SOURCE: “The Comedy of Errors: The Subliminal Narrative,” in Shakespeare and the Awareness of the Audience, Macmillan Press, 1985, pp. 30-45.

[In the essay below, Berry argues that the focus of The Comedy of Errors on “the archetypal experience of wandering, loss and rediscovery” reveals its origins in Greek drama.]

To see The Comedy of Errors as the first of the final romances is no great paradox of vision. It is true that commentators used always to stress the Plautine, and thus the farcical nature of the play. For most of them, The Comedy of Errors was in the first instance an adaptation of Plautus's Menaechmi, and one took it on from there. But the archaic and primitive elements of the play are now more visible than in the past. Northrop Frye points to its dark underside, “which brings the feeling of the play closer to the night world of Apuleius than to Plautus”.¹ Such a perception makes the play more of a comedy, less of a farce. Moreover, the romances are now thought of as a vital and ultimately defining area of the canon, to an extent which would not have been conceded a generation ago; so there is a disposition to admit The Comedy of Errors as an anticipation, not merely an experiment. Manifestly, the play works towards the experience of reconciliation and discovered identity, anticipating the drift of the romances. That can be taken for granted. I want here to look at some ways in which this curiously layered play organizes our experience. The most helpful commentary on its provenance, for my purposes, is Anne Barton's:

Behind the Menaechmi, as behind all the plays of Plautus, lay a Greek original now lost. Mistaken identity and the recovery of lost children seem to have been almost obsessive preoccupations of the New Comedy written by Menander and his contemporaries towards the end of the 4th century b.c. A response, probably, to the political chaos of a Hellenistic world that was filled with displaced persons, where children were often ‘lost’ by parents too poor or too distracted to cope with them at the time of their birth.²

If one substitutes “under” for “behind”, the metaphor becomes more pointed. Under the Roman play is a Greek play; under the Greek play is an action so vaguely apprehensible as to merit only “pre-Hellenistic”, the archetypal experience of wandering, loss and rediscovery. The lost Greek original silts down on to a folk memory. This has little to do with “sources”, as conventionally understood.³The Comedy of Errors is a palimpsest, not of composition, but of experience.

I

Aegeon is the framing definition of the experience, and of its cultural pointers. He is the Wanderer. He tells of tempest, ship-wreck, the parting of family, loss, quest:

Five summers have I spent in furthest Greece,
Roaming clean through the bounds of Asia.

(I. i. 133-4)

Aegeon's account has diverse resonances, part literary, part pure folk memory. The immediate possibility is the parallel with Aeneas's wanderings. At the beginning of Aegeon's prolonged recital of woe comes

A heavier task could not have been impos'd
Than I to speak my griefs unspeakable:
Yet, that the world may witness that my end
Was wrought by nature, not by vile offence,
I'll utter what my sorrow gives me leave.

(I.i. 32-6)

First noted by Theobald, this seems an audible echo of Aeneas's address to Dido, and it is meant I think to be picked up. It is not simply that there is a repetition of situation—the ruler commands the wanderer to speak—and substance, Aegeon's first two lines corresponding to the general sense of Aeneas's

infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem,
Troianas ut opes et lamentibile regnum
eruerint Danai, quaeque ipse miserrima vidi.

(Aeneid, II. 3-5)⁴

It is rather that the whole expressive unit founds itself on “unspeakable: Yet …”, repeating the Virgilian device, in which, after a brief intermediary passage—one waits for the “sed”—it comes in

sed si tantus amor casus cognoscere nostros
et breviter Troiae supremum audire laborem,
quamquam animus meminisse horret luctuque refugit,
incipiam.

(10-13)

and Book II is under way. “Infandum … sed … incipiam” translates closely into “Unspeakable: / Yet … I'll utter”, and the authorities are satisfied that the imitation is conscious.⁵ The basis for the scholarly consensus is research into the grammar school fondness for the first six books of the Aeneid, as much as the verbal parallels. I should myself hazard that Shakespeare is tapping a shared English experience of much of the audience, the acquaintance with certain books of the Aeneid at school. The incorrigible conservatism of the English grammar school is such that anyone studying Latin in the Fifth form today is likely enough to be reading Book II of the Aeneid—as Shakespeare, if he went to Stratford Grammar School, did.⁶ At all events, we can think of the layer of reference here as Roman, or more accurately Latin.

Scholars like to deal with the Latin aspect, because it involves the objective certainties of Renaissance education and textbook adoption. The Greek aspect is much less stressed, because there is apparently much less there to stress. Jonson's (and Baldwin's) phrase, “Shakespeare's small Latine and less Greeke” says it all. Yet it is clear that Odyssean themes are strong in the romances.

Both Homer and Shakespeare weave in a great deal of marvel, risk and triumphant adventures into their tales, use a plot about a wandering journey towards home filled with incidents of shipwreck and loss, stress a mingling of blessings and sorrows in the lives of their protagonists, and end their romances with a final reunion scene in which husband and wife, father and child, ruler and kingdom are reunited.⁷

From this angle alone it is reasonable to take Aegeon as “an early anticipation of this type of wandering figure”.⁸ In fact, a Homeric parallel surfaces in The Comedy of Errors, for there are passages that hint broadly at Book XI of the Odyssey, and the transformation of the mariners into animals. The idea is well launched in

Dromio S. This is the fairy
land; O spite of spites!
We talk with goblins, owls and sprites:
If we obey them not, this will ensue,
They'll suck our breath or pinch us black and blue.
Luciana Why prat'st thou to
thyself and answer'st not?
Dromio, thou drone, thou snail, thou slug, thou sot!
Dromio S. I am transformed, master,
am I not?
Antipholus S. I think thou art in
mind, and so am I.
Dromio S. Nay, master, both in mind
and in my shape.
Antipholus S. Thou hast thine own
form.
Dromio S. No, I am an ape.
Luciana If thou art chang'd
to aught, 'tis to an ass.
Dromio S. 'Tis true; she rides
me, and I long for grass.
'Tis so, I am an ass.

