunted, soliloquy is about commonality, not individuality. 251 00:27:35,220 --> 00:27:38,820 Shakespeare actually gives it again to another character. 252 00:27:38,820 --> 00:27:44,130 When Adriana encounters as she thinks her husband in fact, is of course her husband's brother, 253 00:27:44,130 --> 00:27:49,680 she reminds him of the inviolability of their marriage bond in a similar image. 254 00:27:49,680 --> 00:27:50,820 No, my love, 255 00:27:50,820 --> 00:27:59,580 as easy may still fall a drop of water in the breaking Gulf and take on mingled dents that drop again without additional diminishing as take me 256 00:27:59,580 --> 00:28:14,070 from thyself marriage here indistinguishable from more general watery commingling seems the epitome of a recurrent difficulty of individuation. 257 00:28:14,070 --> 00:28:21,720 So what comedy of errors, I think suggests is that character and characterisation is not the property of the internal, but the external. 258 00:28:21,720 --> 00:28:27,320 That seems to me a theme which recurs in Shakespeare and it recurs. Therefore, in these lectures, it's by. 259 00:28:27,320 --> 00:28:34,080 In this play, identity is fixed when someone recognises you as yourself. 260 00:28:34,080 --> 00:28:46,410 So it's kind of in the eye of the beholder in some way. But it's by operating within a social system that personhood is achieved and secured. 261 00:28:46,410 --> 00:28:54,030 If you look at the early printed texts that shape of Shakespeare's plays up quartos where they exist, or as with comedy of errors, the folio, 262 00:28:54,030 --> 00:29:02,040 we can often see Shakespeare's view of a character fluctuating within and between scenes such that they're given name, 263 00:29:02,040 --> 00:29:06,480 that their proper name is often less important than their social status. 264 00:29:06,480 --> 00:29:13,890 So Claudius in Hamlet is only ever called King Edmund in Lear only ethical bastard. 265 00:29:13,890 --> 00:29:17,730 The character of Angelo in Comedy of Errors is called Goldsmith. 266 00:29:17,730 --> 00:29:25,470 We don't know the name of the Duke in measure for measure, except by reference to the list of characters appended at the end. 267 00:29:25,470 --> 00:29:33,120 Social statuses and social roles come first. Proper names come second in Shakespeare. 268 00:29:33,120 --> 00:29:38,220 Very often it is not being called by our name that identifies as not least because clearly in the history, 269 00:29:38,220 --> 00:29:42,770 plays of the characters seem to have hundreds of confusingly hundreds of different names. 270 00:29:42,770 --> 00:29:52,280 So it's not been called by our name. That is a primary mode of identification, but by being firmly in a particular role in society. 271 00:29:52,280 --> 00:29:59,340 Now we know that this is a kind of preoccupation of only modern culture. It's it's a part why social mobility and things like the sumptuary laws, 272 00:29:59,340 --> 00:30:06,180 those ineffective edicts which try and say what different classes of person are allowed to where they have such an anxious hold on. 273 00:30:06,180 --> 00:30:12,180 On the early modern imagination, because being if your identity is tied up with where you are in society, 274 00:30:12,180 --> 00:30:17,850 movements or fluidity in society become much more frightening. 275 00:30:17,850 --> 00:30:23,010 Comedy of errors, I think, amplifies this insight by giving both sets of twins that shared name. 276 00:30:23,010 --> 00:30:27,480 The proper name, therefore, is precisely what does not distinguish them. 277 00:30:27,480 --> 00:30:35,970 Names are signals of individual identity break down here, both in the themes of the plot and in the apparatus of the play. 278 00:30:35,970 --> 00:30:40,710 If you try to read the play in that first printing in the Folio, it's almost impossible, 279 00:30:40,710 --> 00:30:48,390 not least because the editorial standardisation of The Antiflu says and the Drolma goes into of Ephesus or of Syracuse. 