Profound farce

Prelude: The farce of errors

In this article, I want to read Shakespeare’s early farce The Comedy of Errors from a philosophical point of view and demonstrate that farce is much more profound than critics usually give it credit for. My main contention will be that the light art form of farce, as exemplified by The Comedy of Errors, has serious sceptical implications.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge called The Comedy of Errors a ‘legitimate farce’, ‘distinguished from comedy by the license allowed’ by the supremely unlikely birth of two pairs of exactly identical twins in the same place at the same time. ¹ Contrary to many other commentators, Coleridge does not imply that Errors is bad because it is a farce. This might seem somewhat surprising, given the fact that as early as in 1692, Nahum Tate felt compelled to write a ‘Defence of Farce’ as a preface to his own farcical play A Duke and No Duke, in which he stated: ‘I know not by what Fate it [farce] happens (in common Notion) to be the most contemptible sort of drama’. ²

At the time when Tate wrote his ‘Defence’, the term ‘farce’ had been in the English theatrical vocabulary for only about 30 years. As Leo Hughes has shown, in Shakespeare’s day, the word ‘farce’ was used ‘to mean merely to stuff, to pad, to inflate’, ³ having originally entered the English language before the time of Chaucer as a ‘term of cookery’, ‘derived from Latin farcire, to stuff or fill’. ⁴ Only after the Restoration was the word consistently used for theatrical performances, but the usage was rather ‘hazy’ ⁵ in that it could describe a great many different things. Apart from ‘a theatrical performance, the object of which is to arouse laughter’, ⁶ and ‘comic business, the “stuffings” of the stage’, ⁷ it was also from very early on used ‘to describe anything ridiculous’, ⁸ not only but especially in the literary realm: ‘By the end of the Restoration period, farce is used to describe almost any kind of stage performance which does not meet with the approval of the devotees or supporters of literary drama’, ⁹ a meaning reflected in Tate’s lament quoted above. The theatrical term ‘farce’, which was, according to Hughes, imported, along with the first farcical plays, from France at the beginning of the Restoration ¹⁰ designated of course by its very nature a ‘low’ art form, given its origins in folk culture and marketplace festivals and its concern with the grotesque body as described by Mikhail Bakhtin. ¹¹ But although this sense of the lowliness of ‘farce’ was vaguely present in English from the start, it was not until many years later that ‘farce’ acquired the meaning it has today as a term denoting a specific literary genre which, according to an Encyclopedia Britannica definition which Hughes ends up using himself, ‘is a form of the comic in dramatic art, the object of which is to excite laughter by ridiculous situations and incidents…’. ¹² The use of the term for a Shakespeare play is thus of necessity anachronistic, but, as this essay will hopefully show, nevertheless serves to make important distinctions which can illuminate key aspects of Shakespeare’s Comedy.

One result of the intellectual contempt in which farce has been generally held to this day, along with the urge to preserve Shakespeare’s canonical status, has been to send critics on a quest for reasons why Errors is really not a farce, and to emphasize the romance and comedy aspects of the play over the farcical aspects, often with quite amusing results. ¹³ In this essay, I would like to turn this critical approach upside down and suggest that it is a mistake to believe that to find profound meaning in the play, we have to focus on its comedic rather than on its farcical elements. As Ralph Berry put it many years ago, The Comedy of Errors is in fact an amalgam of farce and comedy which combines a primarily farcical plot (based on the highly unlikely double twin premise described by Coleridge) with fully realized stage characters more typical of comedy: ‘The farce here is merely the record of the mechanical errors based on mistaken identity. The comedy is the study of the reactions of the characters to the farce in which they find themselves’. ¹⁴ This is indeed an admirable summary of the play: Shakespeare drops a set of reasonably normal people into a farcical situation and invites the audience to watch what happens next. Yet the ‘merely’ shows that Berry also subscribes to the old idea that farce is somehow less valuable or meaningful than comedy.

