Are you a god? Would you
create me new? - Antipholus of
Syracuse, The Comedy of Errors
In The Comedy
of Errors, truth is in the eye of the beholder. In each case of mistaken
identity, we see characters insist upon their own beliefs and perceptions,
until the weight of these subjective truths causes all sense of reality to
collapse in on itself - each character declared ‘stark mad.’ The only
hope of resolution is solid proof, and in the world of this particular play, it
is not immediately found in words, but beheld in sight. It is only when as the
stage direction denotes, ‘all gather to see’ the two sets of twins that the
truth is finally revealed – in this moment, visual stagecraft takes precedence
over linguistic denotation. However, even in the climactic final scene of the
play, characters rely upon their use of language to aid the revelations of
sight – if Egeon did not beg the Duke, ‘vouchsafe me speak a word’, and if the
Duke did not allow him to ‘speak freely what [he] wilt’, the Antipholuses and
the Dromios would remain ‘beyond human reason,’ attendant spirits or, simply, ‘errors’. Egeon's words
bring about the resolution of the play, just as they bring about the action in
the opening scene, as I will later discuss. Word creates action, from the
physical movements on the stage, to the speeches that propel narrative and
demarcate scenes, to each individual statement made by each actor. Similarly, in
the opening lines of Twelfth Night Shakespeare establishes an Illyrian
mode of language – just as the playwright uses his opening speech to create the
world of play, Orsino uses the language of love, ‘so full of shapes’ and
‘fantastical’ potential to build himself verbal ‘bowers’ of love. So it appears
that in Illyria, speech can create forms of reality even within the fictional
reality that has already been created by the playwright. Both plays begin with
these hints to the creative power of speech, but, as every play-world is
different, from the cityscape of Ephesus to the unmappable realm of Illyria,
each is subject to its own linguistic rules, and consequently each reacts
differently when the verbal pressure is applied.
The opening lines
of The Comedy of Errors establish the fate of Egeon, as the Duke
sentences him to death. We are deposited into a world where the immediate form
of establishment (and language) belongs to the law; the law is the Duke, and in
one speech-act the Duke can take away life - what he says, goes. So, the play
begins life with a verbal proclamation of an ending, as the final line of the
Duke's monologue denotes: ‘Therefore by law thou art condemned to die.’ Egeon's
response acknowledges this fate – ‘Yet this my comfort: when your words are
done, / My woes end likewise with the evening sun/’ - but he also seems to
suggest that the Duke's ‘words’ are the direct cause of his death. The half
line, ‘Yet this my comfort:’ frames the rest of the couplet, placing the
emphasis on the middle clause which stands alone - “when your words are done”.
Equally, the absence of the auxiliary verb 'will' in between ‘woes’ and ‘end’ create
a direct cause and effect relationship between the words being done and the
woes being ended. For Egeon, the verbal proclamation makes his death an
inevitability, as sure as the sun will set. However, it is not only the Duke's
speech that has the power to bring about events. The Duke's request that Egeon
‘say in brief the cause’ of his arrival in Ephesus, and Egeon's attempt to
‘speak [his] griefs unspeakable’ ignite the action in the rest of the play. The
paradoxical phrasing of speaking the unspeakable and contravening his own
emotional rules leads to the delay in his execution creates the timespan in
which the story (and his story) can unfold, and his removal to custody – the
physical action of which removes him from the stage and allows the play to
progress.
Egeon's lines
capture the way in which words can manipulate and forge a path through
narrative, in this case it is the search for his family as opposed to his
death. In Twelfth Night however, speech is able to create realities as
well as stimulating the action within them. Just as the Duke establishes the
function of speech in Ephesus, the Duke Orsino sets the linguistic tone in
Illyria. Crucially, we begin our journey into the play-world with the
subjunctive formation, ‘If... be.’ Immediately, the tone is one of hypothesis,
possibility, and condition – it becomes impossible to tether the play-world, or
indeed the narrative to any sense of actuality or reality, from the thoughts of
Orsino to the entire progression of the play. This mode is later built upon by
Viola, but first Shakespeare offers a glimpse into the creative potency of
words and imagination. The monologue is one of imagination and sense, to be
experienced both aurally and visually by both the audience and the speaker.
Orsino envisions ‘the sweet sound/That breathes upon a bank of violets/stealing
and giving odour.’ The synaesthetic imagery along with the music playing on
stage creates several layers of reality and sense, enhanced by the multiplicity
in each word; ‘violets’, ‘the sea’ and the ‘shapes of fancy’ - each shape
containing a thought or a possibility for ‘fantastical’ creations.
