Abstract
Might William Shakespeare's play The Comedy of Errors be essentially a multiverse story, arguing against predeterminism, and for human agency (to some extent)?
Introduction
The plot of Comedy of Errors features an unlikely pair of identical twins, separated by an accident at sea. My argument is that this accident constitutes a Sliding Doors moment, which is what the play is really concerned with, despite appearances.
This is not the fan-fiction/multiple interpretations take on Shakespearean drama. Rather we see in one tale how the lives of two people (joined by a master and servant relationship) could play out in two different (yet somewhat similar) ways.
This approach begs the question of whether other plays in Shakespeare's ouevre have similar encoded divergences. And does this happen elsewhere in literature? I would argue that folktale siblings sometimes represent divergent paths that a single person could take. You could view it as the serialisation of a decision tree, where multiple outcomes of choice or random events are simultaneously presented.
But why would Shakespeare be interested in presenting a multiverse model? I have some ideas, but first, the Play.
The Play
After the shipwreck (recounted by Aegeon), one set of the Antipholus and Dromio infant twins go with him to Syracuse (I'll refer to them as Ant/Syr and Dro/Syr), the other with Aemilia to Ephesus where the action takes place (Ant/Eph and Dro/Eph, I'll highlight the home team). Right at the start, Aegeon describes:
two goodly sons, And, which was strange, the one so like the other As could not be distinguished but by names
Confusion
But each son is given the same name, Antipholus. And the pattern repeats for the sons' servants, both identical, both called Dromio. You could argue the play would not 'work' otherwise, requiring this for mistaken identity, but why write such an improbable tale in the first place? Furthermore, at least one set of twins is seeking the other, which Ant/Syr confirms on arriving for the day's events in Ephesus.
Fatal Attraction
In another Shakespeare play, the character Ford comes to the conclusion:
In love the heavens themselves do guide the state. Money buys lands, and wives are sold by fate.
However, attraction seems variable for the twins, the Antipholuses towards different sisters, the Dromios towards and away from kitchen maid Dowsabel.
Status Effects
Ant/Eph is joined to his wife Adriana after wartime service to the Duke of Ephesus, and gains elevated status from this. Ant/Eph has put down roots and appears outwardly to be thriving and is reportedly well-liked and trusted, yet Adriana has noted her husband to be heavy, sour, sad
in the past week before the arrival of itinerant twin Ant/Syr upsets his ordered life.
Systematic Beatings
However, both twin masters beat their twin servants. This could be Shakespeare saying this is structural form of behaviour, borne out of the master–servant relationship, with its inbuilt power imbalance. The servant-beating is normalised, though never accepted by the Dromios who persistently complain, and Ephesus society apparently frowns on excessive public abuses. There is a seed of dissent here.
Dividing and rejoining paths
Of course, some differences may be temporary. Ant/Syr is a bachelor, but marriage is only delayed not deferred.
Mirror, Mirror
Mirrors (or as Shakespeare sometimes calls them, glasses) play significant parts in some multiverse stories, as physically-crossable portals, or as transmitters of information (or both). They can also represent self-knowledge, or vanity. What would we do if we could see alternate paths, alternate futures? What personal growth (or otherwise) do the Dromio's exhibit on seeing their mirror counterparts? Would the Antipholuses continue to beat the Dromios so enthusiastically if they could, as it were, see their own behaviour from outside?
The Point
Agency
At a basic level, Shakespeare shares the general dramatist interest in human agency, questions of chance, circumstance, personal history and fate.
Fate
But on another level, Shakespeare plays with the repudiation of Christian predestination, sometimes associated with protagonists like Hamlet, sometimes with antagonists like Edmund, other times with comedic characters (as in Benedick's predestinate scratched face
mock).
Shakespeare seems interested in what we can change about our human condition. There is very little sense that heredity plays an important role shaping Shakespeare's characters. As even heiress-to-a-dukedom Miranda says, Good wombs have borne bad sons.
.
Society and structure have a hold (hence the servant-beating, which features in other plays). Education and experience combines with innate qualities (the age-old Nature–Nurture debate). Shakespeare is also clear we are not tabula rasa (blank slates) either.
Other Plays with Doubles
Macbeth and Banquo are an interesting pair. They encounter prophecy together, but take different paths, although their circumstances are not identical.
Edmund and Edgar (see also Bastard and Faulconbridge) represent pairs of step-brothers where one is deemed illegitimate, a status which acts as a driving force for plotting, though Nature presumably doesn't care either way.
Viola and Sebastian are another pair which are closer to the multiversal Sliding Doors moment, though they are different sexes, yet are mistaken for each other.
Sebastian and Antonio in the Tempest are differentiated by one deposing a brother while the other is stopped in the act, which presents an interesting question about their different capacities for regret.
Trouble with Triples
The folktale sibling pattern of youngest-wisest-kindest-sibling-of-three is not evident in the three sons of Richard of York, which is rather a reflection on the sibling rivalry proximate to the throne.
Possibly the closest match is Cordelia as youngest of three daughters of King Lear, but none of these dynastic dynamics is really a fair comparison, there's just too much interaction (and competition) between the siblings.
Conclusion
In the Comedy of Errors, moreso than in the other surviving plays, Shakespeare seems to be exploring the multiverse in terms of how one character (or rather a pair of characters) might take different paths in alternate universes, even though it is presented as a pair of identical twins seeking and comically finding another in just one universe.
Shakespeare is interested in similarities and differences, and what may cause these. Nature versus Nurture, ideas of Christian predestination or 'there but for the grace of God go I', human agency, slight starting variations leading to larger divergences down the line (as in complexity theory's butterfly effect), as well as convergences (from structural, society or predisposition causes, for example).
Consider this was a comedy, with a happy ending, multiple marriages in the offing, no great bloodshed, family reunion, etc. How might Shakespeare have treated the topic in a tragedy? When a tragedy could be (especially if easily) avoided, the drama can become a cautionary tale. Learn to swim, young man!
. Perhaps in some respects Shakespeare's plays were the public information warnings of their day. But that's a subject for another post.