To show that it is, on the contrary, precisely the farce plot which makes Errors one of Shakespeare’s most philosophically profound plays, I will refer to ideas about human language and community originally put forward by Ludwig Wittgenstein and later developed and refined by Stanley Cavell. Wittgenstein’s key insight in his later philosophy is that languages are not abstract systems of signification but are rather embedded in and dependent on the activities of human life. ¹⁵ The meaning of words consists in the ways they are used by a community of speakers. Cavell develops this into a view in which human language, and, with it, reason and identity, are dependent on a seemingly natural, but actually conventional agreement between the speakers of a given language to use words in certain ways. ¹⁶ This means that the most fundamental aspects of human existence, the very things that make us human, ultimately depend on a state of normality.

As I will try to show in this essay, the farce plot in The Comedy of Errors brings about a suspension of this normality, and it is in the complex dialectical relationship between farce and normality that farce’s sceptical potential resides. As Albert Bermel has written, farce ‘flouts the bounds of reason…and what we commonly think of as sanity’, ¹⁷ and it ‘unrolls in settings that keep the characters feeling unsteady’. ¹⁸ Yet, at the same time, farce gives the spectator a bird’s-eye view on the action, creating a maximum of discrepant awareness as described by Bertrand Evans while keeping the audience emotionally engaged as well. ¹⁹ As a result, ‘he (the spectator) is both enlisted in the scene and blessedly free of it’, ²⁰ which puts the audience in a position to ‘laugh at the characters, not with them’. ²¹ Farce’s capacity to give rise to scepticism is the result of this combination: on the one hand, it puts on stage an overthrow of normality which reveals the uncomfortable fact that our language and reason are neither natural nor metaphysically certain; and, on the other, its theatrical arrangement puts the spectator in the position of an observer who can watch and think about what is going on from a relatively neutral point of view.

I am thus going to argue that it is precisely through its farcical elements that The Comedy of Errors manages to gesture at fundamental, uncomfortable truths about the human condition. In doing this, I also hope to show that farce, far from being superficial, pushes the audience to look at their own world in a different way. This approach will simultaneously serve to illuminate and explain a number of facts about the play that have been under-appreciated by critics. The pervasiveness of the motif of madness in Errors, for example, has been noted but not satisfactorily accounted for. ²² The same is true for the dependence of personal identity on public acknowledgement explored in the play and for the association of the farce plot with the realm of the eye, contrasting with the association of the comedy and romance elements of the play with the realm of the ear. In dealing with these points in detail, this essay hopes to contribute to a philosophical appreciation of The Comedy of Errors, while also encouraging the reader to take farce and other plot-focused forms of theatre and storytelling in general more seriously and give them the credit they deserve.

Out of tune: Farcical madness and criteria

The farcical premise in The Comedy of Errors is that two sets of completely identical twins, who also share the same names and who have grown up apart, spend one day in the same city without being aware of each other’s presence. This premise is introduced in a romantic, entirely non-farcical framing narrative which grants the audience the superior awareness necessary to see the farcical confusions for what they are, and which also serves to resolve the impossible farcical knot at the end of the play.

From the very beginning of the farce plot in Act 1 Scene 2, the confusions of individual twins for one another take effect mainly as breakdowns of communication which become successively more severe in their consequences as the action progresses. Shakespeare carefully constructs a pattern of gradual escalation: while in Act 1, only the Dromios are seriously implicated in, and suffer blows from, the various confusions of identity, in Act 2, Antipholus of Syracuse is drawn in when he meets his brother’s wife, Adriana, on the street. She promptly mistakes him for her husband and takes him home, where he falls in love with her sister Luciana. Only in Act 3 does the audience actually get to see Antipholus of Ephesus, the man for whom his Syracusian brother has been mistaken so many times in the first two acts, and confusions of the Antipholuses become the motor of the plot. There is thus a clear movement of the farcical destabilisation from the margins of society, represented by the Dromio slaves and the politically persecuted stranger Antipholus of Syracuse, via the domestic sphere governed by the women Adriana and Luciana, towards the public sphere, the centre of respectable Ephesian society represented by the successful merchant Antipholus of Ephesus, a man ‘of very reverend reputation’, ‘Of credit infinite, highly beloved’ (5.1.5–6). ²⁴