280 00:30:48,390 --> 00:30:53,920 That's the way modern editors give us a sort of mastery over what's happening. So at any time, we do know who's speaking. 281 00:30:53,920 --> 00:31:00,450 That's not part of the folio. So we just got a character who is largely called until our character called Tromeo. 282 00:31:00,450 --> 00:31:02,040 They're not differentiated in that way. 283 00:31:02,040 --> 00:31:09,870 The experience of reading the play is a much more confusing one in that format than modern editors make it for us. 284 00:31:09,870 --> 00:31:16,170 So if the play locates identity and exteriors, it also understands selfhood through property. 285 00:31:16,170 --> 00:31:21,150 Comedy of Errors is an unusually prop dependent play for Shakespeare. 286 00:31:21,150 --> 00:31:23,220 Sometimes it can be a really useful job, actually, 287 00:31:23,220 --> 00:31:31,860 to just set out a list of what props you would really absolutely need to perform any any particular play. 288 00:31:31,860 --> 00:31:36,240 There are lots and lots of play for which you need really no props at all. 289 00:31:36,240 --> 00:31:40,530 Here we do need props because they're this that they're that they're not decorative, 290 00:31:40,530 --> 00:31:50,140 that they're actual tokens of transactions and of identity, particularly things like the gold chain, the rope and the money. 291 00:31:50,140 --> 00:31:56,910 They're all objects which indicate connexion and interaction between characters, both metaphorically or literally. 292 00:31:56,910 --> 00:32:02,070 When the goldsmith in comedy of errors spots antipolice wearing the gold chain, 293 00:32:02,070 --> 00:32:08,610 he immediately and naturally identifies him as the man who has taken delivery of that chain and not paid for it. 294 00:32:08,610 --> 00:32:13,620 In fact, he isn't that man. But the gold chain seems to indicate that he is the play. 295 00:32:13,620 --> 00:32:20,910 The plots confusion's thus are confusion's of props, giving money to the wrong man, extracting payment from the wrong man. 296 00:32:20,910 --> 00:32:26,520 And in this we might want to see comedy of errors as Shakespeare's only city comedy. 297 00:32:26,520 --> 00:32:34,920 That genre which become so popular really around a decade after comedy of errors, which has a similar dependence on props. 298 00:32:34,920 --> 00:32:39,390 A similar interest in character types rather than an individual personality. 299 00:32:39,390 --> 00:32:45,720 And in fact, a similar cast of merchants, courtesans and cuckolds. 300 00:32:45,720 --> 00:32:52,080 So the play's in sight, I think, is that character is not expressed through dinner, through the out, but through the outer. 301 00:32:52,080 --> 00:32:56,250 The play makes no claim for the specific or autonomous individual. 302 00:32:56,250 --> 00:33:01,080 Rather, it's clever plot moves towards the reunion of a family. 303 00:33:01,080 --> 00:33:10,650 It's by resituated these people in their proper roles in relation to each other, in the family that the play can be resolved. 304 00:33:10,650 --> 00:33:16,320 It might be possible for us to read these figures in a more explicitly psychoanalytical way 305 00:33:16,320 --> 00:33:20,580 and therefore to link comedy of errors with something that Shakespeare explores elsewhere. 306 00:33:20,580 --> 00:33:28,750 The idea of split personality or a self refracted across several characters, rather, in the manner of that mediæval dramatic form. 307 00:33:28,750 --> 00:33:33,090 Psycho. I've talked about this before, but let's just recap. 308 00:33:33,090 --> 00:33:42,010 Psycho Makela is a form of theatre in which actors play not individuals, but aspects of behaviour and their interactions are there a lot. 309 00:33:42,010 --> 00:33:54,870 Thus less the interactions of full human beings and rather an allegory ised play of possible behaviours for a kind of representative human subject. 