Helen Funai

            On Wednesday after midnight I did my usual search for bedbugs and found none. That makes thirteen days since a sighting. If there are none tomorrow morning I'll declare the infestation over and stop looking for them.

            I translated the first verse of "Arthur, où t'as mis le corps?" (Arthur, Where'd You Put the Corpse?) by Boris Vian: "It was planned to perfection / a plan we could get rich on / As a team we were strong / but the client was clever / so we killed him before / he could loosen his tongue." 

            I ran through "U.S.S.R. / U.S.A." by Serge Gainsbourg in French and English and uploaded it to Christian's Translations. I'll start editing it in preparation for blog publication tomorrow. 

            I weighed 89.4 kilos before breakfast. 

            Before 9:00 I logged into my Shakespeare class Zoom lecture. Just before class started I put my digital hand up and presented my idea to Professor Lopez about the Duke's cancelling Aegeon's sentence for trespassing in Ephesus. I said that rather than simply throwing out the law the Duke may be responding to a new set of laws since now Aegeon is revealed to have a wife in Ephesus and a son who is a prominent citizen. 

            He said he'd never thought of that before and he said it's plausible. He said if he were directing The Comedy of Errors and the actor playing the Duke were ask for a motivation at the end he might tell him what I said. 

            In Shakespeare we rarely receive clear reasons from the text. This type of thing happens a lot in Shakespeare plays. "In A Midsummer Night's Dream" the daughter wants to marry but the father disagrees and the Duke tells her to obey her dad. But in the end she does marry and the father wants her punished but the Duke says no. 

            The professor urged us to read part one of Henry IV by Monday. We had four classes dedicated to The Comedy of Errors but we have only three for Henry. 

            Henry IV is easier to follow but more difficult to read. There is a tapestry of different ways of speaking because Shakespeare was interested in various idioms of speech and language. He was painting a verbal picture of England. 

            In The Comedy of Errors there are some differences of speech. The slaves are less formal, the women are rhyming and the Duke is somewhat dukish, but it's generally homogenous in a verbal sense. That is more appropriate for a play that is about the similarities between people. 

            Shakespeare's comedies were more self limiting in the first five years of his career.

            The Comedy of Errors is based on a Roman comedy by Plautus about one set of twins. In adding another set of twins Shakespeare is outdoing a play that he probably studied in school. Roman drama followed self limiting conventions of traditional misunderstanding. Shakespeare and others of his time imitated those themes. In that idiom the differences of speech are less important. 

            His later plays are driven by the fact that playwrights were working on new kinds of more character driven plays. That was especially true of tragedy but Shakespeare also used it in his comedies. How characters speak differently from one another creates a texture. A history play has different imperatives. 

            Besides Plautus's play Shakespeare had other models for plays about mistaken identity such as a comedy by John Lily. Mix ups of identity were common in his time, especially early on. Shakespeare naturalized it. 

            The professor says few TV shows do it but I've found the trope of the identical double of a main character is used at least once on any sitcom that lasts more than one season. It's usually a clear indication that the writers are running out of ideas, but sometimes it's used to good effect such as with Samantha's identical but dark and seductive sister Sabrina on "Bewitched". Also "The Patty Duke Show" was entirely based on the mix ups that happen when identical teenage girls with different personalities live and go to school together. 

            Shakespeare had twins five years before writing Comedy of Errors but they were a boy and a girl. His son Hamnet died in 1596 and so there was then only one living twin. His later Twelfth Night also features twins. He actually put twins in more plays than anyone else. Was there a set of twin actors working in his company? Nobody knows because the information on that side of things is patchy.

            Comedy of Errors goes out of its way to create confusion of characters. It begins with the story told of the births of all of the twins. In 1.2 there is one twin's speech about missing the other drop of water. In 1.2.43 one Dromio enters. The twins must be costumed the same but slightly different. The audience must be able to distinguish between them and yet see how they are meant to look the same. There must be a shimmer of confusion without making the audience work too hard. The audience must be quickly on top of the differences of identity in order to enjoy the confusion the characters are experiencing. They have been primed early on with two speeches about twins. There is a dramatic irony in the differences between what the characters and the audience know. 

            Antipholus of Syracuse always thinks that he is experiencing magic. 

            In 2.1 the women interact with Dromio. 

            Shakespeare takes time to mix up the two sets of twins. 

            One Antipholus beats one Dromio and then the other to dramatize the exacerbation of trouble. The masters in this world beat their slaves when they are under stress. 

            Antipholus of Syracuse meets his sister in law Adriana who thinks he is her husband. 