The breakdown of communication engendered by the duplication of twins is framed throughout the play as a breakdown of reason. ²⁵ When Dromio of Ephesus reports his presumed master’s inexplicable behaviour from 1.2 back to his mistress Adriana in 2.1, he immediately states that Antipholus of Ephesus ‘is stark mad’ (57). The slave bases this diagnosis on the complete failure of his attempt to communicate with whom he assumes to be his master:

The purported Antipholus of Ephesus is here singled out as a madman because of his apparent inability to participate in effective communicative behaviour. The same pattern is repeated in virtually every single scene throughout the play, ²⁶ but it becomes especially pronounced when the farce plot reaches the heart of Ephesian society and Antipholus of Ephesus enters the action. The most prominent instance is to be found in 4.4, where an exasperated Antipholus of Ephesus finds himself confronted with a most unlikely alliance of representatives of normality, consisting of his wife, her sister, the Courtesan and the schoolmaster/conjuror Doctor Pinch. Adriana and Luciana have been set up as emblems of normality in 2.1 through their discussion of marriage conventions and the socially appropriate behaviour of women and men; the schoolmaster is normal by default, as it is he who diagnoses what counts as mad; and the presence of the Courtesan parodies the preposterousness of the whole set-up. All have adopted the Courtesan’s conviction that Antipholus of Ephesus is mad, formed on the basis of a confrontation with Antipholus of Syracuse in 4.3, a scene whose utter breakdown of communication closely mirrors Dromio’s impression quoted above. ²⁷ All believe the source of Antipholus’ madness to be demonic possession and interpret his actions and words accordingly. Thus, when Antipholus of Ephesus beats his slave in front of them, the upright citizens comment:

Never mind that this ‘incivility’ is apparently completely consistent with the Ephesian merchant’s usual behaviour, as the audience knows from Dromio of Ephesus’ lament of having had ‘nothing at his hands for my service but blows’ (4.4.28) earlier in the scene. The full scale of the discord becomes apparent when Antipholus of Ephesus, after having insisted to the ‘doting wizard’ trying to exorcise him that he is ‘not mad’ (4.4.52), correctly states that he had been shut out from his home earlier, and Adriana retorts: ‘O, husband, God doth know you dined at home’. ²⁸ Even Dromio of Ephesus’ corroboration of his master’s story is smoothly reinterpreted to fit the diagnosis in which the representatives of normality already believe. Without knowing how, Antipholus of Ephesus finds himself isolated by his true convictions – an isolation which becomes physical reality at the end of the scene when he and his Dromio are bound and imprisoned in a dark room by the conjuror.

Where does this desperate need to make sense, even at the expense of inflicting violence upon a respected member of society, come from? In his Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein provides a clue when he writes: ‘It is not only agreement in definitions, but also (odd as it may sound) agreement in judgements that is required for communication by means of language’. ²⁹ Although Dromio of Ephesus and Antipholus of Syracuse speak the same language ³⁰ in the confrontation in 1.2 quoted above, they are unable to communicate because their respective judgements of what the situation is about are wildly different. The same holds true for similar clashes of judgement throughout the farce plot.