310 00:33:54,870 --> 00:34:02,430 Shakespeare is usually credited with a break away from these kinds of characterisation and the discovery of a more interior psychology. 311 00:34:02,430 --> 00:34:09,570 But it might be useful to return to that split form of characterisation in a more secular form here and to 312 00:34:09,570 --> 00:34:16,920 see the two ambivalences and the two drome is less as pairs of people and more as split or divided people. 313 00:34:16,920 --> 00:34:21,330 Each seeking not the other, but the self. 314 00:34:21,330 --> 00:34:28,080 One reason Comedy of Errors is not a romantic comedy is that the search is directed inward rather than outward. 315 00:34:28,080 --> 00:34:32,740 These guys are not looking for partners. Searching for his family. 316 00:34:32,740 --> 00:34:35,940 Antithesis of Sciorra clues, cues will lose himself. 317 00:34:35,940 --> 00:34:42,950 It is less his mother and his brother that he is looking for than some sense of personal completeness. 318 00:34:42,950 --> 00:34:48,070 Now, often this play has been performed with a single actor doubling the role of the twins. 319 00:34:48,070 --> 00:34:51,510 That's been particularly popular for the dreamier characters. 320 00:34:51,510 --> 00:34:57,640 The BBC television production, for instance, has one actor who plays both Phyllis's and one playing the drone. 321 00:34:57,640 --> 00:35:02,770 Meer's is an easier thing to do on film. But it's not impossible to do it in the theatre. 322 00:35:02,770 --> 00:35:09,390 And there are quite a number of examples of that. It's an interesting technique because it adds on the one hand, the kind of verisimilitude. 323 00:35:09,390 --> 00:35:15,210 Of course, everybody is confused because the twins look so alike. They look so alike because they are the same person. 324 00:35:15,210 --> 00:35:22,230 But it links that verisimilitude with a really unsettling, kind of uncanny and Heimlich kind of dream. 325 00:35:22,230 --> 00:35:28,350 The treat the twins both are and are not separate people. 326 00:35:28,350 --> 00:35:35,930 Perhaps we could link this sense of psychic split with, for instance, the common doubling in Midsummer Night's Dream of the earthly rulers, 327 00:35:35,930 --> 00:35:40,620 Theseus and Hippolyta with their fairy counterparts, Oberon and to Tanya. 328 00:35:40,620 --> 00:35:47,490 So doubling them means the same actors play the same, the two sets of characters. 329 00:35:47,490 --> 00:35:54,810 This tends. This has become almost a cliché in readings of Midsummer Night's Dream and in performances of that play as a way of 330 00:35:54,810 --> 00:36:04,950 suggesting that the forest there is the dreamscape of Athens in which repressed or hidden personalities can emerge. 331 00:36:04,950 --> 00:36:09,970 If we take this to comedy of errors, an interesting phenomenon emerges. 332 00:36:09,970 --> 00:36:17,250 Um, syphilis of Syracuse, the visiting twin to visit Syracuse, 333 00:36:17,250 --> 00:36:24,390 is able to experience all manner of vicarious behaviour without taking any responsibility for it. 334 00:36:24,390 --> 00:36:29,970 He's able to have encounters with the courtesan, encounters with his brother's wife. 335 00:36:29,970 --> 00:36:38,070 He's able to take goods without paying for them and so on. Typically, the plot of this play worked by making one brother take the rap, 336 00:36:38,070 --> 00:36:43,140 literally a beating, always in the case of the drome years and a kind of ear bashing for the. 337 00:36:43,140 --> 00:36:47,610 Until it didn't. Until I brothers one brother takes the rap for what the other has done. 338 00:36:47,610 --> 00:36:52,050 So we'll see that again and again. A kind of performance of substitution. 339 00:36:52,050 --> 00:37:00,150 It's a dance of actions and displaced or ducked consequences. The current National Theatre production with Lenny Henry is Phyllis. 