[In this excerpt, Candido shows that characters' attitudes toward meals reveals their gendered understanding of marital social obligations.]

C. L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler observe shrewdly that in The Comedy of Errors "Shakespeare is marvelous at conveying a sense of a world already there," and cite Dromio of Ephesus's first words as illustrating the "routine tensions" of "daily, ordinary life" that pervade the play:¹

The capon burns, the pig falls from the spit;
The clock hath strucken twelve upon the bell:
My mistress made it one upon my cheek:
She is so hot, because the meat is cold.
                                 (I.ii.44-47)

The passage is a fine indication of Shakespeare's early genius at dramatic economy, for not only does it catch effortlessly the rhythms of "a world already there," it also points to certain rhetorical and psychological traits that bind the parted Antipholuses and their Dromios together even as the two pairs of twins remain comically at odds throughout much of the play. Dromio's urgent concern over such matters as tardiness for dinner, the condition of food, household plans gone awry, and the anger of his mistress, is by no means exceptional in The Comedy of Errors, for voiced attention to the seemingly unremarkable events of day-to-day life occupy the two Antipholuses and their servants with striking regularity. Listen to Antipholus of Syracuse as he first sets foot in Ephesus:

Within this hour it will be dinner-time;
Till that, I'll view the manners of the town,
Persue the traders, gaze upon the buildings,
And then return and sleep within my inn,
For with long travel I am stiff and weary.
                                   (I.ii. 11-15)

The banal itinerary of the tourist tends not to be fit matter for Shakespearean romantic comedy, but in The Comedy of Errors bed and board often come abruptly to the forefront of the action. We are seldom unaware of people going to and from dinner or talking about the comforts of food and home. It is perhaps natural enough that the traveling Antipholus of Syracuse—whose sense of aimless nonattachment is so resonantly conveyed by the metaphor of the lone water drop seeking its fellow in the ocean (I.ii.35-38)—should be attracted to the security and solidity implied by the shared meal. He is, to be sure, an earnest seeker of dining companions, oddly receptive, for example, to the sudden feast thrust upon him by total strangers later in the play, and eager to make a dinner engagement with the first native Ephesian he meets. We miss much in the play if we ignore the tentative yet deep longing for connection behind his invitation to the anonymous Ephesian merchant:

What, will you walk with me about the town,
And then go to my inn and dine with me?
                            (I.ii.22-23)

Coming as it does after Antipholus's admission of frequent "care and melancholy" (I.ii.20), the remark suggests a yearning for the personal and societal integration so sadly absent in the separated twin. Instructive in this regard are the concluding lines of the Ephesian Dromio's previously cited call to dinner, which both elaborate on the servant's urgent request and place the longings of the Syracusan visitor in a wider and more richly suggestive social context:

The meat is cold, because you come not
  home:
You come not home, because you have no
  stomach:
You have no stomach, having broke your fast:
But we that know what 'tis to fast and pray,
Are penitent for your default to-day.
                                 (I.ii.48-52)

Dromio's witty admonition points to serious matters that go beyond a mere hunger for food and society; it posits a social reality in which a genuine and strongly felt causal relationship exists between the abandoned meal and intimate moral and marital concerns. The five lines that take us from cold meat to implied sinfulness ("your default to-day")² hinge on the assumption that Ephesus is a place where social ceremonies matter, where the wayward husband's suspected dining away ("having broke [his] fast") has serious consequences for his relationship to wife and home. Antipholus of Ephesus's absence has transformed his house into the social equivalent of a spiritually unprofitable Lent, imposing a penitential fasting on all its inhabitants and eliciting from his wife a resentment that manifests itself in violence to her servant and angry abstinence (I.ii.90).³

Before discussing the marital—and expressly sexual—implications of the Ephesian husband's absence from dinner at home, I should first like to review briefly the status of the midday meal for Shakespeare and his audience. William Harrison in his Description of England (1577, 1587) has much to say about the importance of the noon dinner for Elizabethans, particularly since this was the central and most elaborate meal of the day. Harrison's moralistic digression on dining habits, although not explicitly related to the action of Shakespeare's play, nonetheless indicates the close relationship between social mores and social morality. He disparages the frequent "odd repasts" of earlier times that included "breakfasts in the forenoon, beverages or nuncheons after dinner, and thereto reresuppers generally when it was time to go to rest,"⁴ preferring instead the more enlightened modern habit of eating once, or at most twice, a day. Even this practice, however, is not without the gluttonous abuse of "long and stately sitting at meat" (p. 141): "For the nobility, gentlemen, and merchantmen, especially at great meetings, do sit commonly till two or three of the clock at afternoon, so that with many is an hard matter, to rise from the table to go to Evening Prayer and return from thence to come time enough to supper" (p. 141).

