What’s So Funny About the Law?

William Shakespeare: The Comedy of Errors.

 

This lecture was written for the Sixth Annual Will’n in Weslaco Festival, South Texas College, Weslaco, Texas, April 8, 2025.

 

“Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.”

John Locke: An Essay on Civil Government. Book II, Chapter xviii, Section 202.

 

“Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature, and is purifying insofar as there is a natural and unschooled goodness in the human heart.”

Agnes Repplier: In Pursuit of Laughter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1936.

 

We know that this play was performed a part of Christmastime celebration at Gray’s Inn, which was one of the four Inns of Court in London. the inns were professional associations for lawyers and judges which also served as la schools. Part of the seasonal fund was the election of a Lord of Misrule, typically a student whose reign was mercifully brief and whose powers were prudently limited. The strictness of the rule of law and of lawyers relaxed for the holiday celebrating the birth of Christ, Redeemer of souls guilty before the Law of God.

The Comedy of Errors is perfect for such an occasion and it’s not untimely in today’s circumstances, either. Students still take over some elite university campuses, and they are nothing if not lords of misrule when they do.

Not only that, but in the play there’s a trade war going on.

It would be a comedy of error on my part if I tried to summarize Shakespeare’s wild and twisty plot, and that would take the fun out of watching the play. But I do want to show how the play, for all the laughs, brings out some serious points about law, about ruling and misruling, and especially about how, in ruling, we can weigh evidence and testimony in order to make just and wise judgements  in the face of confusion: the face of confusion often being what we see all around us, and also when we look in the mirror.

Although I won’t attempt a plot summary, I will pay particular attention to the play’s first scene and its last scene.

So: What’s so funny about the law? Judging from the play’s first scene, nothing at all. The law is serious, and it can turn deadly. Syracuse and Ephesus began as city-states—as sovereign in their day as the United Sates, Mexico, and Canada are today. Each was a major commercial country—Syracuse, a Sicilian city founded by Greeks from the city-state of Corinth, eventually served as a trading link between Eastern and Western Christendom.

By the time of the actions depicted in the play, Christianity evidently has been introduced, however, which means that these cities are now under imperial rule—probably of Rome, since the Duke of Ephesus, Solinus, has a Roman name. The Apostle Paul evangelized in Syracuse and of course his Letter to the Ephesians when those cities were part of the Roman Empire.

Neither secular empire nor the sacred empire of the Church stops these cities from acting like sovereign states, however, at least when it comes to trade. And their trade war isn’t just a matter of reciprocal tariffs, either; Ephesus has banned Syracusans from the country, in response to harsh penalties enacted by the Duke of Syracuse on Ephesian merchants. Illegal interlopers must pay a heavy fine or pay the ultimate penalty of death. City states generally took citizenship, and therefore ‘foreignness,’ more seriously than many do today and when they fought a trade war, they played for keeps. You won’t find much talk about ‘globalization’ among the ancient Greeks and Romans, or among the European states of Shakespeare’s time, for that matter. Shakespeare’s Ephesus makes its own laws regarding trade, and indeed the old empires allowed subject nations a considerable degree of self-rule.

Where does law, severe or mild, come from? To take a prominent example, Moses receives the laws of Israel from God, the supreme Ruler. The ancient city-states often supposed that their laws were divinely ordained, with each city having its own protecting and oftentimes lawgiving deity: for both Ephesus and Syracuse, it was Artemis—Diana, in the Roman pantheon. Now, in Christendom, they still have women as patron, or should I say matron, saints: Agatha for Sicily, Hermione for Ephesus, both associated with the power of healing. With the coming of Christianity, then, they exchanged the goddess of the hunt for saints of health.

Secular regimes also derive their laws from rulers—that is, from the regime of the country. Regimes consist of four components: rulers (one, few, or many, good or bad); the ruling offices the rulers occupy; the way of life governed by those rulers and ruling offices; there is, finally, the purpose o purpose of the rulers, ruling offices, and way of life aim at. As mentioned, the purpose of the Ephesian and the Syracusan regimes is commercial prosperity, and they achieved it.