How this relates to madness can be illustrated with one of Wittgenstein’s famous thought experiments. In it, Wittgenstein imagines a ‘certain tribe’ which teaches its children to count numerals from 1 to 20, and expects the children after a certain period of training to be able to continue after 20 with 21 and then 22 and so on:

When in counting the pupil arrives at the numeral 20, one makes a gesture suggestive of ‘Go on’, upon which the child says (in most cases at any rate) ‘21’. Analogously, the children are made to count to 22 and to higher numbers.…If a child does not respond to the suggestive gesture, it is separated from the others and treated as a lunatic. ³¹

Labelling and treating Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus as mad and thereby excluding them from their community of reason enables the other Ephesians to account for the inconsistency in their normality in a manner which leaves that normality intact. As Shakespeare has Isabella suggest in the passage from Measure for Measure quoted above, calling someone mad can be an attempt to make the unlikely seem impossible, thereby quarantining the undesired fact in a safe place where it cannot affect the general consensus on what is normal and real. This serves to explain the ubiquity of madness in The Comedy of Errors: in spite of the fact that not a single character actually goes mad or pretends to go mad, madness is more pervasive in the Comedy than in almost any other play by Shakespeare. ³⁶ If we read the play from a Wittgensteinian perspective, this makes perfect sense: reason depends on, and might even be said to consist in, the harmonious mutual attunement of the members of a language community, and the farce plot sabotages just that attunement with its duplication of the Antipholuses and Dromios. ³⁷

Here, we can catch a first glimpse of this farce’s sceptical potential. Notably, the isolation of Antipholus of Ephesus is not the result of him being wrong about anything in any objective way; on the contrary, the scene is funny only because the audience, thanks to its superior awareness, knows the merchant to be right and the diagnosis of madness to be ridiculously inadequate. ³⁸ In this respect, the scene is representative of the entire play: all confusions of identity, allegations of madness, and supposedly supernatural phenomena are arranged in such a way that the audience can see them for what they are – helpless attempts on the part of the characters to make sense of subjectively inexplicable, but perfectly natural phenomena – and therefore laugh at them. The farce plot in The Comedy of Errors, in other words, shows belief in demonic possession, witchcraft and exorcism, still mainstream when Shakespeare wrote his plays, ³⁹ to be the result of ignorance. ⁴⁰

Identity crises, eyes and ears

While the Ephesian twins suffer from the verdict of madness passed on them by the Ephesian public, Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse experience the consequences of the destabilization of normality on a private, subjective level. Their Ephesian brothers are rather vexed by the treatment they receive, but they do not exhibit any symptoms of identity loss.

What makes the Syracusian twins doubt their own identity is that, in addition to being mistaken for other people, they have the uncanny experience of being known by strangers. Identity loss is shown to be the result of the combined failure of eye and ear.

On the visual level, the disruption that is the confusion of faces and identities plays itself out against a background of ‘normal’ conventionality which assumes that there is, as Douglas Lanier puts it, a ‘continuity…between identities and the external marks that display, support and confirm them’. ⁴² This assumption is parodied in Errors itself in a deeply ironic, metatheatrical scene in which Luciana pleads with Antipholus of Syracuse to at least act as if he loved his brother’s wife Adriana (3.3.7 ff), indicating that the correspondence of bodily expression and real feeling can be misleading or manipulated on several levels at once. While Luciana is lecturing Antipholus of Syracuse on the virtues of dissembling, his face is in effect already doing so in front of Luciana herself, and much against his will. This scene emblematizes the essential problem that the twins, Syracusian and Ephesian, have to struggle with in this farce: the errors of the other characters’ eyes direct their minds. Their mistaken visual perceptions, and theories built upon those perceptions, override their common sense and, crucially, their willingness to listen, ⁴³ thereby creating the destabilization of public attunement described above.