The "supper" to which Harrison alludes was a much lighter evening meal that carried little of the formal or symbolic character of the noon dinner. Lu Emily Pearson and Muriel St. Clare Byrne, both of whom examine in some detail the richly allusive meanings implicit in dinner at the home of a well-to-do Elizabethan, make this point persuasively.⁵ Echoing Harrison, Pearson notes how the noon meal could drag on almost to supper with only time for evening prayer between; she then proceeds to underscore the personal and social symbolism implicit in the long repast: "cooking, like ornate architecture or elaborate dress or anything else that might impress one's acquaintances with a display of wealth, became a very important advertisement of a man's financial status.… No one was ever expected to partake of all the dishes but to eat and drink moderately by making a selection from the variety so bounteously offered" (pp. 556-57).

Although Pearson here is describing a somewhat more elaborate dinner than the family meal that Antipholus of Ephesus disregards so casually in The Comedy of Errors, even the ordinary dinner prepared for family alone was a matter of some culinary complexity for the housewife. (At least three main dishes were usually served, not including vegetables, bread, and drink, and Dromio mentions capon and pig specifically.) Moreover, Adriana's Elizabethan counterpart could have expected guests on short or no notice—witness the fact that Antipholus of Ephesus approaches his house with Angelo and Balthazar in tow—and her readiness in preparation would have been a sign of her domestic competence as well as her magnanimity as a hostess. Her social role—indeed her identity as wife—was linked in some measure to her success at entertaining, just as her husband's public reputation was linked to the affluence of his board.⁶ Along these lines Pearson notes that "even everyday meals were served with due decorum in well-managed homes, and the table was carefully set" (p. 565). Byrne further elaborates on what she calls the "ceremony" observed for daily dinner in "a well-to-do townman's household":

a cloth was laid upon the table, and at every place was set a trencher, a napkin, and a spoon. Wine, ale, and drinking vessels, Harrison tells us, stood on the buffet, and the servants filled a clean goblet or Venetian drinking glass when any guest called for liquor. In the kitchen quarters the butler took pains to chip the bread in order to remove any cinders from the crust, and he also squared each piece neatly before he set it on the board. Finally, the great salt-cellar would be placed on the table, and with basin,⁷ ewer, and fine damask towel ready to hand for the diners'ablutions, all was prepared.

(p. 30)

Clearly Antipholus of Ephesus's failure to come to dinner on time is a repudiation of more than mere food; his absence from home is the first step in the flouting of an accepted social ceremony that helps define his identity as respected citizen and respectful husband. It is surely no coincidence that in the course of the play he is threatened with the loss of both of these socially and emotionally vital aspects of the self. Reputation and marriage begin to dissolve together when the wrong brother dines at home.⁸

When viewed in this context Adriana's behavior assumes a deeper and more richly suggestive character than the mere ragings of a jealous housewife. Her determination to refrain from eating despite the fact that her husband is two hours late (II.i.3) indicates a serious attempt to maintain personal equilibrium and social bonds in the face of heavy pressures.⁹ Adriana is no mere jealous shrew (her readiness to forgive later in the play is too often slighted); rather she is a fiercely combative woman confronting squarely the threat of an imperiled marriage and determined to sustain meaningful ties despite social and personal threats to her identity as wife and Lady. This is, oddly enough, a fact that her didactic and self-assured sister fails to recognize. Luciana's smug suggestion to "let us dine, and never fret" (II.i.6) implies an indifference to her sister's emotional plight that reveals the severe limitations of the unwedded woman's easy aphorisms about marriage (II.i. 15-25). Adriana knows better; her rhetoric wisely acknowledges the heavy emotional tool exacted by her husband's absence in terms lost on her sister:

His company must do his minions grace,
Whilst I at home starve for a merry look:

But, too unruly deer, he breaks the pale,
And feeds from home; poor I am but his stale.
                     (II.i.87-101; emphasis added)

When Adriana finally locates the man she believes to be her Antipholus, her first instinct is to reestablish old connections by clarifying the proper relationship of husband to wife. Her moving speech on the mystical Christian notion that the married couple are one flesh evokes longingly an earlier stage of her marriage when identities were stable and rooted securely in the simple ceremonies of everyday life:

The time was once, when thou unurg'd
  wouldst vow
That never words were music to thine ear,
That never object pleasing in thine eye,
That never touch well welcome to thy hand,
That never meat sweet-savor'd in thy taste,
Unless I spake, or look'd, or touch'd, or
  carv'd to thee.
                                   (II.ii. 113-18)