Whether Orsino is
creating an illusion or merely deluding himself, he uses language to create his
own world of excessive love. However, it is the entrance of Viola that truly
galvanises the action in the play. Like Orsino, Viola's first lines serve to
establish the world she is in, though her arrival necessitates some exposition
of narrative – ‘This is Illyria, lady.’ However, her question, ‘And what should
I do in Illyria?’, with its use of the modal auxiliary, opens the scene up to
several options. Firstly, it requires an answer or an intervention, and if we
consider the varied use of the word ‘perchance’ it seems likely that the phrase
is waiting for a twist of fate. Secondly, it allows for a discussion of
identity and vocation – the desire or obligation to “do” something means the
question may be read as ‘Who am I in Illyria?’, indicating that the narrative
may resolve that question. Finally, the question can be used to define Illyria
itself – the speech unit identifies Illyria as a new reality, a clean slate on
which Viola can perform any function, creation or identity. The latter reading
offers an insight into Viola's decision later in the scene:
VIOLA:
O that I served that lady,
And might not
be delivered to the world
Till I had made my own occasion
mellow,
What my
estate is. (1.2.38-41)
Through her speech, Viola
creates an optative space in which to plan her course of action. The
grammatical tense is once of longing, but the syntactical structure of the
first line establishes that the potential action of serving is actually a tool
which will enable further journeys and possibilities. The half line represents
in structure what it does in plot – it provides momentum for the rest of the
verse, and the rest of the play. However, the passage is grammatically
disjunctive, as the optative tense is followed by a weaker expression of the
volitional subjunctive in ‘might’, followed by the hypothetical action of Viola
making her own occasion. The final, present tense description of what her
estate ‘is’ marks the transition from an imagined wish to a reality – in the
space of four lines Viola conceives, hypothesises and actualises a reality,
harnessing the creative power of speech, and setting in motion the events of
the play. However, the imagery works against the tenses of the verse, with
‘mellow’ connoting that which is ripe, seasonal, inevitable and of the
world. The act of ‘being delivered’ also hinting at an external system of
control. It seems that Viola's volition can only exist up to a certain point in
the liminal realm of Illyria, whereupon she will be in the ‘world’, wherever that may be, but
certainly not where is now.
We are arguably in a reality
of Viola's making – confusion and action occur when she and her brother enter
the world of Illyria, and, like foreign bodies, interfere with the natural way
of things. Had the storm not occurred, we could assume that Orsino would have
carried on pursuing Olivia without success, or even that she may have submitted.
For a play described as ‘striving into the future’, it is
pregnant with images of unnatural, almost artificially kept life, from the
overpowering ‘excess’ of language and sensuality in Orsino's opening lines, to
the frenzied, festive energies of Sir Andrew and Sir Toby. Most notably perhaps
is Olivia's preserved state of mourning; she is as ‘addicted to melancholy’ as
Orsino is to love:
VALENTINE:
But, like a cloistress, she will
veiled walk
And water once a day her chamber round
With eye-offending brine: all this to season
A brother's dead love, which she would keep fresh
And lasting in her sad remembrance. (1.1.27-31)
And water once a day her chamber round
With eye-offending brine: all this to season
A brother's dead love, which she would keep fresh
And lasting in her sad remembrance. (1.1.27-31)
Olivia has
created a reality for herself, just like the other characters, and a
performative identity as ‘cloistress’. The image of seasoning connotes the
unnecessary nature of her behaviour, and suggests that like Orsino she is
willing to make herself an illusion, or again, a delusion of an emotional
state. The state of ‘remembrance’ is what she creates, and the syntax of the
‘brother's dead love’ suggest that her attempts to keep it fresh are in fact
what has killed the true emotion. For
Olivia, the experience of losing her brother has become almost like an
artificial memory, prompting her to veil herself from the real world (if
Illyria is indeed 'real') and exist in one of her own creation. Olivia's
reality of mourning inspires Orsino's world of pining, and both stimulate
Viola's own reality. So, each sphere, related through speech, feeds the other
as Viola then inspires Olivia's new fixation – Cesario.
Though worlds do
not so clearly spring for speech in The Comedy of Errors, there are
moments in the play when it functions as more than an explanatory tool or an
instigator of plot. In Act 3 Scene 2 of the play, Luciana and Antipholus of
Syracuse debate both the power and the morality of the spoken word. Luciana
speaks of the manipulative skill in speech, noting that ‘Ill deeds is doubled
with an evil word’, and that the ‘sweet breath of flattery conquers strife’,
drawing attention to the persuasive power of in speech whilst performing that
very act. However, in the context of the mistaken identity, Antipholus of
Syracuse almost wilfully misinterprets Luciana's speech, latching not upon the
content (her advice regarding Adriana) but on the power she invests in speech:
ANT. OF SYRACUSE: That folded meaning of your words'
deceit.