These errors originate in the farcical doubling of the twins, and this is only one of a variety of duplications that structure the Comedy at every level. ⁴⁴ As the philosopher Clément Rosset has remarked, there is a ‘very deep connection that binds illusion to duplication, to the double’, ⁴⁵ in that ‘the general technique of illusion is, in fact, to turn one thing into two’, ⁴⁶ that is, mentally doubling it. This is of course precisely what the farce plot of the Comedy does physically: Shakespeare turns one person into two. As a result, the other characters can see the twins correctly but nevertheless ‘wander in illusions’ (4.3.36), because they draw inaccurate conclusions from what they see. This points to two further ways in which the visual focus of the farce plot points to deeper philosophical issues and gives rise to sceptical questions. On the one hand, as Rosset points out with reference to Plato’s Cratylus, the ‘basic structure of the real’, as well as of the self, is ‘uniqueness’: ⁴⁷ ‘it is, in fact, the fate of everything that exists to deny, by its very existence, any form of different reality…every event implies the negation of its double’. ⁴⁸ The farce in the Comedy works directly against this fundamental negation by affirming and theatrically realizing what is in reality negated, and, in the ensuing errors, making visible the usually invisible structure of reality. At the same time, the theatre itself, an ‘imitation of an action’ according to Aristotle, ⁴⁹ is of course based on a duplication of reality. The structure of the farce plot based on doubling a character is thus in itself metatheatrical, mirroring the doubling of the world present in all theatre. The farce constantly draws attention to itself as theatre in what might be called a farcical Verfremdungseffekt, ⁵⁰ thereby drawing into question the theatrical medium itself and fostering a sceptical attitude on the part of the audience towards what is seen on stage.

But to jeopardize the Syracusian twins’ sense of their own identity, it takes the failure of the ear as well as the eye: ‘What error drives our eyes and ears amiss?’ asks a flabbergasted Antipholus of Syracuse in 2.2.175 (my emphasis). In this scene, Antipholus and Dromio are amazed that the strange women Adriana and Luciana seem to recognize them, but what really unsettles them is what they hear: ‘Ay, ay, Antipholus’, and ‘She sent for you by Dromio home to dinner’ (2.2.101, 145). If, as Dromio insists, he ‘never spake to her [Adriana] in all my life’ (2.2.156) – ‘How can she thus then call us by our names – / Unless it be by inspiration?’ (2.2.157–8). The crucial impact of being called by their names by strangers on the Syracusians’ sense of identity can be gauged by the fact that this is the first time in the play that the supernatural is invoked to explain an otherwise inexplicable phenomenon ⁵¹ and that Dromio enacts a hilarious burlesque version of identity loss directly afterwards. The belief that the slave, like his master, has about having been ‘transformed’ (2.2.186) is due to the fact that ‘else it could never be / But I should know her as well as she knows me’, (2.2.192–3), to be ‘Known unto these, and to myself disguised’ (2.2.205). ⁵²

In showing identity loss to be intimately connected to language and the ear, The Comedy of Errors demonstrates how deep language and culture reach into the subjective, ‘private’ mind via the communal agreement which is necessary for language to work. In the errors of the farce plot, the Comedy is an illustration of the idea that seeing is believing; in its more comedic, character-bound exploration of identity which is set in motion by that plot, the play suggests that it is through language, and specifically through being acknowledged through language, that personal identity is constructed and maintained. Again, Wittgenstein and Cavell can help to see more clearly here. In Wittgenstein’s view, personal identity is formed through the process of learning our mother tongue. When we learn to speak from our parents and other members of our language community, we also learn the criteria of our language and the concepts and world view established by them; without those criteria, we could not formulate any private thoughts. ⁵³ Cavell writes: ‘If I am to have a native tongue, I have to accept what “my elders” say and do as consequential…if I am to have my own voice in it [the language], I must be speaking for others and allow others to speak for me’. ⁵⁴ Because of this, self-knowledge and identity depend on being relayed through other speakers via the language I share with them, that is to say, on being acknowledged by them: ‘the home of belief lies in my relation to others’. ⁵⁵

Antonio Castore, following Keir Elam and others, has shown that in Elizabethan conceptions of language and meaning in general, and in The Comedy of Errors in particular, the ‘name not only refers to a body but, in a profound sense, corresponds to it, guaranteeing its self-identity and, at the same time, its distinction from others’. ⁵⁶ If we combine this with Cavell’s insights, the experience of identity loss on the part of the Syracusian twins becomes understandable. It is not just the fact that, as Lanier has it, ‘because their outward characters are not exclusively their own, identities can be projected upon them from without, an operation that feels to the twins like being inhabited by a spirit’. ⁵⁷ As the counterexample of the Ephesian twins shows, this in itself is not enough to precipitate identity loss. What is crucial is that the false acknowledgement of their ‘outward characters’ is, in the case of the Syracusian twins, accompanied by the equally confusing undue acknowledgement of hearing their names used by people they have never met. If we follow Cavell, it comes as no surprise that their sense of identity should be compromised:

In saying that the home of belief lies in my relation to others, to what they tell me, to what I hear…, I am proposing that our access to belief is fundamentally through the ear, not the eye. The ear requires corroboration (and prompts rumor), the eye requires construction (and prompts theory). ⁵⁸

Comic restoration

The restoration of attunement, and with it of reason and identity, in the final scene is accordingly achieved through a reconciliation of the testimonies of the characters’ eyes and ears. But before the resolution, Shakespeare tightens the plot screws to a hilarious breaking point, based on what the various characters believe to have seen. The final clash comes when a messenger arrives and the assembled citizens, including the Duke, hear that Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus have freed themselves and are torturing Doctor Pinch after his own model, although Adriana and others are certain that they have seen them enter the abbey a short time ago. Here, what they hear and what they see cannot possibly be true at the same time: the good citizens of Ephesus are, finally, at the same epistemological impasse that the Syracusian twins had reached three acts earlier. But only when she sees her husband enter the stage from the other side, even Adriana admits that what is happening here is ‘past thought of human reason’ (5.1.189).

What makes the resolution possible is the authoritative presence of the Duke, which effectively ends the predominance of the eye, and, with it, the farce plot. As Castore remarks, ‘within the [play’s] first [non-farcical] scene’s juridical frame’, in which Egeon narrated the story of the separation of the twins, ‘the principle of authority transfuses itself into that of narration, so that past events can be ordered and transposed in a linear story’. ⁵⁹ When Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus enter the stage and demand retribution for the wrong that has been done to them by Adriana and company, the Duke takes on the role not so much of judge but of careful listener. Having been absent while the farce plot played out, he is the only character on stage who is not biased by what he has seen, but, focusing only on what he hears, can try to make sense of it all. He is not the first one in the play to try this, of course. As Gāmini Salgādo has pointed out, ‘over a third of the play is taken up with narrating events that have already occurred before the audience’s eyes’. ⁶⁰ Yet the Duke, listening carefully, is able to see through many of the previous ‘errors’, such as the idea that Antipholus of Ephesus is mad, an accusation that the Duke dismisses quickly on the basis of what he hears: ‘If he were mad, he would not plead so coldly’ (5.1.273). But because the eyewitness accounts are still wildly contradictory, the Duke is unable to construct a coherent narrative to complete Egeon’s own story from the first scene and arrives at the conclusion that all of them must be ‘mated, or stark mad’ (282).

Only when the four twins are to be seen together on stage can the characters finally make sense of it all, prompting the Duke to say: ‘here begins this morning’s story right’ (346). The rest of the scene passes with the characters engaging in a restoration of their community’s attunement of judgements through constructing a coherent narrative that brings the testimony of eyes and ears together. The Abbess’ revelation as the Antipholuses’ lost mother completes the romance frame story of the long-separated family. The play ends with the characters going off to a ‘gossip’s feast’, where they are going to be rechristened in a bid to stabilize their recovered identities, thereby confirming one more time the crucial importance of names and language for a sense of personal identity. But as Van Elk notes, ⁶¹ even in this last scene, the romance frame narrative does not completely overcome the farce. The characters to exit the stage last are the two Dromios. While the Ephesian slave can appreciate that he can see himself in his brother’s face as in a mirror, and thereby perceive that he is ‘a sweet-faced youth’ (5.1.418), the brothers are unable to settle the question of who is the elder. In the end, they agree on drawing ‘cuts for the senior’ (5.1.422), thereby once again emphasizing, while also accepting, the ultimate arbitrariness of their society’s form of life previously brought out by the farce of errors.