Adriana's suggestive use of the Syracusan brother's earlier image of "a drop of water in the breaking gulf" to define marital inseparability (II.ii. 126) further implies her sense of identification with the man before her, particularly as he represents—in an almost literal sense—the younger and more innocent version of her husband.¹⁰ Her urgent invitation to the Syracusan twin can thus be seen symbolically as a psychologically necessary act of marital renewal; Adriana's desire for the earlier and untainted version of her husband is symbolically fulfilled as she enacts with the younger twin the meaningful social ceremony that defines for her the basis of a stable marriage. Speaking, looking, and touching—the characteristic intimacies of romantic love—fuse curiously in her mind with carving. Moral realignment and marital recommitment both meet for the anxious wife in the ordered normalcy of the shared meal:

Come, come, no longer will I be a fool,
To put the finger in the eye and weep,
Whilst man and master laughs my woes to
  scorn.
Come, sir, to dinner. Dromio, keep the gate.
Husband, I'll dine above with you to-day,
And shrive you of a thousand idle pranks.
Sirrah, if any ask you for your master,
Say he dines forth, and let no creature enter.
                                (II.ii.203-10)

The episode is rich with implication. Anthropologists such as Mary Douglas and Claude Levi-Strauss have painstakingly detailed the close association of food with sexual longings and sexual identity." Douglas, in particular, has probed how in various cultures "sexual and gastronomic consummation are made equivalents of one another by reasons of analogous restrictions applied to each" (p. 71), a phenomenon with obvious implications for the marital identity of the couple.¹² Similarly, Adriana's renewed enthusiasm for dinner with the man she thinks is her husband appears to include such psychological concerns. Despite the fact that Luciana will accompany the pair, theirs will be a rather private meal, "above," symbolically located in the living quarters upstairs rather than in the more public business quarters below. Moreover, the exclusivity of the meal is further underscored by Adriana's (unintentionally ironic) instructions to Dromio to tell all callers that her husband dines away, and by her explicit order to the servant to "play the porter well … let none enter, lest I break your pate" (II.ii.211, 218). Clearly there is more at stake here for Adriana than the rearrangement of a disturbed afternoon. Her private family meal serves as a convenient social vehicle for the larger issue of forgiveness, and her insistence on privacy metaphorically links confidential family matters with the equally confidential regenerative power of the confessional: "Husband, I'll … shrive you of a thousand idle pranks." Even Luciana seems to sense what the renewed meal means symbolically for her sister; there is a note of urgency as well as impatience in her enjoinder to the puzzled guest: "Come, come, Antipholus, we dine too late" (II.ii.219).

The arrival of the real husband, of course, throws all into confusion; but as is so often the case in The Comedy of Errors, it is a confusion that abruptly forces characters to clarify identities and locate priorities. As Antipholus of Ephesus approaches his house with Angelo and Balthazar, he exudes a settled complacency with the verities of his mercantile and male-oriented world. He is late for dinner, and although he knows that Adriana "is shrewish when I keep not hours" (III.i.2), he believes that the remedy for her discontent lies in the protective duplicity of his friend the goldsmith: "Say that I linger'd with you at your shop / To see the making of her carcanet, / And that tomorrow you will bring it home" (ffl.i.3-5). Antipholus's crass gift of the necklace (which in anger he later transfers to the Courtesan) illustrates the immense psychological gap that separates his materialist notion of marriage from Adriana's loftier attitude of Christian idealism. For the inattentive husband, whose response to marital drift is to placate his wife with costly trinkets, the midday meal carries none of the deep-seated marital or sexual significance that it does for Adriana. Indeed, there is every indication that Antipholus sees the dinner as an exclusively male concern, an occasion for refined humanist discourse on the relationship of food to friendship, but little more. Any thought of the neglected wife disappears under the somewhat precious and over-embroidered male niceties that precede Antipholus's discovery of the locked door:

E. Ant. Y' are sad, Signior Balthazar, pray
  God our cheer
May answer my good will and your good
  welcome here.
Balth. I hold your dainties cheap, sir, and
  your welcome dear.
E. Ant. O, Signior Balthazar, either at flesh or
  fish,
A table full of welcome makes scarce one
  dainty dish.
Balth. Good meat, sir, is common; that every
  churl affords.
E. Ant. And welcome more common, for that's
  nothing but words.
Balth. Small cheer and great welcome makes a
  merry feast.
E. Ant. Ay, to a niggardly host and more
  sparing guest:
But though my cates be mean, take them in
  good part;
Better cheer may you have, but not with better
  heart.
But soft, my door is lock'd; go bid them let
  us in.
                                         (III.i. 19-30)

The stark reality of Adriana's shut door, carrying as it does the same sexual implications as that of the angry wife in The Menaechmi, turns Antipholus's dinner of male friendship and ostentation into a marital crisis. By virtue of his denied access to home and wife, the Ephesian brother comes to experience precisely the same feelings of alienation and sexual doubt that he has so casually inflicted upon his wife. But the confusion here produces more than mere psychological tit-for-tat. Antipholus's isolation outside the locked house functions symbolically to define the spiritual divorce he has already produced while at the same time literalizing ominously the ends to which his neglect will lead. In this sense the Ephesian brother joins Adriana, his twin, Egeon, and Aemelia in experiencing the anxieties of isolation and nonattachment, with the significant difference that in his case he alone is to blame.

