Introduction

When Coleridge, speaking of The Comedy of Errors, averred that “farces commence in a postulate which must be granted,” he pointed to the internal logic governing the otherwise illogical. That he did so to categorize Errors a farce helped contribute to masking the play’s more sophisticated explorations of identity formation, social contracts, mercantile exchange, and the crucial epistemological functions of the memory, to name a few of the play’s broader cultural concerns, that recent critics have rightly recovered. Some readings, in fact, have begun, daringly even if mostly in passing, to suggest the play gestures towards the metaphysical. But why has it seemed so remarkable to think of such a raucously physical, frenetic play as interested in the philosophical and particularly the metaphysical? We’ve long recognized the play’s fascination with bodies, issues of individuation, the relations that bind person to person, and the means by which we make sense of each. How might these familiar issues lead us not simply to matters of psychological individuation and epistemological crisis but also, through these, to individuation of a different sort and the problem of metaphysics? The doubled set of twins and insistent emphasis on relations in The Comedy of Errors, I will suggest, signal the play’s investment in the metaphysics of substance. Identical twins exist ontologically within a material—or, more precisely, a substantial— continuum of sameness. Yet they also remain simultaneously (and somewhat mysteriously) individuated. Through the misrecognition of lost siblings and the incapability of individuals (on their own) to make sense of such relations, Shakespeare’s play depicts, first, how frustrations to acquiring knowledge can expose the imprecision of metaphysical verities about the composition of the world and, second, how such frustrations, when shared, can foster, not merely disrupt, communal bonds.

The Comedy of Errors exhibits a remarkable indebtedness to the predominant Aristotelian method of logic and metaphysics still regnant, even if under assault, in the early 1590s. Aristotelian hylomorphism, in brief, figures each individual as a composite of matter and form, the latter receiving from Aristotle pride of place, and this substance, as Michael Witmore has pointed out, “possessed both individuality and a logical or metaphysical unity, one that could be enumerated through comparisons with other substances,” a classical doctrine that remained central to the “philosophical culture that Shakespeare grew up with.”