‘Time’s Deformed Hand’: Sequence, Consequence, and Inconsequence in ‘The Comedy of Errors’

Summary

Thirty years ago, the highlight of the Stratford-on-Avon Shakespeare season was Theodore Komisarjevsky’s production of The Comedy of Errors. Between the house of Antipholus and The Porpentine a large clock-tower dominated the setting. ‘To emphasize the note of farce’, wrote the critic of the Birmingham Gazette, ‘the clock in the tower between the two inns every now and again strikes an hour to which the hands of the clock are not pointing. And the hands gallop to overtake the time.’ Other comments, including the producer’s own, make it evident that Komisarjevsky considered the play itself to be a poor thing at best, and that therefore the more liberties taken with it the better. The business with the clock may be regarded as a typical instance, another being the weird mélange of costumes from all times and places, presumably to emphasise an Ephesus beyond the range of any time or place. It is therefore mildly ironical that these touches, especially that of the clock, intended as bold and original strokes of production (which indeed they were) should nevertheless be profoundly true to one of the chief concerns of the play, the movement of time and its apparent aberrations.