The Body in Error

The Dromios, as servants who constantly make mistakes, are beaten for their errors. When Dromio (of Ephesus) protests he is told: ‘Good now, hold thy tongue’, to which he replies ‘Nay, rather persuade him to hold his hands’, referring to Antipholus of Ephesus (IV.4.23). Here tongues and hands are parts of the body equally capable of communication. Although the communication of the hands in this case may be primitive violence, it leaves a written language on Dromio’s body, and it foregrounds the importance of the body in communication. Language and the body intersect: ‘That you beat me at the mart, I have your hand to show; | If the skin were parchment, and the blows you gave were ink, | Your own handwriting would tell you what I think’ (III.1.12-14).77

The words are Antipholus’s but the meaning or thought is Dromio’s. The marks and scars reveal their shared history. Ordinarily between twins the body records a shared history, through birthmarks and shared physical characteristics78 but here the body records error—the consequences of ‘mistakes’ where Dromio returns when he is sent away, loses the gold he is given and fetches a rope when he is asked for a gold chain.

Such physical violence is used to characterise the relationship between Antipholus and Dromio. As Dromio explains, ‘I am wak’d with it when I sleep, rais’d with it when I sit, driven out of doors with it when I go from home, welcom’d home with it when I return’ (IV.4.34-7). In telling this story, Dromio suggests his bodily state of being is changed to its opposite. Narrativising his abuse in this way expresses his attempt to make sense of the nonsensical. Yet the form does not fit the content—order can be identified in the structure of his speech but the content

77

Maps, reading and the body, relates back to Nell and her body as a map, discussed above.

78 _{‘Who deciphers them?’ asks the Duke looking at the twins, appropriating the editorial mode of}

sifting through, understand and making sense, decoding the data (V.1.335). It is as if their appearance and even being need to be converted into ordinary language rather than the special language of the twins.

remains impenetrable to reason as he cannot understand why he is beaten. In the end Dromio’s attempt to order his experience fails and his speech is silenced with a beating: ‘Wilt thou still talk? Beats Dromio’ (IV.4.44 S.D.)

The body is not only subject to error but it also is the site of its resolution. The aptly named Doctor Pinch is ready with his torturous ways to restore order. Adriana instructs ‘Good Doctor Pinch, you are a conjurer, | Establish him in his true sense again’ (IV.4.47-8). Pinch pronounces that ‘both man and master is possess’d; | I know it by their pale and deadly looks.’ (IV.4.92-3). This deduction is based entirely on the body, on Antipholus and Dromio’s visual appearance. In reaction, Antipholus says ‘with these nails I’ll pluck out these false eyes | That would behold in me this shameful sport’ (IV.4.104-5). Antipholus claims he will blind himself with his own fingers. The scene has moved a long way from farce; indeed it chimes more with the tragedy of King Lear than with any other Shakespearean comedy.79

Antipholus threatens to do what Cornwall does to Gloucester: to ‘pluck’ out his eyes. In one of the most gruesome scenes, Gloucester is blinded by the vengeful Regan and Cornwall. Cornwall horrifically proclaims ‘Out, vild jelly! | Where is thy lustre now?’ (III.7.83-4). Antipholus is bound by many others: ‘Enter three or four, and offer to bind him; he strives’ and Doctor Pinch calls for ‘[m]ore company! the fiend is strong within him’, asking for yet more men to restrain him (IV.4.105 s.d-107). Like Antipholus, Gloucester is also bound at the excited command of his captors, where Cornwall says ‘[b]ind him, I say. [Servants bind him.] Regan: ‘Hard, hard. O

79 _{Jonathan Bate claims that ‘The Comedy of Errors turns on the essential device of farce’. See}