Law isn’t supposed to be funny, and in the play’s first scene it doesn’t look like it will be. This comedy begins as if it will be a tragedy. In Shakespeare generally, comedy and tragedy are on a knife’ edge; one might easily turn into the other, and in most of his plays the genres are mixed, often with comic and tragic scenes interspersed. Solinus, the name of the Duke of Ephesus, means ‘solitary one’; he rules as a monarch. In the ancient world and up to and including Shakespeare’s time, monarchs were not primarily what we think of today. While they were ‘commanders in chief’ in wartime, in peacetime they were not primarily ‘executives’ but judges. That’s why to this day we speak of a ‘king’s court.’ We encounter Solinus in his role as a judge in a legal case.

Aegeon is a merchant from Syracuse, arrested under the Ephesian law banning Syracusans. Since he’s obviously guilty as charged, he throws himself on the mercy of the court, telling a tragic story of family separation. Decades earlier, he and his wife, Aemilia, had twin sons for whom he purchased twin slaves when they were all in their infancy. A few years later, the family suffered shipwreck in a storm. Father, one son and his slave were rescued by one ship; his wife, one son and his slave were rescued by another, taking them to different cities, the destination of each unknown to the other. Upon reaching adulthood, the son and slave who remained with Aegeon went on a mission to find their lost brothers and never returned. Aegeon embarked on what has been a five-year mission to find them, coming to Ephesus only as a last desperate resort.

The law he has violated is a convention—not a natural but a man-made thing—enacted by the Ephesian regime, which intends to defend its commerce, its way of life aimed at the purpose of citizens’ prosperity—arguably, a natural human purpose. By contrast, Aegeon’s purpose has no conventional content; it is entirely natural: to reunite his family. In Aristotle’s book, the Politics, families are the building blocks of political communities, of city-states, giving them a natural foundation. Thus, the legal conventions of Ephesus now collide with human nature in a legal case. Right at the beginning of his play, Shakespeare has the full attention of those lawyers, judges, and law students of Gray’s Inn, who are responsible for cases at trial under English common law within the English regime, which is also a monarchy, one that is part of Christendom but recently separated from Roman Catholic Christendom in an act of sovereignty taken y the father of the current monarch, Elizabeth I.

Duke Solinus keeps to the letter of the law: he tells Aegeon to raise money to pay the fine in 24 hours or suffer death by beheading. The Duke’s argument in justifying his sternness—his tragic judgment, if you will—may seem tyrannical to us in modern America, but it is crucial to understand that we are looking at it through the lens of our own regime, a democratic and commercial republic, where we are often encouraged to ‘Question authority.’ That isn’t the traditional way of understanding law or of understanding the rulers who make and enforce the law, either in the ancient world or in Christendom. The Apostle Paul famously tells his missionaries to respect the ruler, who “wields not the sword in vain”—a ruler who was then a pagan, and sometimes a persecutor of Christians. The difference between our moral sensibility and that of other regimes suggests that our judgments are crucially influenced by the regime we live in.

It therefore takes an effort for us to consider the argument the Duke make in the case of a foreign merchant who has knowingly or unknowingly violated Ephesian law, for an understandable natural purpose. He doesn’t blame Aegeon’s plight on Aegeon, but on “the fates”—the winds that caused the shipwreck, the initial cause in the sequence of events that brought him to this trial. Solinus tells the defendant, “We may pity, though not pardon thee.” Why not?

Because the law is the law, and the regime behind that law (“my crown, my oath”—notice, an obligation—and indeed “my dignity and my “honor”) require that the regime’s laws be respected, that the laws be taken seriously and not ‘comically. Laws laxly enforced become laws ‘in name only,” comical, things of derision. What we call the rule of law is really the rule of men and women who follow the law, a set of laws made by God or by human beings, but in either case necessarily ‘solemnized,’ abided by. And even ‘we democrats’ know that. We know that there come circumstances in every regime when legal justice can no longer be tempered by mercy, or the regime will collapse in a crisis of dishonor, of disrespect, of comedy. Satire is an engine of such disrespect. As the Bible says, God is not to be mocked. Shakespeare audience of legal authorities, of dignitaries, expect citizens to stand up when the judge enters the courtroom. Even America’s Judge Judy, no stranger to comedy, expects and demands that.