There is a fine irony to the fact that while Antipholus suspects Adriana with another man, his real rival for his virtuous wife is the earlier and idealized image of himself as represented in his younger brother. Adriana does love another man—the Antipholus she so longingly evokes as she recalls what her husband once was, the Antipholus she believes she is restoring at dinner in her upstairs room. In an almost literal sense, then, the Ephesian brother is in conflict with himself, thus embodying, in another more resonantly suggestive form, the self-division that is everywhere in the play.¹³ As Balthazar wisely points out, Antipholus's unseemly attempts to break into his own house in full view of others is really a senseless act of violence to self:

Have patience, sir, O, let it not be so!
Herein you war against your reputation,
And draw within the compass of suspect
Th' unviolated honor of your wife.

If by strong hand you offer to break in
Now in the stirring passage of the day,
A vulgar comment will be made of it;
And that supposed by the common rout
Against your yet ungalled estimation,
That may with foul intrusion enter in,
And dwell upon your grave when you are
  dead.
                            (III.i.85-104)

Although the irate husband finally departs "in quiet" (III.i.107), he hardly departs emotionally intact; self-rebellion and self-loathing, not just revenge, drive Antipholus to dinner at the Courtesan's.

The two separate dining experiences of the two identical twins stand in sharp contrast to each other; yet they also reflect each other in curious ways. For Antipholus of Ephesus the dinner with the Courtesan contains many of the same psychological elements as that planned by his Plautine counterpart in The Menaechmi. Just as Menaechmus of Epidamnum's choice of Voluptas over Industria involved a rejection of his wife for male companionship and dinner with Erotium, the Ephesian twin invites his male friends to dine with him at the Courtesan's where he will bestow the necklace "for nothing but to spite my wife" (III.i.118). Obviously Antipholus's rebellious dinner, at which the materialistic sign of his weak marital commitment is to change hands, represents the moral opposite of Adriana's feast of reconciliation. Perhaps less obvious, however, is the way in which the younger Antipholus's behavior at Adriana's dinner unwittingly parallels the unfaithfulness of his brother. As the symbolic embodiment of the younger version of his Ephesian twin, Antipholus of Syracuse reenacts his brother's behavior by forsaking the woman who has welcomed him to the feast and turning his romantic attention to another. In professing love for Luciana he sounds strangely like an only slightly exaggerated version of his older brother:

Your weeping sister is no wife of mine,
Nor to her bed no homage do I owe:
Far more, far more, to you do I decline.
                              (III.ii.41-43)

And later, when alone, he finds an even more distinctly "Antipholan" mode of expression:

She that doth call me husband, even my soul
Doth for a wife abhor. But her fair sister,
Possess'd with such a gentle sovereign grace,
Of such enchanting presence and discourse,
Hath almost made me traitor to myself.
                             (III.ii. 158-62)

Something very close to this attitude (expressed in strikingly similar rhetoric) lies behind the Ephesian brother's attraction to the "wench of excellent discourse, / Pretty and witty; wild, and yet, too, gentle" (III.i.109-10), at whose home he will dine and to whom he will give his wife's necklace. At both dinners Adriana is rejected by her husband.

Adriana's broken banquet fails to produce its desired ends, but it nonetheless sets in motion a process of moral and social realignment that continues to the end of the play. Critics have generally tended to overlook the rejected wife's response to her failed dinner, particularly her remarks upon hearing that at the meal her supposed husband has tried to woo Luciana:

He is deformed, crooked, old, and sere,
Ill-fac'd, worse bodied, shapeless every where;
Vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind,
Stigmatical in making, worse in mind.

