2nd individual paper
DISGUISE AND MISTAKEN IDENTITIES
Twelfth Night & The Comedy of Errors
Most Shakespearean comedies share a common structure that goes from a situation
of chaos to the restoration of order. One of the resources used by the Bard
to cause that chaos is to create confusion in the characters by making them
unaware of some fact that the audience knows, leading to hilarious situations.
The device of mistaken identities and disguises, used by Shakespeare in
many of his plays, is probably the best example of this chaos. In The
Taming of the Shrew, for instance, Lucentio disguises as a Latin teacher
and his servant, Tranio, pretends to be him; in Measure for Measure,
Vincentio disguises as a friar to expose Angelo’s bad deeds; in Love’s
Labour’s Lost the main male characters try to deceive the female
ones by disguising themselves; in The Merchant of Venice, Portia
and Nerissa disguise themselves as men to save Antonio and to mock their
husbands, etc. However, there are two Shakespearean plays in which mistaken
identities are not just a device but the main impulse of the plot: The
Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night. But is comic relief the
only purpose of this game of identities and disguises? Definitely not. Through
disguise and the confusion of identities Shakespeare was able to deal with
issues that would have been unsuitable for his time, such as homosexuality
or unfaithfulness, and he was also able to put women (or men dressed as
women, at least) in unusual roles or situations.
Of course, these storytelling devices were not made up by Shakespeare, they
were commonly used in Elizabethan
drama and before. The Italian commedia
dell’arte is an important source of the English playwright and
the classic theatre of Greece and Rome is also an indispensable reference.
In fact, The Comedy of Errors is loosely
based on Plautus’ plays Menaechmi
and Amphitruo . In Shakespeare’s first comedy, two set
of twins (the Antipholi and the Dromios) that were separated in the wreckage
of a ship almost twenty years ago cause confusion and chaos among their
friends and relatives in the city of Ephesus. At the end the multiple misunderstandings
are solved and the brothers are finally reunited. The device of mistaken
identities is used in a not very subtle way when compared to other plays
by Shakespeare and it is difficult to find hidden meanings or intentions
in the chaos created by the playwright. Everything is just as it seems to
be, except for the characters, of course.
Twelfth Night also starts with a shipwreck and the separation of
two twin siblings: Viola and Sebastian. Viola decides to dress as a man
to serve Duke Orsino, but she falls in love with him. At the same time,
the Duke is in love with a noble woman called Olivia, that does not correspond
to his love. The triangle is complete when Olivia meets the disguised Viola
and falls for her. The arrival of Sebastian to the city and the subsequent
misunderstandings and revelations serve as the climax of the story.
In general we could say that the use of mistaken identities in Twelfth
Night is more subtle and sophisticated than in The Comedy of Errors,
and the same can be applied to the comic situations derived from that confusion.
The former is a more mature play that has other purposes apart from entertaining
the audience.
An important fact that we have to take into account is that in both plays
the spectators are completely aware of these ‘identity issues’.
At the very beginning of The Comedy of Errors (ERR: I. i. 33),
Egeon, father of the Antipholi, explains to Duke Solinus the story of his
life and the separation of his sons and the Dromios, and during the following
scene (ERR: I. ii. 37), Antipholus of Syracuse tells the audience of his
errand:
I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself:
So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.
In Twelfth Night, it is Viola who explains the situation to the audience as she wonders how everything will end (TN: II. ii. 34):
How will this fadge? my master loves her dearly;
And I, poor monster, fond as much on him;
And she, mistaken, seems to dote on me.
What will become of this?
By making his audience aware of everything, Shakespeare gave them the privilege of being gods, watching from above (metaphorically speaking) the adventures and misfortunes of the characters and laughing at them and their misunderstandings.
The plot of both plays has many common points, however, an important difference
between them is that in The Comedy of Errors, the confusion created
by the Antipholi and the Dromios is caused by pure chance, while in Twelfth
Night, Viola’s deliberate decision of disguising herself as a
man is the starting point of the events to follow. This connects also with
the device of cross-dressing, taken again from Italian commedia dell’arte
and frequently used by Shakespeare to give his female characters the chance
to carry out actions that usually corresponded to men in Elizabethan times.
Apart from that, the fact that Viola is a woman disguised as a man (played
on the stage by a man pretending to be a woman) develops the perfect situation
for double meanings, misunderstandings and irony. But once again we should
look further than that. Shakespeare’s purpose when disguising Viola
as a boy is not only to create comic situations, but also to teach a lesson
to his audience. It is almost as if Shakespeare wanted to transmit to the
public that looks and appearance are always deceiving. And this is not only
limited to gender. It is also related with power, authority and even art.
But the lesson of the Bard can be somewhat contradictory. In that same soliloquy,
Viola connects again with the theme of appearance when she says: “Disguise,
I see, thou art a wickedness, / Wherein the pregnant enemy does much”
(TN: II. ii. 28). But the truth is that at the end Viola gets Orsino and
her own happy ending by deceiving those around her. Was Shakespeare also
trying to fool the audience? What he was doing was making them wonder about
that appearance / reality dichotomy and also about what makes us be what
we are: birth, social class, gender… These issues would be far from
strange in nowadays literature, but four centuries ago the only way writers
had to deal with them was to create a farce, a fake and comic universe in
which everything is possible because everything has some kind of inherent
absurdity. The creation of that world allows the audience to believe what
is happening on the stage, to believe that a woman can behave as a man,
or that a servant can become a lord, probably a much more dangerous way
of thinking.
Bibliography and resources
- “Commedia dell’arte”, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. GNU Free Documentation License. Last modified
30 Dec. 2006. 03 Jan. 2007. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commedia_dell%27arte>
- “Plautus”, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. GNU Free Documentation License. Last modified 29 Dec. 2006. 02 Jan. 2007. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plautus> - especially the part under the title “Plautus and Shakespeare” <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plautus#Plautus_and_Shakespeare>
- “Double the Confusion, and the Comedy”, Utah Shakespearean Festival. Southern Utah University. 28 Dec. 2006. <http://www.bard.org/education/resources/shakespeare/comedydouble.html>
- Best, Michael. “The Comedy of Errors”, Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, 28 Dec. 2006. <http://ise.uvic.ca/Library/plays/Err.html>
- Best, Michael. “Twelfth Night”, Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, 28 Dec. 2006. <http://ise.uvic.ca/Library/plays/TN.html>
- Best, Michael. “The Merchant of Venice”, Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, 28 Dec. 2006. <http://ise.uvic.ca/Library/plays/MV.html>
- Larque, Thomas. “A Lecture on Elizabethan Theatre”,
Shakespeare and His Critics. 2001. 03 Jan. 2007. <http://shakespearean.org.uk/elizthea1.htm>