Friday, 6/7/12

 Friday morning began (after coffee and a snack) with a lecture by Stephen Dickey of UCLA on The Comedy of Errors.  Dickey used primary sources such as descriptions of the first performance of Errors in 1594 and excerpts from Plautus' Menaechmus, the Roman play mined by Shakespeare to produce Errors in order to highlight the errors, themselves, of the play.  To begin with, Dickey referred us to several OED entries for the word, pointing out that at the time it was written it was not used to mean an accident, as it is now, but rather wanderings, and trickery, both of which are more apt to the play.  In his discussion, he focused on the trickery usage, and included twinning as a form of trickery, as it certainly is on stage, if not in life, being merely rare.

The first research presented was from Gesta Grayorum, the records of Gray's Inn, a brief description of the play on its first presentation, which connected it to its basis, Plautus's Menechmus, and concluded: "So that Night was begun, and continued to the end, in nothing but Confusion and Errors; whereupon, it was ever afterwards called, The Night of Errors.  This was day three of the twelve days of Christmas.

Dickey went on to highlight all the twinings in the play, from that first, with Menechmus, on to the rarity of the birth of the two Antipholus twins, to the even more rare circumstance that two other twins were born in the same place on the same day, and that Egeon purchased these twins from their impoverished parents to serve as servants for his own twin children.  The servants are doubled by Shakespeare, though not by Plautus.  Also, Shakespeare gives names to his characters, while Plautus names them as stock figures, ie. "wife," "rolling pin," "secondary," etc.

The greatest trick, a form of slight of hand, is that the twins can't meet until the end of the play, as that will then be... the end of the play.  This moment will be the anagnorisis, the moment when the characters learn what the audience has know all along.  Note the different effect when this occurs in tragedy, as when Oedipus learns that his wife is his mother, or that Othello admits that Desdemona was faithful.

The very beginning of Errors defies all expectations: the Duke does not speak first, Egeon does not address him respectfully or beg for mercy, the Duke does not really reply to Egeon, Egeon decries in great, and long detail his history, not in brief as requested.  In fact, this is the longest speech Shakespeare wrote, in his shortest play!

A couple of other interesting remarks included that the names of the two inns were the centaur and the phoenix, one a hybrid and the other the ultimate "singleton", and that these exemplified the methods of appropriation and adaptation.  Shakespeare "doubles down" by adding a second set of twins, then "doubling down again to offer the women Luciana and Luce who mirror downstairs what is happening upstairs.

Following Stephen Dickey's lecture we met for seminar, and then had an introduction to HAMNET, the Folger's search engine for research over lunch, with Georgianna Ziegler.  We were also pointed toward several useful search tools: the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, for biographies on all English people, the OED for etamology, Shakespeare Quarterly and the World Shakespeare Bibliography.  Another useful Resource Ms. Ziegler introduced us to was EEBO, or Early English Books Online.  This will provide electronic files of  early books and illustrations.  We also were instructed on how to use the Library of Congress, which I think sounds fun.

After lunch we went to our performance groups, and after warming up, presented the scenes we'd been working on from The Comedy of Errors.  I've never acted with so much physicality before, thanks to Caleen Jennings.  It was really fun!