Ah, but I think him better than I say,
And yet would herein others' eyes were
  worse:
Far from her nest the lapwing cries away;
My heart prays for him, though my tongue do
  curse.
                            (IV.ii. 19-28)

The division here between heart and tongue, feeling and saying, focuses upon yet another pair of forceful oppositions embedded in singleness. Adriana's acknowledgement of her inner divisions not only reflects the outer and more obvious tensions involved in relationships like twinship, sisterhood, marriage, and friendship; it also points implicitly to a means of finding concord in discord. Adriana is a frequent object of others' criticism—her husband, sister, and mother-inlaw are only the most vocal examples—yet despite it all she remains the most fully responsive and synthetic character in the play, preferring finally in a crisis to labor at forgiveness rather than to ease into recrimination. If her first significant act of synthesis is her attempted dinner, her second is her readiness to forgive her husband despite its apparent failure. Her recognition of her own divided response to the supposed infidelity of her husband—outward rage and inward love—and her determination to act charitably in the face of it, implies the wise acceptance of a psychological duality in her self and in her husband that is symbolically represented in the two identical yet separate twins. The gold she gives to ransom her Antipholus is the surest sign of her clear-sighted resolve to meet rejection with forgiveness despite warring inner tensions: "Go Dromio … bring thy master home immediately. / Come, sister, I am press'd down with conceit—/ Conceit, my comfort and my injury" (IV.ii.63-66). When the younger Antipholus rejects the Courtesan as his older brother should have ("I conjure thee to leave me and be gone" [IV.iii.67]), his behavior ratifies symbolically the process of marital reconciliation that Adriana's charity has begun. But the younger Antipholus's behavior is more than merely symbolic; it also has the practical effect of eroding the Ephesian brother's newly formed relationship with the Courtesan. After being turned away by Antipholus of Syracuse (whom she takes for the Ephesian twin), the Courtesan does an emotional about-face in order to recoup the day's financial losses. Her blatant self-concern—in clear contrast to Adriana's charity—only heightens the emotional poverty of her makeshift meal with the wayward husband:

My way is now to hie home to his house,
And tell his wife that, being lunatic,
He rush'd into my house, and took perforce
My ring away. This course I fittest choose,
For forty ducats is too much to lose.
                               (IV.iii.92-96)

But even Adriana, despite her strenuous attempts to sustain and revivify her marriage, is hardly guiltless of marital neglect. Like her husband, she must endure a harsh public embarrassment that airs private wrongs and forces her to confront squarely her share in the weakened relationship. Her sister's earnest yet commonplace strictures on the superiority of husband to wife (II.i. 15-25) pale beside the withering—and more imperiously authoritative—criticism of the Abbess. Unlike Luciana, who relies on traditional and essentially Pauline notions of marriage to upbraid her sister, the Abbess turns her criticism inward to the intimate day-to-day activities of bedroom and kitchen that Adriana sees as her special province. The Abbess is, ironically, not nearly as concerned with theological and religious matters as she is with the practical goings-on inside Adriana's household. In this sense she sounds far less like a cloistered sister than like the concerned mother-in-law that she is. Here is the Abbess just after she learns, from Adriana herself, of the wife's frequent and public criticisms of her husband:

And thereof came it that the man was mad.
The venom clamors of a jealous woman
Poisons more deadly than a mad dog's tooth.
It seems his sleeps were hind'red by thy
  railing,
And thereof comes it that his head is light.
Thou say'st his meat was sauc'd with thy
  upbraidings:
Unquiet meals make ill digestions,
Thereof the raging fire of fever bred,
And what's a fever but a fit of madness?
Thou say'st his sports were hind'red by thy
  brawls:
Sweet recreation barr'd, what doth ensue
But moody and dull melancholy,
Kinsman to grim and comfortless despair,
And at her heels a huge infectious troop
Of pale distemperatures and foes to life?
In food, in sport, and life-preserving rest
To be disturb'd, would mad or man or beast:
The consequence is then, thy jealous fits
Hath scar'd thy husband from the use of wits.
                                     (V.i.68-86)

The speech links two important domestic responsibilities that went hand-in-hand for the Elizabethan housewife, preparing food and ministering to the sick. Popular handbooks of the day such as Sir Hugh Plat's Delightes for Ladies (1608) repeatedly spelled out this dual responsibility.¹⁴ Plat's four-part discourse takes up such matters as "The Arte of Preseruing," "Secrets in Distillation," and "Cookerie and Huswiferie," concluding with a detailed section on powders, ointments, and home cures that the good housewife would need to know in order to perform her domestic duties successfully. Here one can find remedies for problems such as yellow teeth, chilbains, pimpled or burned skin, bodily bruises of various sorts, and almost any other commonplace malady of the day. Implicit in Plat's book, particularly its final section, is a recognition of the important role of the housewife as custodian of domestic order and ease. In addition to her skill in the preparation of food (the largest part of the book consists of recipes), the resourceful mistress of an Elizabethan house was expected to produce medical results like that which relieved one "M. Foster an Essex man and an Atturney of the Common pleas" of an inflamed face: "Qvilt bay salt well dried & powdered, in double linnen sockes of a prettie bignesse, let the patient weare them in wide hose and shooes day and night, by the space of fourteene daies, or till he be well: euerie morning and euening let him dry his sockes by the fire and put them on againe" (p. 93). It is presumably Adriana's inattentiveness to details such as these to which the Abbess alludes when she speaks of the "huge infectious troop / Of pale distemperatures and foes to life" that characterize the wife's disordered household. Adriana should have paid more attention to Thomas Tusser, whose earnest Points of Huswifery, United to the Comfort of Husbandry (1573), also sees attention to food and physic as dual but hardly separate concerns for women like Adriana. Tusser's advice could almost serve as a shorthand introduction to some of the key critical issues in The Comedy of Errors:

Good huswives provide, ere an' sickness do
  come,
Of sundry good things, in her house to have
  some:
Good aqua composita, and vinegar tart,
Rose-water, and treacle, to comfort the heart.
Cold herbs in her garden, for agues that burn,
That over strong heat, to good temper may
  turn.
                                   (p. 274)

          Use mirth and good word,
           At bed and at board.
Provide for thy husband, to make him good
  cheer,
Make merry together, while time ye be here.
At bed and at board, howsoever befall,
Whatever God sendeth, be merry withall.

      No brawling make,
           No jealousy take.
No taunts before servants, for hindering of
  fame,
No jarring too loud, for avoiding of shame.
                                   (p. 266)¹⁵

Tusser's cautionary advice could hardly be more apt in Adriana's case. The wife's defense of her jealous accusations is the virtual textbook antithesis of Tusser's admonitions:

It [suspected philandering] was the copy of
  our conference:
In bed he slept not for my urging it;
At board he fed not for my urging it;
Alone, it was the subject of my theme;
In company I often glanced it;
Still did I tell him it was vild and bad.
                                   (V.i.62-67)

Adriana has indeed acted well in trying to refashion her broken noon meal into a dinner of forgiveness for her supposed husband, but absent from her notion of the shared meal is her own penitence for past wrongs. Now, for the first time, we sense why her husband may have been late for dinner in the first place, for he had little reason to expect anything like the calm repast it was his wife's duty to supply. As the Abbess so pointedly says: "his meat was sauc'd with thy upbraidings: / Unquiet meals make ill digestions." Adriana's repeated unquiet meals have provided more sustenance for Antipholus's "raging fire of fever" and "moody and dull melancholy" than they have for his physical and emotional well-being. Adriana has, in short, forsaken the role of hostess and healer that it was her marital duty to perform. To her credit, however, she responds to this open exposé of her short-comings, as she always does to a crisis, with admirable clear-sightedness. Her reaction to the Abbess's scathing public denunciation would have made Tusser proud:

I will attend my husband, be his nurse,
Diet his sickness, for it is my office,
And will have no attorney but myself,
And therefore let me have him home with me.
                            (V.i.98-101)

Adriana's suggestive "Diet his sickness" indicates a clear psychological commitment to her twin responsibilities as purveyor of meals and overseer of home remedies. Implicit in her response is the full acceptance of her role as custodian of the day-to-day activities that ensure marital harmony and household ease. In this sense Adriana becomes the willing secular equivalent of the Abbess, the mistress of a religious household, whose "wholesome syrups, drugs, and holy prayers" are "the charitable duty" of her order (V.i.104-107). Religious mother-in-law and secular wife merge psychologically in a mutual determination to ensure "food, sport, and life-preserving rest" for the separate Antipholuses in their care.

