Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors

[fiction/theater] [****]
I read Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors last night. Unless you count Measure for Measure as a comedy (as opposed to a problem play), this is the third of Shakespeare's comedies that I've read, and the first that I've liked. Midsummer Night's Dream and The Taming of the Shrew are the two that did not impress me at all. Like many plays from the time period, the Comedy of Errors has a plot based on people getting confused for one another and passing themselves off as people they are not.
 It works about as well as any play could within the confines of its plot. My appreciation for Shakespeare  increases when I keep in mind the limitations of the plot ideas he used; modern attempts to use similar plot ideas result in works like The Parent Trap which come nowhere close to warranting comparison with a play like the Comedy of Errors. What I think of as great modern literature and theater typically uses plots and techniques that were not available to Shakespeare. I don't think it's fair to criticize someone for failing to create new genres when that is something that very few authors or playwrights have ever managed to do. That said, I don't find Shakespeare as entertaining as many modern authors, and if I am going to respect Shakespeare as a literary genius, I have to do so in the context of remembering that he did not work with the same tool set available to modern authors and instead evaluate him on how well he used his tools.

If I am going to say an author of a comedy uses his tools well, one of the things that the author has to do is make me laugh more often than he makes me wince. The Comedy of Errors succeeds in this department. I don't laugh out loud nearly as often when reading alone as I do when watching a performance along with other people, but I still laughed verbally several times, and inwardly much more frequently. In the wince department, Shakespeare has a disadvantage because he writes so many of his lines in rhyme, and one of the things that makes me wince is when an author sacrifices any semblance of natural language usage in order to maintain a rhyme scheme. Some of Shakespeare's plays are damaged by their use of rhyme, but the rhyme and rhythm of The Comedy of Errors gives it a wonderful sense of pace that amplifies its humor. All of the jokes were either funny or inconsequential. The whole plot was written for the sake of the jokes, so I can't say that the play didn't go out of its way to tell them, but it never felt like it was going out of its way to tell them.

Another thing that The Comedy of Errors does particularly well is retelling what has happened. A play about confusion is necessarily repetitive, and most such plays are also redundant. You see something happen and then you hear about it four more times, and you get tired of it. The retellings in The Comedy of Error are actually the most interesting and humorous parts. The plot creates confusion, not so much so that the confusion can be resolved, but so that Dromio can comment on the confusion as it reappears, and Dromio (both Dromios) have been given an excellent voice for commentary that makes the play quite entertaining.

The Comedy of Errors is easily my favorite Shakespeare comedy that I've read. Hamlet is still my favorite of Shakespeare's plays, but I'd rank this one second, and I'm usually partial to tragedies or possibly dark comedies (in most literature and performance, not just Shakespeare). That said, it's still Shakespeare. The humor doesn't compare to Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett; the use of language doesn't compare to Joyce or Nabokov; the plot doesn't compare to Dumas or du Maurier; the setting and characters are equally lackluster by more modern standards. But for a contrived story, written mostly in rhyme that doesn't do any particular thing exceptionally well, The Comedy of Errors is a damn good play.