Another way to put it is that Solinus is a monarch, but he is a constitutional monarch. He is not a lawless tyrant. John Locke could not find fault with him, in that regard. I emphasize this so that you’ll see the themes of the play clearly, as Shakespeare sets them up from the outset, themes that must be understood in the way they were understood by learned and intelligent ‘men of the law’ in the English regime of his time.

But just as the convention of law has a sort of nature to it, a serious and potentially tragic nature, just as it sets limit on comedy, and especially on mockery, legal convention also has its limits. Law and respect for law are necessary to the regime, but its consequences may contradict justice when it governs what lawyers call ‘a hard case’—a case that the legislators who framed the law did not, could not, anticipate. Can such tragic consequences of legal reasoning be averted by comedy—that is, by the kind of natural reasoning that, first, recognizes how circumstances alter cases—what jurists call ‘equity’—and second, that the circumstances that Solinus understands are not all the circumstances of the case he has adjudicated?

Laws govern both city-states and the households within them; there is tariff and criminal law; there is also marital law. In Ephesus, the city-state law is violated by the arrival of Aegeon; the marital law i challenged, if not intentionally violated, by the arrival of the twins from Syracuse. Their arrival also challenges criminal law, as it relates to commerce, as seen in the errors surrounding the gold chain that the goldsmith, Angelo, mistakenly gives to the Syracusan Antipholus, because he confuses him with his Ephesian twin—a circumstance to which I shall return.

With reasoning, comedy begins—the chance for a happy ending. A monarch/judge needs first to know the law; second, he needs to know the facts of the case, the real evidence; he finally needs to make a reasoned judgment base on that law and those facts, which really provide the circumstances of the case. A sound judgment doesn’t ‘print out’ a good result, lie a photocopier attached to a computer. A sound judgment takes practical reasoning. Notice that these three steps constitute an ascent, an ascent from convention, from law, to the nature of the actions taken by the accused and the accuser, and finally to the exercise of natural, prudential reason, which is the distinctive character of human nature and the basis of right judgment, in law courts and in our lives, generally.

This is comic, not tragic because tragedies end like Hamlet, with dead bodies on the floor, including the bodies of persons who didn’t deserve to die, whereas comedies end happily, whether it is in marriage (as it often does in Shakespeare) or in the philosophic death of Socrates 9who contentedly dies so that philosophy may live on, or in the Divine Comedy of Dane, where God’s judgments are understood to be both just and merciful. God’s judgments are always right because God knows the true identity of those He judges. Human judges are less reliable, and they need to understand that. They need ways of discovering the true identities of those accused and their accusers who appear before them.

The Comedy of Errors therefore proceeds more philosophically than religiously, by reason not by divine revelation. It proceeds a bit like an argument in a Platonic dialogue—an argument, however, in actions, with errors made and opinions exposed as incorrect by means of human sense perception and human reasoning.

First, let’s take a look at sense perception. Both slave twins are named “Dromio.” ‘Dromio’ means ‘path’ or ‘way. The slavish path to knowledge, its way of knowing, is by sense perception. We see this especially in Act III, Scene 1, where Ephesian Dromio, having suffered a beating from Syracusan Antipholus, replies to his real master’s denial of having struck him, “I know what I know.” When it comes to knowledge, his physical experience, his sense perceptions, cannot give way to his master’s authority. And he’s right: He was beaten, only wrong in mistaking his master for his master’s identical twin. His simplest sense, touch, which registers bodily pain and pleasure, gave him part of the truth, even as another sense perception, from sight, deceived him.

In one sense, the senses are always right he really did get beaten, and he really did see a man who looked exactly like his master. Sight is a higher sense than touch. Touch perceives only parts of things, out of their ‘context,’ their surroundings. Sight gives us a picture, often a bigger picture, than touch can do. Also, we can rely on sight more readily to reveal the identities of one another, the inner ‘regimes,’ so to speak, the souls and the purposes souls pursue, motives. Sight perceives facial expressions, ‘body language’; the eyes are the ‘windows of the soul’ both for looking out and for looking in. But physical sight of course cannot fully disclose a soul. The senses need to be supplemented with reasoning about the evidence presented to the human mind by the senses. That is a task preeminently for rulers, not slaves. Slaves are tasked with obedience, rulers with responsibility.