It is frequently observed that the last act of The Comedy of Errors, while suggesting some degree of familial reorientation and renewal, stops short of a full affirmation of marital harmony. This is essentially the view of Alexander Leggatt, who, in an allusive and sensitive essay on the play, points out that there is no explicit reconciliation between Adriana and her husband, leaving the final state of their marriage "an open question." For Leggatt the idea of reconciliation in marriage is not utterly dismissed "but it is quietly placed in the background, and no great hopes are pinned on it."¹⁶ This is true enough, for at the end of the play we have no actual nuptial rite or even the symbolic evocation of one as we sometimes do in Shakespearean comedy. Instead the emphasis here is on the unification of an old family (even its younger members are old enough to have grown apart) rather than on the earnest hope for beginning a new one. But this is not to say that The Comedy of Errors is without its own significant—and characteristic—comic closure. When the multiple confusions are finally resolved, the Abbess invites the assembled company into her dwelling for a dining experience of a very different sort from those we have seen earlier in the play. This will be a "gossips' feast" (V.i.406), that is, a baptismal banquet at which the whole family assembles to welcome with joy a new member into a social and religious community. As such, it is a time for reestablishing old bonds and reaffirming one's commitment to a set of moral and religious values that impart spiritual significance to the activities of daily life.¹⁷ It is a mended and more comprehensive version of the failed dinners of Adriana and the Courtesan, containing as it does the security and shared spiritual objectives theirs so obviously lack. At the Abbess's feast, in sharp contrast to the dinners planned by Adriana and the Courtesan, participants exist in a stable and recognizable relationship to each other. Indeed, the whole purpose of a baptismal gathering is to ratify collectively the stabilization of one's identity, for it is the baptismal act that fixes a new creature once and for all with a name that denotes both who he is and what one hopes he will become. The Abbess's feast is thus an attempt to reach backward—symbolically at least—to Egeon's and Aemelia's experience with their twin infants on the mast, to begin time again at the key moment when the sacramental stability of a double christening can cancel the psychological division of family shipwreck. Perhaps the surest sign of the need for such stability is the obvious personal and social chaos produced by twin brothers with identical names, a consequence that would have been impossible at their joint baptism. Aemelia is at some pains to rectify this problem, at least in psychological terms; and if we cannot see her insistence upon the banquet in the Abbey as a determination literally to re-name her sons, we surely recognize the event as a fit occasion for her to clarify (and codify) who and what they are.¹⁸ Just as in sacramental terms baptism must precede marriage, so too a clear and secure notion of self must precede the hope of marital harmony. It is this process of reclamation that Aemelia begins at her gossips' feast inside the Abbey, a family banquet on which all other feasts—with whatever social, moral, or psychological meaning they may acquire—so heavily depend. After so long marital grief, Aemelia's family needs nothing more than the spiritual nativity and personal stability conferred by the sacrament. It is this need that they ratify in the play's final and most joyously comic banquet.

Notes

¹ C. L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler, The Whole Journey: Shakespeare's Power of Development (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986), p. 68. See also and

² So glossed in The Riverside Shakespeare (p. 85) and in other texts. However, some editors, like Foakes, gloss "default" simply as "offence" or "fault" (p. 15).

³ For an impressive examination of the connection between food and sexual aggression in Shakespeare see Janet Adelman, "'Anger's My Meat': Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus," in Shakespeare: Pattern of Excelling Nature, ed. David Bevington and Jay L. Halio (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1978), pp. 108-24. See also

⁴ William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. Georges Edelen (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1968), p. 140. Subsequent references to Harrison are noted parenthetically.

⁵ Lu Emily Pearson, Elizabethans at Home (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1957); M. St. Clare Byrne, Elizabethan Life in Town and Country (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926). Subsequent references to both works are noted parenthetically.

⁶ Note, for example, the following lines from Ben Jonson's "To Penshurst," in which the poet praises the hospitality of Sir Robert Sidney, Viscount Lisle, and his wife Barbara Gamage:

That found King James when, hunting late
  this way
With his brave son, the Prince, they saw thy
  fires
Shine bright on every hearth as the desires
Of thy Penates had been set on flame
To entertain them; or the country came
With all their zeal to warm their welcome
  here.
What (great, I will not say, but) sudden cheer
Didst thou then make 'em! and what praise
  was heaped
On thy good lady then! who therein reaped
The just reward of her high housewifery;
To have her linen, plate, and all things nigh,
When she was far; and not a room but dressed
As if it had expected such a guest!
                               (lines 76-88)

⁷ Pearson discusses a further "ceremonial" aspect of Elizabethan dining regarding the basin: "If different ranks were not represented at table, one basin was frequently used for a small company, two or three washing their hands at the same time, but if guests of various ranks were present, there must be one basin for each rank, and music between courses. Sir Francis Drake, for example, liked to live up to his rank even at sea, and besides observing the usual decorum, he had his meals served with the sound of trumpets and other instruments" (p. 565).

⁸ The confusion brought about by two sets of identical twins allows Shakespeare to enrich his play in subtly expressive ways. For example, when Antipholus of Syracuse is called to dinner (mistakenly) by the Ephesian Dromio, the Syracusan twin's reaction both expresses his own confusion and restates the actual attitude of the brother for whom he is mistaken: "Hang up thy mistress! I know not thy mistress, out on thy mistress!" (II.i.67-68), and "I know … no house, no wife, no mistress" (II.i.71). For an influential study of the way in which the Antipholan twins reflect psychological aspects of each other, see Barbara Freedman, "Egeon's Debt: Self-Division and Self-Redemption in The Comedy of Errors," English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980):360-83.

⁹ For a provocative study of the fasting of medieval women and its usefulness as a means of criticizing, manipulating, educating, or converting family members, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), particularly chapters 6 and 7 (pp. 189-244).