            In 2.2.124 there is an echo of the twinning moment in 1.2.36 about searching for a matching drop of water when Adriana says a drop of water can't be pulled from the ocean without coming with other drops. The drops are indistinguishable. Shakespeare has themetized twinning wholeness arising from one relation to another. Parallels develop around the action of how the two Antipholi are mixed. Shakespeare delays the appearance of Antipholus of Ephesus. The plot unfolds slowly. The point of the first two acts is that one Antipholus is not the other. In 3.1 Antipholus of Ephesus enters bringing with him a new group of characters, the Goldsmith and Angelo. But we already know Antipholus of Ephesus because he has been spoken of and mistaken for. 

            The Comedy of Errors is not meant to confuse the audience. He wants a clash between behaviour and knowledge for the sake of dramatic irony. Some modern productions use one actor for both roles and this defeats the purpose because it confuses the audience who should be able to tell the two apart. 

            Shakespeare is interested in the conceptual ramifications of theatrical effects. 

            There is lots of play between slaves and masters. They have been together since birth and so they are almost twins except for being socially stratified. Slavery was not normal in Shakespeare's England as a historical institution. England didn't get involved in the slave trade until twenty years later. This is a particular fiction because the characters could have been masters and servants. He makes them slaves because he wants to dramatize the beatings. It was not sanctioned for someone to beat their servants. He wants to show lots of beatings so that the Dromios can talk about it as a fact of life. 

            The play is about social and economic bonds between people. The bond between Antipholus and Dromio is shown metaphorically when they are bound together by a rope. Many characters are talking about bonds and violence throughout the play. 

            The moment when Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse discuss Nell becomes a not very funny comedy routine about her being shaped like a globe with the parts of her body being various countries of the world. This scene, a relic of a certain performance style, is detachable from the play. In 3.2.80-150 someone is described who looks different from anyone else in the play. Her body is important to the play and it is a nice thematic riff to make her body different but unseen. She looks like all the world and it makes a joke about the drops of water being indistinguishable. She is distinct and yet she looks like the whole world. Shakespeare uses this to enter a different conceptual domain. He is a complex thinker making harmonic and melodic material sometimes in the form of solos, arias, and surprising combos. 

            The rope and the chain are also twinned. A chain can be a sign of affection, economic binding but also a means of imprisonment. 

            I weighed 90.4 kilos before lunch. I had crackers with five year old cheddar and a glass of lemonade. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Yonge and Bloor. 

            I went just outside the Bloor bike lane to pass someone in the bike lane but she rang her bell to tell me that I should have warned her that I was passing. 

            On the Richmond bike lane a guy on an electric scooter had a cup of coffee in one hand and was swerving all over the lane. When I passed I told him to stay on the right and he made my day when he responded dramatically in perhaps a British accent, "Oh! Shot op!" 

            On Queen Street a guy was sitting on the sidewalk with his toque down over his eyes and a smart phone in his hands as he screamed "Stop attacking!" 

            I weighed 89.2 kilos at 18:00. 

            I finished typing my lecture notes at around 19:45. 

            I made pizza on a slice of Bavarian sandwich bread with mango and lime salsa for sauce and extra old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching an episode of Gomer Pyle. 

            In this story Gomer and Carter are still in Washington. They are leaving the hotel with Gomer on his way to sightsee and Carter heading for a date with Rose Pilchek. Gomer notices a little boy sitting by himself on the sidewalk looking dejected. Gomer tries to talk with him but he doesn't seem to speak English. Carter has been trying and failing to get a cab but notices the boy. Carter discovers that the boy only speaks Japanese and it turns out Carter knows some Japanese because he served in Korea and perhaps was also stationed in Japan. Carter learns the boy's address and wants to put the kid in a cab but Toki doesn't want to travel alone. Carter has to call Rose and she thinks it's charming that he's helping out a little boy. They take Toki to the address but it turns out to be an amusement park. Gomer thinks that Toki has amnesia and that if they take him on some rides he'll relax and remember where he lives. After several rides, a stuffed toy and some ice cream Toki gives them another address, but it turns out to be a place for boat rides. By this time Rose is getting increasingly mad every time Carter calls her. After a boat ride they get another adress and it's a baseball stadium. They take Toki to a Washington Senators game where when a player tries to get home and is called out Toki gets excited and shouts "He was safe by a mile!" Gomer and Carter realize they've been conned. Toki confesses he lives at the Japanese Embassy. He admits he pretended but only because while living at the embassy he never gets to go anywhere. They take Toki to the embassy and they are greeted by his beautiful sister who invites them in for tea but before Carter can accept Gomer says Carter has to go and patch things up with a girlfriend. 

            Toki's sister was played by Helen Funai, who danced on Broadway in "The Flower Drum Song", danced four years on the Red Skelton Show and later became a member of the singing and dancing group The Dingaling Sisters on The Dean Martin Show. She was the first Asian member of the group. Then she appeared in Martin's Matt Helm movie "Murderer's Row." Later she had a regular part as Kim Douglas on Days of Our Lives.