340 00:37:00,150 --> 00:37:02,940 Has Adriana enticed her husband? 341 00:37:02,940 --> 00:37:13,320 But in fact, it's her husband's brother to bed in what one reviewer identified nicely, I think, as a. Phyllis's guilty pleasure. 342 00:37:13,320 --> 00:37:19,230 I think this makes the twins kind of wish fulfilment device a sort of ID function. 343 00:37:19,230 --> 00:37:29,610 They allow repression to be lifted and behaviour liberated by pushing the blame onto a kind of alter ego or not alternate self. 344 00:37:29,610 --> 00:37:38,740 Under the guise of being someone else, even unwittingly, the characters are able to rehearse alternative selves and alternative behaviours. 345 00:37:38,740 --> 00:37:44,870 In this reading, what the plot reveals, though, is that such liberation can only be temporary. 346 00:37:44,870 --> 00:37:49,700 There is extremes, increasing stress and anxiety in this play. 347 00:37:49,700 --> 00:37:58,930 Another review of the of the National Theatre production talks about the director's substantial achievement to orchestrate a gradually mounting mania, 348 00:37:58,930 --> 00:38:06,350 a gradually mounting mania. It's a great phrase and a great description of that production, but also of the play. 349 00:38:06,350 --> 00:38:15,260 The Folio stage direction at the end of Act four has excellent omnis as fast as may be frighted as fast as may be. 350 00:38:15,260 --> 00:38:23,770 Frighted look very often get in stage directions, an indication of the emotion that's to be to be given in any one action. 351 00:38:23,770 --> 00:38:31,680 Do it. If you think about that, we very rarely get Sock's of adverbs or descriptions in that in that way. 352 00:38:31,680 --> 00:38:37,070 And it's quite striking on as fast as maybe frightened events catch up with the bewildered 353 00:38:37,070 --> 00:38:41,900 Antibalas and Drummy of Syracuse such that they have to seek sanctuary in the abbey. 354 00:38:41,900 --> 00:38:51,140 We don't have to be fully paid up Freudians, to see that. What happens next is that a chaste nun stroke mum sorts it all out. 355 00:38:51,140 --> 00:38:57,440 If we push this idea a bit further, then we can see that the these errors are not too far from terrors. 356 00:38:57,440 --> 00:39:07,160 The scene in which I'm DeVillers of Ephesus returns to his home to find his way Baade because his servant tells him he is already inside. 357 00:39:07,160 --> 00:39:11,840 Supping with his wife is a kind of parable of self alienation. 358 00:39:11,840 --> 00:39:16,890 It's funny, but it's funny because its implications are frightening. 359 00:39:16,890 --> 00:39:22,650 And the place very interested, I think, in the way identity, witchcraft, possession, 360 00:39:22,650 --> 00:39:27,930 both in the idea of being possessed by something outside yourself and having a kind of self-possession work. 361 00:39:27,930 --> 00:39:31,460 Shakespeare has relocated the action of the play from Plautus. 362 00:39:31,460 --> 00:39:43,800 His location, Eppy, dumbness to emphasis and emphasis, has strong associations in the Bible with exorcism, with evil spirits and with confusion. 363 00:39:43,800 --> 00:39:50,100 The frequency with which this play employs a lexicon of magic and the supernatural is striking. 364 00:39:50,100 --> 00:39:58,800 More mentions of witches and witchcraft than in Macbeth, for instance, more mentions of conjuring and magic than in Midsummer Night's Dream. 365 00:39:58,800 --> 00:40:03,780 More references to Satan and the devil than in any other Shakespeare play. 366 00:40:03,780 --> 00:40:15,660 So on the edges of this slapstick farce, isn't is a real abiding linguistic interest in magic, supernatural, the supernatural and devilry. 367 00:40:15,660 --> 00:40:22,110 Dr Pinches attempts to exercise this madness at the end of the play, bring out comedy of errors, 368 00:40:22,110 --> 00:40:29,450 preoccupation with possessions, madness and other forms of South Los. 369 00:40:29,450 --> 00:40:31,040 So what I've been talking about so far, 370 00:40:31,040 --> 00:40:38,650 there are ways to suggest that there is more to comedy of errors than the dismissal of it as an immature or trivial work might suggest. 