¹⁰ The question of the relative ages of the two Antipholuses is a vexed one, since Egeon's comments in Li on the issue seem to contradict each other. Many editors note Shakespeare's apparent confusion regarding which twin is the elder and, like Foakes, contend that "such conflict in details is not uncommon in Shakespeare and is not noticed on the stage" (p. 9). Addressing the problem critically, Patricia Parker has demonstrated how the "rhetorical crossing" in the relevant passage (I.i.78-85) indicates that the Syracusan twin is consistently referred to as the younger; see "Elder and Younger: The Opening Scene of The Comedy of Errors," Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983):325-27. Parker's assumption is shared by most critics; see particularly Freedman (p. 368); Tillyard (p. 567); and Ralph Berry, Shakespeare's Comedies: Explorations in Form (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 28-29. The idea is implied if not expressly stated by Robert Ornstein, Shakespeare's Comedies: From Roman Farce to Romantic Mystery (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1986), p. 30; and by Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London: Methuen, 1974), pp. 6-7.

¹¹ Mary Douglas, "Deciphering a Meal," Daedalus 101, 1 (Winter 1972):61-81; Levi-Strauss, The Origins of Table Manners. Introduction to a Science of Mythology, 3 vols., trans. John and Doreen Weightmann (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), passim, but particularly 3:54-59 where Levi-Strauss discusses the myth of the "clinging woman" which has certain curious analogies to the relationship between Antipholus of Ephesus and Adriana. See also, ; and

¹² Farb and Armelagos note that "At marriage celebrations in northern Europe during the Middle Ages, it was considered an important moment when the couple ate together" (p. 5).

¹³ See particularly Freedman's essay mentioned above, and Berry (p. 176). Also of interest in this regard is William C. Carroll, The Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 68-77.

¹⁴ Sir Hugh Plat, Delightes for Ladies, ed. G. E. Fussell and Kathleen Rosemary Fussell (London: Crosby Lockwood & Son, 1948); all references to Plat's work are to this edition and are noted parenthetically. See also Of interest too are the remarks of George Herbert in A Priest to the Temple or, The Country Parson (1652) where the necessary characteristics of a good parson's wife are set forth in some detail. Herbert lists three separate qualities that such a woman must possess, among them expertise in "curing, and healing of all wounds and sores with her owne hands; which skill either she brought with her, or he [the parson] takes care she shall learn it of some religious neighbor." See The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 239.

¹⁵ References to Thomas Tusser are from Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry … together with A Book of Huswifery, ed. William Mavor (London: Lackington, Allen, 1812). Also of interest is George Walton Williams, "Shakespeare's Metaphors of Health: Food, Sport, and Life-Preserving Rest," JMRS 14 (1984):187-202; and Owsei Temkin, "Nutrition from Classical Antiquity to the Baroque," in Human Nutrition: Historic and Scientific, ed. Iago Galdston (New York: International Univ. Press, 1960), pp. 78-97. Temkin points out that the concept of "diet" comprised not only food and drink "but also work, sleep, climate of the home, emotions, and sexual life, i.e., what the medieval doctors came to call the six res non-naturales, the six 'non-naturals'" (p. 83).

¹⁶ Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London: Methuen, 1974), pp. 9, 18.

¹⁷ In Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare's Language of Gesture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), David Bevington discusses the theatrical centrality of the banquet in several Shakespearean plays, most notably Macbeth, Timon of Athens, Titus Andronicus, and Troilus and Cressida, where the "ceremony of feasting represents not so much God's gift of charity" as a failed ritual of reincorporation that presents a "disillusioned view of lifeless artificiality" (p. 159). As Bevington notes, the "violence and hypocrisy" underlying banqueting in these plays serves importantly to heighten its moral opposite—the "regular form and sense of hospitable order" that a communal feast implies (pp. 159-60). For an elaboration of the idea of inverted feasting in Macbeth, see G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme: Further Interpretations of Shakespeare's Tragedies Including the Roman Plays (London: Methuen, 1951), ch. 5 (particularly pp. 134-41).

¹⁸ Elizabethan and Jacobean comedies, of course, abound with concluding banquets (actual or proposed) as symbolic of social harmony and renewal. Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew comes instantly to mind (but see Bevington's modifying remarks here [p. 159]), as do The Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and even the end of The Merchant of Venice, where, although "It is almost morning" Lorenzo sees Portia and Nerissa as dropping "manna in the way of starved people" (V.i.294-95). The disappearing banquet in The Tempest is far too richly allusive to be discussed here, but bears mentioning, as does the proposed feasting at the end of Cymbeline (V.v.483). All references to Shakespeare here are to The Riverside Shakespeare. Suffice it to say that the motif of the concluding harmonious banquet is so pervasive as to appear in plays as diverse as Peele's Old Wives' Tale, Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday, and Jonson's Every Man in His Humor and, most notably, Bartholomew Fair.