Against my soul's pure truth why
labour you
To make
it wander in an unknown field?
Are you a god? Would you create me new? (3.2.36-39)
Antipholus
believes Luciana's words to be deceitful, as they advise him against his
‘soul's pure truth’ to love Luciana herself - once again, individual
perspective and belief is in tension with verbal explanation. However, the
phrase ‘folded meaning’ does far more than describe Luciana's monologue, or her
‘words' deceit”. The syntax of the line frames the deceit as belonging to the
words, rather than to the figure that spoke them, imbuing 'words' with a
sentient ability to manipulate and deceive – an independent body of action.
This line is then re-imagined by Antipholus' question – ‘Are you a god? Would
you create me new?’ The words that he knows (in his soul) to be false, he then
grants the power to “create” him new – so, if he acquiesces to Luciana's speech
he will be ‘transformed’ by the words. Luciana's speech is given divine power – she has the potential to create a new
character, just as Viola manipulates a world to her will. The word ‘folded’ is
glossed as 'hidden' in the Norton edition of the text, but its possibilities
extend beyond a suggestion of implicit meaning. The tangible qualities of the
adjective ‘folded’ are many: it could mean to bend, twist, or coil , and
perhaps most suggestively, to double. Equally, if the action is repeated, it
creates something dense and compact, that moves in on itself. Actions such as
these can be seen in individual moments of the play, from the doubling of
characters (identity folded in on itself, or shared across two bodies, brothers
or husband and wife) to the tightly wound coil of confusion at the centre of
the play. Folded meaning pervades both speech, action and narrative, and the
space for interpretation suggests that language has creative power.
In Twelfth
Night, the idea of ‘folded meaning’ is exemplified by the linguistic
wordplay of Feste, the fool. Feste directly addresses the ways in which
language can shape form more than any other character; he is a ‘corrupter of
words’, but he is very much aware of it, as Terry Eagleton suggests when analysing
the following lines:
FESTE: To see this age! A sentence is but a chev’ril glove to a
good wit. How quickly the wrong side may be turn’d outward! . . . I can yield
you [no reason] without words, and words are grown so false I am loath to prove
reason with them. (3.1.10-22)
Eagleton suggests
that Feste harnesses both the creative and the destructive power in speech, as
reality can only be expressed in language, but language can also serve to
falsify reality – the paradox shown by the chiasmic structure of the second
sentence. In
contrast to Viola however, Feste distances himself from speech – he exists
externally from it, he can ‘see [the] age’, whereas Viola lives in an
experience of her own linguistic creation. Imagination and reality become the
same, made possible by each act of speech. For example, when Viola is mistaken
for Sebastian and considers that he may yet be alive, she cries ‘Prove true,
imagination, o prove true!’. Once again, Viola's speech performs an act, her
imagination does indeed prove true, moving the play nearer to its conclusion.
The very title of
the play encapsulates the dialectic of things as they are, and things as
character and speech create them: Twelfth Night, Or What You Will. The
'will' here is both optative and determined – the play can be what you wish it,
as can the language, as can reality, when inspired by a certain stimulus – in
this case the point of beginning for Viola is the virtual reality of Illyria,
which spawns several different articulated worlds. At the end of both plays, we
are confronted with the potential end of a world – in Ephesus, balance has been
restored, names realigned – the characters end where they begun before the
world of the play existed – a family as was recollected in Egeon's first speech.
In Twelfth Night however, the ‘excess’ of language, of love and of the
multiple realities created in speech, is not so easily resolved. Like The
Comedy of Errors, the play ends where it began, in Illyria, but unlike
other comedies such as a Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It,
there is no return to an external, stable world – characters remain locked into
their own realities, realities which could only happen in Illyria. The only
character who emerges is Feste, alone on the stage in the ‘wind and the rain’,
beginning his final song with a definitive ‘when’ to contrast Orsino's ‘if’ and
bookend the play. So, language begins and ends the world of the play, but the
course of events formed by Viola's optative choices and verbal assertions
continue – Feste does not undo them, as he did not create them. Viola, Orsino,
Olivia and Sebastian remain inextricably linked by their intertwined,
speech-shaped realities: despite the fact that the ‘play is done’ - the
linguistic world endures.
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