‘Introduction’ to William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors ed. Jonathan Bate (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2011), p. 2. The play has historically been regarded as a farce and therefore is deemed essentially trivial. Farce, being close to slapstick comedy, relies on exaggerated visual, physical gestures and face-pulling. There are moments in The Comedy of Errors which use these techniques, especially surrounding the Dromios. The violence towards them, however, could be interpreted as tragically comic, as dark humour, with serious overtones rather than a glib acceptance of aggression. There are climactic moments of violence where the extremity of the language and action extend beyond comic entertainment, for example in the trial of Antipholus of Ephesus in Act IV Scene 4.

filthy traitor!’ (III.7.32-3). Within Act IV Scene 4 of The Comedy of Errors, characters are not acting comically as the play’s genre might predict. Pinch is often seen as a figure of fun, a quasi-schoolteacher and quack doctor drafted in by Shakespeare to perform a comic exorcism on Antipholus, yet his appearance from the beginning suggests otherwise. If Doctor Pinch is a farcical figure, the violence he inflicts in resolution of bodily errors is inconsequential. But on an alternative reading of Pinch, more akin to the equivalent scene in King Lear, the violence is not

inconsequential, but the painful result of bodily error.

For Dromio when he is beaten and Antipholus when he is tied, their natural physical and vocal responses are omitted from the text. Their words are recorded but not their cries for help or involuntary bodily responses. Lecercle draws a distinction in language between ‘what we might call the “dictionary”, i.e. language as abstract, systematic, an instrument of communication, and the “scream”, i.e. language as material, individual, an expression of the passions and instinctual drive of the human body.’80

‘Material language, on the other hand, is unsystematic, a series of noises, private to individual speakers, not meant to promote communication and therefore self-contradictory’. Private languages and communication understood by only a few people, especially in familial units, is pertinent to The Comedy of Errors where the identical nature of the twins raises the possibility of thought and language that only they can follow. For Lecercle language is an integral part of the speaker’s body, an outward expression of its drives. At the same time it imposes itself on the individual, controlling the ‘subject’.81

Despite the agency of the body in moments of pain,

80 _{Lecercle, Philosophy Through the Looking Glass, p. 44.} 81

confusion or delirium, such noises and non-linguistic responses are not represented in the playtext.82

Dromio of Ephesus asks Antipholus of Syracuse ‘for God's sake, hold your hands! Nay, and you will not, sir, I'll take my heels’. By taking his ‘heels’, he exits the scene because Antipholus will not stop beating him. Involuntary noises from the body are not recorded from the battery that takes place between these two sentences. This restrains the sympathy felt for the Dromios and prevents the play from turning into a tragedy, where the consequences of error are fully realised. In tragedy, ‘screams’ are released and the body is released to express itself. In King Lear, what does ‘howl howl howl’ signify (V.3.258)? Is it an imperative, an embedded stage direction, instructing a throaty inarticulate noise, or is Lear supposed to speak ‘howl’, or is it both? The same question arises with Othello’s ‘O! O! O!’ (V.2.197). They could sound softly like an owl or a coo at a baby just as easily as an elongated human cry, where the ‘o’ is steadily rearticulated, its pain and volume insistent. It has none of Lecercle’s ‘dictionary’ sense—it is an empty signifier. But this is the privilege of performance and the freedom of the actor, that in the moment of performance the actor decides how to speak (or scream). Eradicating the noises made by the body in response to violence not only restrains the horror of the aggression but suppresses its ‘screams’ and thus the delire of the character. The errors of the body are not

restricted to the marks of the Dromios’ failures, or to Antipholus’s madness which Pinch seeks to ‘correct’, but extend to the screams, the projections of the body, which also express error. Lear and Othello emit these bodily noises at the moment they realise their tragic errors. On the other hand, in The Comedy of Errors, these

‘screams’ are suppressed and removed. This maintains the interpretation of the play

82 _{In performance it would be possible to represent them. My argument is focused here on the material}

as a comedy.83 The absence of these bodily errors prevents the comedy falling into tragic error. In this way, our categorisation of the play is facilitated.