The path of natural reasoning runs roughly because the human mind easily misconstrues the facts, the evidence that bodily senses bring before it to judge. That is how masters can mistake rational actions of other masters and slaves as irrational. Rational Luciana (her name means ‘light’) mistakes Syracusan Antipholus for Ephesian Antipholus, who is unhappily married to her sister. When the Syracusan truthfully denies that he is married and, smitten, proposes marriage to her, she doesn’t fall back on her senses as her source of knowledge (as in “I know what I know”) but arrives at a seemingly reasonable explanation of the contradiction: Antipholus must have gone mad; he must have lost his reason. Her error is to reason prudently from a false premise.

Another way in which the human mind deceives itself is to interpret sense-evidence through the soul’s passions. Luciana’s sister, Adriana (which means ‘dark’) is near madness, herself, maddened by jealousy. Jealousy darkens her mind. Passions, such as jealousy, impede reasoning, providing the mind with false evidence. Both lucid Luciana and mind-darkened Adriana contribute to the derangement of their household, the first by reasoning from false premises, the second by abandoning reason altogether.

Superstition is yet another impediment to reasoning. On several occasions, those who mistake the identity of one twin for another assume that they are witnessing sorcery, witchcraft, deviltry, demonic possession. This evokes not the passion of jealousy but the passion of ear. Ephesus had a reputation for such things, and the Apostle Paul takes them with supreme seriousness Shakespeare presents the as still another source of error, as illusory, indeed delusory, opinions purporting to explain naturally occurring actions by natural persons by supernatural influences. This is no small point, especially when made before lawyers, judges, and law students. Witch trials were not unknown in Shakespeare’s Europe, and his Puritan countrymen would bring the practice to New England, not many years later. Shakespeare suggests to men of the law: Are you quite sure of the evidence? Such errors derange city-states, as fear leads either to cowardice or to rage, both ruinous to good regimes, and conducive to tyranny. His comedy implies a limit to the law, a rational limit.

To put it in terms of the play, the double duality of two sets of twins embodies the dualities of the world in which we make judgments, a world of appearance and reality, passions and reason, misrule and good rule, tragedy and comedy. It is very easy to mistake one element of those pairs for its opposite. Shakespeare’s well-known and sometimes criticized fondness for puns, for words with double meanings, exemplifies this in the very way he uses language. In fact, the Greek word for ‘speech,’ logos, means both speech and reason. Speech, words, can clarify or confuse our reasoning.

Given this duality of human perception, reasoning, speech, how to avoid tragedy, how to obtain a comic—that is, happy, reasonable ending, a just verdict in trials but more broadly, good judgment in the life you live?

Act Five begins with the apparent violation of the city’s law pertaining to commerce. Angelo the goldsmith is assuring his creditor that he, Angelo, will receive payment for the gold chain he sold to Ephesian Antipholus, a man of “most revered reputation.” He doesn’t really believe that Antipholus deserves that reputation, or much reverence, however. He thought he’d delivered the chain, but he gave it to the wrong Antipholus. When he later demanded payment from Ephesian Antipholus, that estimable gentleman denied having receive the chain and Angelo had him arrested. He’s only buying time with his creditor. Now, he sees Syracusan Antipholus, who is wearing the chain, and is duly outraged at the apparent injustice, lying, double-dealing.

Before he or his merchant can do anything, Adriana enters the scene. She misidentifies this Antipholus as her husband and demands that he and his slave be bound and returned home. Deeming them all mad, the Syracusans flee from both sets of accusers to the sanctuary of a nearby priory.

Th Abbess of the priory arrives and questions Adriana, concluding that she has driven her husband mad. “The venom clamors of a jealous woman / Poisons more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth.” Unquiet meals, she explains, lead to indigestion and fire in the stomach causes madness. That is, regardless of her religious status, the Abbess understands matters in terms of nature not of demonic possession. She refuses to release her supposed husband to her, ruling that she will bring him back to sanity herself, an intention consistent with Ephesus’s matron saint. For her part, Adriana can only think that she’s lost her husband to another woman, after all!