Coda: Farce as scepticism

The sceptical potential of The Comedy of Errors lies in that it shows human culture, language and society to be ultimately based on nothing more, or less, than convention. What usually looks like a stable, dependable, self-evident system of representation and communication is shown to be fragile by a farce plot which, through a simple if unlikely device, manages to unsettle an entire social order. It thereby gestures at what Cavell has called ‘Wittgenstein’s discovery, or rediscovery’, namely ‘the depth of convention in human life; a discovery which insists not only on the conventionality of human society but, we could say, on the conventionality of human nature itself…’. ⁶² In Errors, the motif of socially constructed madness exposes the ‘conventionality of human society’; the destabilization of personal identity shows the ‘conventionality of human nature itself’. Philosophizing, in Cavell’s and also in Wittgenstein’s vision, has to begin with accepting that ‘my foregone conclusions were never conclusions I had arrived at, but were merely imbibed in me, merely conventional’. ⁶³ In this sense, The Comedy of Errors encourages its audience to look at the world in a more philosophical, and that is to say sceptical, way: the farce breaks open what looked rock solid, and draws into question what seemed utterly beyond doubt.

In his seminal book on Shakespeare’s Scepticism, Graham Bradshaw detects a ‘radical scepticism’ in Shakespeare’s plays, which does not dogmatically deny that there are objective values, but rather ‘turns on itself – weighing the human need to affirm values against the inherently problematic nature of all acts of valuing’. ⁶⁴ While Bradshaw’s discussion focuses on later plays, this is also an accurate description of the scepticism evident in The Comedy of Errors. Social norms and values are shown to be arbitrary in the sense that they are based on convention and ‘normality’; but the human need for values and meaning, the fact that human life would be impossible without them, is equally emphasized and, in the happy ending, largely affirmed.

It is because of this dialectic of doubting and affirmation in the play that critical accounts which emphasize the Comedy’s potential for horror appear to me to be somewhat lopsided. Simon Palfrey and Emma Smith’s chapter on the play in their book on Shakespeare’s Dead tends towards this direction when they write: ‘If this horror [of the frequent invocations of hell and death in the play] is partially redeemed by our awareness that the characters are mired in error, it is precisely these errors that reveal people as they are, without the protection of custom and normality. By the same logic, it might be the terrifying truth beneath the social surface’. ⁶⁵ As we have seen, this is, to a certain extent, true, and yet it is also false, since people cannot, and do not, exist ‘without the protection of custom and normality’. This is because it is custom and normality which make us people: human nature itself is conventional. The common notion that farce is a superficial genre which cannot be taken seriously here turns out to be equally true and false: farce is superficial in that it deals with the spectacular, with surface, with plot, with wordplay, with confusions of faces, with fun and games. But it is anything but superficial in the sense that there is nothing to be learned from it.

A human being, in a memorable phrase by anthropologist Clifford Geertz which Bradshaw also quotes, ‘is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’. ⁶⁶ These webs, our culture, are what make us human. As Wittgenstein and Cavell emphasize, the webs of meaning do not merely ‘suspend’ us, but support us, keep us upright, in touch with others, able to act, sane. In his late work On Certainty, Wittgenstein calls them his ‘world picture’ – a system of fundamental beliefs which he has learned as a child, and which now forms the background against which all his thinking and activity takes place – and without which it could not take place. ⁶⁷ Crucially, he writes, ‘…I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false’. ⁶⁸ It is precisely this world picture, the web of the unexamined assumptions of a culture, which, under farcical examination, turns out to be not natural but conventional, not eternal but temporary, not indestructible but delicate, and yet necessary still, in the farce of Errors. It is therefore somewhat misleading to call it the ‘truth beneath the surface’, as the surface is the truth – a fact that, under normal circumstances, is hidden in plain sight. And this is precisely why it takes a farce to bring out the constructedness – not artificiality! – of this normality.