371 00:40:38,650 --> 00:40:43,610 So the answer to my opening question, should we bother with comedy of errors? Seems to be yes. 372 00:40:43,610 --> 00:40:48,050 Because really, it's Hamlet or Lear. But just in microcosm. 373 00:40:48,050 --> 00:40:56,270 When Hamlet tells Laertes he shouldn't be blamed for Polonius his death, he does it by suggesting it was not Hamlet, but his madness. 374 00:40:56,270 --> 00:41:02,240 Lear gets the answer Lear's shadow when he asks, who is it that can tell me who I am? 375 00:41:02,240 --> 00:41:06,050 So these are expressions of South division we're used to seeing in tragedies or that we think 376 00:41:06,050 --> 00:41:13,040 of the hallmark of tragedies that are already present in a different key in comedy of errors. 377 00:41:13,040 --> 00:41:17,780 As I think it's always attributed to John Mortimer, as John Mortimer wrote, Farce. 378 00:41:17,780 --> 00:41:26,510 It's tragedy at a thousand revolutions per minute, farce is tragedy at a thousand revolutions per minute. 379 00:41:26,510 --> 00:41:35,150 The speeded up comedy of errors is only half the length of these later tragedies, but claims some of the same existential territory. 380 00:41:35,150 --> 00:41:43,250 So the gain here, interpretively, interpretively, has been to identify the players worthy of study because it is serious. 381 00:41:43,250 --> 00:41:48,380 And how better to do that than to link it with the major tragedies? That's what we've gained. 382 00:41:48,380 --> 00:41:58,880 What we might have lost is an idea of comedy. It's not very useful truism as truism to say that most theorising of comedy is not very funny. 383 00:41:58,880 --> 00:42:03,800 I don't know whether we could should be concerned that the critical movement to understand comedy 384 00:42:03,800 --> 00:42:10,110 tends to find it interesting precisely in proportion to the ways it finds it no longer funny. 385 00:42:10,110 --> 00:42:15,230 So interesting and funny seem difficult for us to reconcile. 386 00:42:15,230 --> 00:42:21,560 We might then here we might think. And this is my final point about laughter more generally. 387 00:42:21,560 --> 00:42:27,680 Firstly, comedy is not only about laughter. I've talked a bit about that distinction in the lecture on measure for measure. 388 00:42:27,680 --> 00:42:32,600 When I talk about the difference in comic form and structure on the one hand and comic tone on the other, 389 00:42:32,600 --> 00:42:39,010 and I'm sure we'll come back to that when we talk about all's well that ends well later on this term. 390 00:42:39,010 --> 00:42:45,760 But laughter is itself a complicated force, which I think is, above all, non-trivial. 391 00:42:45,760 --> 00:42:51,670 Bergsten writes that laughter is, above all, a corrective. 392 00:42:51,670 --> 00:42:57,370 We laugh at things as a coercive attempt to realign behaviours with social norms. 393 00:42:57,370 --> 00:43:05,350 Again, as with the echo of Sydney Bergson has, Bergesen is not an entirely anachronistic force here. 394 00:43:05,350 --> 00:43:12,490 The historian Keith Thomas recognises something about early modern laughter in quite similar terms. 395 00:43:12,490 --> 00:43:20,950 For all its affirmation of shared values, laughter could be a powerful source of social cohesion in the close knit village communities. 396 00:43:20,950 --> 00:43:24,400 Mockery and derision. Sounds a bit like Oxford colleges to me. 397 00:43:24,400 --> 00:43:26,380 In the first close knit village communities, 398 00:43:26,380 --> 00:43:33,970 mockery and derision were indispensible means of preserving Orthodox values and condemning unorthodox behaviour. 