When Solinus and Aegeon walk past, on their way to the latter’s beheading, Adriana, at Luciana’s urging, begs the Duke’s intervention. Evidently, a mere execution can await the resolution of her dilemma. He agrees to negotiate with the Abbess—given the independence of Church authority from secular authority, he cannot simply command her, but his stated reason for initiating an informal judicial inquiry on the spot is his respect for Antipholus’ wartime service to Ephesus.

At this point, the real Ephesian Antipholus and Dromio charge in, this Antipholus demanding justice against his wife on the grounds that she has locked him out of his house. Adriana, who saw the man she supposed to be her husband escape into the priory, and now at the end of what wit she has, recurs to superstition, imagining that he must have the power to move invisibly, saying, it is all “past thought of human reason.” 

For moment, Aegeon seems doomed to die, Ephesian Antipholus and Adriane doomed to divorce, and Angelo can’t know what to do about his gold chain. Public justice, domestic justice, and commercial justice are all on that knife edge ready to fall into tragedy. To the Duke, they all seem mad.

The most helpless person saves the day. Aegeon identifies Ephesian Antipholus, whom he hasn’t seen in more than two decades, as his son—easily enough, of course, since he is identical to his other son, whom he last saw only five years ago. Since this Antipholus cannot know his father, everyone takes the old man to be senile. When Syracusan Antipholus emerges from the priory with his slave, the confusion quickly resolves. now, everyone’s sense of sight finally perceives the whole picture, and they can reason rightly, from correct premises. And finally, when the Abbess is revealed as Aemilia, Aegeon’s long-lost wife, the family is reunited. In legal terms, they have been “made whole.” Aemilia means ‘rival,’ and the Abbess has indeed rivaled her daughter-in-law, but in a satisfactory way with a just result; each Antipholus is restored to the right woman: Ephesian Antipholus to his wife and father, Syracusan Antipholus to his mother and father, Aegeon and Aemilia to one another.

Domestic justice has been served. But what of political justice, criminal and commercial? The case of the gold chain will be no problem, but the criminal case is more difficult. The Duke pardons Aegeon. Before, he had steadfastly enforced the rule of law. What has changed? Surely not the law; surely not the fact that Aegeon has violated it.

Solinus now has corroborating evidence that Aegeon’s story is true, but he believed him initially, anyway. The law is still the law. But now he knows that one of Aegeon’s sons is not only the merchant respected and even loved throughout the city, a man to whom he owes a debt of gratitude for his military service to the city, but he also knows that the debt Ephesian Antipholus has asked him to repay by prosecuting Adriana can now be discharged by pardoning the man now known to be his father. And he also knows that his prisoner is the husband of the eminently respectable Abbess of the priory, a person he is unlikely to wish to offend.

“Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail / Of you, my sons,” Aemilia tells them. “Travail” is a synonym for labor, for giving birth, and thirty-three is the traditional estimate of the number of years Jesus lived on earth. Her sons do indeed seem born again, to her. As for the two Dromios, whose mother sold them into slavery, they now celebrate not a miracle but their natural equality: “We came into this world like brother and brother, / And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before the other.”

What can a playwright, a man of no high social standing in Elizabethan England, teach a distinguished gathering at Gray’ Inn? Since they are on holiday, this may be what we now call a ‘teachable moment.’ Shakespeare builds on the fact that English lawyers had won the separation of the common law from the Church’s canon law, centuries earlier. But that boundary needs to be guarded by its inheritor, his audience. Do not, he suggests, assume that witches and demons are the cause of apparently irrational behavior. And even down-to-earth sense perception is not unimpeachable evidence, and a physiological/’scientific’ diagnosis of madness may prove mistaken. The Comedy of Errors sees a family and a city saved from hasty judgments based on false premises. The monarch-judge and his subjects learn the true premise the Socratic way as enacted, as set in motion by actors on stage: by testing the various conflicting stories they hear and by finding the rationally coherent overall story that accounts for each piece of each person’s narrative—the comprehensive argument that encompasses all the others in a non-contradictory way. That is comedy’s happy ending, the triumph of reason over unreason. The true Christmastide Lord of Misrule at Gray’s Inn is William Shakespeare.