399 00:43:33,970 --> 00:43:40,510 So comedy or laughter seeks to manage unorthodox behaviour and bring us into line. 400 00:43:40,510 --> 00:43:46,030 We laugh at things in order to send out a signal that they're not acceptable. 401 00:43:46,030 --> 00:43:52,660 What kind of orthodox behaviour is being managed then by the comedy of comedy of errors? 402 00:43:52,660 --> 00:44:01,030 Well, we could see that, as befits a play performed as part of entertainment in the homosocial world of the ins of court and a 403 00:44:01,030 --> 00:44:07,090 play which was almost certainly too short ever to be performed in the public theatre of the Globe. 404 00:44:07,090 --> 00:44:12,060 We can say that it reinforces certain attitudes about social rank. 405 00:44:12,060 --> 00:44:16,900 The serial beatings of the drama brothers can, in performance, take on an unreal. 406 00:44:16,900 --> 00:44:25,210 Tom and Jerry kind of quality of violence, which is inventive and in Bergsten's terms, not human or slapstick. 407 00:44:25,210 --> 00:44:31,270 But they can also take on the more uncomfortable reality of the Tom and Jerry equivalent in The Simpsons cartoons. 408 00:44:31,270 --> 00:44:36,850 Itchy and scratchy. Itchy, scratchy. Remember, do draw real blood. 409 00:44:36,850 --> 00:44:47,840 The fact that they are real bodies being beaten and and battered is part of what's funny about that background sequence. 410 00:44:47,840 --> 00:44:55,400 We might also see that the behaviour in comedy varies that's being endorsed. It's pro merchant and indifferent to women. 411 00:44:55,400 --> 00:44:59,480 That's the start of how we might say that saying something is funny. 412 00:44:59,480 --> 00:45:03,410 Can't be the end of the discussion. Why is this this way? 413 00:45:03,410 --> 00:45:13,460 Because it's funny because I ask him why something is funny. Almost always has a social or cultural reason which might now be difficult to recover. 414 00:45:13,460 --> 00:45:20,450 If you read reviews of this play, the current National Theatre production is well worth reading up about or seeing if you can. 415 00:45:20,450 --> 00:45:23,990 It's on live at the Phoenix at the beginning of March. 416 00:45:23,990 --> 00:45:28,910 If you read reviews of the play, you can see some of the difficulties of translating the plays humour, 417 00:45:28,910 --> 00:45:36,070 but also on the ongoing significance, I think of bugs only and theories of the bodily and the mechanical. 418 00:45:36,070 --> 00:45:38,320 So I've asked whether we should bother with comedy of errors. 419 00:45:38,320 --> 00:45:43,300 I've tried to suggest that we should and that its pleasures and its sophistication are still underrated. 420 00:45:43,300 --> 00:45:45,430 And that's such a rarity in Shakespeare studies, 421 00:45:45,430 --> 00:45:52,180 where everything seems to be so well trodden that that might in itself be something attractive to you. 422 00:45:52,180 --> 00:45:56,020 I've tried to suggest ways that comic theories might be applied to the play to make 423 00:45:56,020 --> 00:46:00,790 its apparent deficiencies of character or emotional depth into its most definitely, 424 00:46:00,790 --> 00:46:09,220 definitely managed features and then to cover some more general material on how we might understand comedy and its twin laughter. 425 00:46:09,220 --> 00:46:16,420 Next week I'm lecturing on Richard the Third. This is a slightly random collection of plays, I admit, 426 00:46:16,420 --> 00:46:23,530 which is because I have now set myself the task of trying to do a lecture on pretty much every play, which is not the task I had set at the beginning. 427 00:46:23,530 --> 00:46:27,340 Had I said that at the beginning, I would have chosen the place in slightly different order. 428 00:46:27,340 --> 00:46:31,500 But I hope this randomness will give you something kind of fruitful to think about. 429 00:46:31,500 --> 00:46:50,854 So I'm letting on Richard the third. The question I'm asking is, do we want Richmond to win?