(II. ii. 188-200)

The Odysseus figure, Aegeon in the opening scene, becomes by easy transference Antipholus of Syracuse: “I'll stop mine ears against the mermaid's song” (III. ii. 163). And the allusion is made formal by the Duke, who exclaims “I think you all have drunk of Circe's cup” (V. i. 270).⁹ There is a running parallel between The Comedy of Errors and the Odyssey. The Aeneid and the Odyssey, then, symbolize layers of experience here. The vertical structure of allusions is a metaphor for the psychic layers to which the play appeals.

II

Roman on Greek: that is our code for the opening. The allusions, conscious or subliminal, to the Aeneid and the Odyssey conduct us into the play world. It is Hellenistic, archaic, romantic. “For Shakespeare”, says Bullough, “romance was mainly of the Mediterranean.”¹⁰ The local associations of Ephesus would also mean something to the Elizabethans. They thought of it as a great seaport, renowned for its Temple of Diana. St Paul stayed there for two years.¹¹ Hence the audience would connect it with St Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, and its appeals for domestic unity. They would also remember that Ephesus was known for sorcerers and exorcists, and for St Paul's “curious acts”. The Biblical allusions help to establish the dark underside of this play. But these cultural referents are absorbed in the broad symbolism of the action and its background, with the atavistic appeal to collective memories of wandering and loss. Always at the back of the action is the sea, as great a presence here as in The Tempest. It is the sea that parts Aegeon and his family, that brings Antipholus of Syracuse to Ephesus, that calls him throughout. “For he is bound to sea, and stays but for it” (IV. i. 33). “Both wind and tide stays for this gentleman” (IV. i. 46). That sense of the sea—waiting, pulling, imperious—is strong in The Comedy of Errors. Not only is it a reminder, in its ebb and flow, of the mysterious forces that govern the individual, it is the image through which the individual defines himself:

Antipholus S. I to the world
am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself;
So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.

(I. ii. 35-40)

Adriana For know, my love,
as easy may'st thou fall
A drop of water in the breaking gulf
And take unmingled thence that drop again,
Without addition or diminishing,
As take from me thyself and not me too.

(II. ii. 124-8)

It is another version of the theatre experience, with the audience (see Chapter 1) the sea. Both Antipholus and Adriana find in the sea the deepest formulas for human identity. It is a symbol that transcends cultural allusion.

In fact, this play constantly reaches towards the universal. If Measure for Measure is the most Freudian play in the canon, The Comedy of Errors is the most Jungian. It is rooted in the collective subconscious, and archetypes of enduring power are presented. The plot itself is a playful rendering of the hostile brother motif, a theme which as Aronson points out recurs often in Shakespeare.¹² Here, the brothers are unwitting not hostile; it is only through ignorance that Antipholus of Syracuse intrudes upon his brother's domain. The Syracusan appears, archetypally, to be the “younger” brother; he is defensive, apprehensive, easily daunted (but luckier, for all that). His enduring impulse, when confronted with difficulties, is to take to the boats (“I long that we were safe and sound aboard”, IV. iv. 150), while the “elder” brother is passionate, overbearing, a fighter. This mutuality of temperament is a part of the psychic integration of the play. Then again, Luciana provides perhaps the clearest statement in Shakespeare of the anima archetype.

Antopholus S. It is thyself,
mine own self's better part,
Mine eye's clear eye, my dear heart's dearer heart,
My food, my fortune, and my sweet hope's aim,
My sole earth's heaven, and my heaven's claim.

(II. ii. 61-4)

She, for Antipholus, is “the embodiment of this omnipresent and ageless image [of woman] which corresponds to the deepest reality in man”.¹³ The final transformation of the anima is the Abbess, who also combines the functions of Great Mother and Wise Old Man. In the end, the Syracuse merchant attains his “heaven's claim”, too. The archetypes, to which I shall return later, are the inner substance of this drama. The archaic is simply the period costume of the universal.

III

Let us turn to the general experience of the opening scene. Its narrative is, as Northrop Frye says, “a sophisticated, if sympathetic treatment of a structural cliché”.¹⁴ The hieratic solemnity of the opening has the decorum of tragedy:

Aegeon Proceed, Solinus, to
procure my fall,
And by the doom of death end woes and all.

(I. i. 1-2)

The speaker—and thus, at this moment of supreme weight, the play—invites the Duke to define the experience as tragic. He, for 23 lines, appears to pronounce the verdict of tragedy. Yet there are hints of unwillingness to complete the definition. “I am not partial to infringe our laws” begins to sketch an apology; he explains at length that the Syracusans and Ephesans have similar edicts; he indicates that a heavy fine would suffice, but that Aegeon's property is only a tenth part. He draws the only available conclusion, “Therefore by law thou art condemn'd to die.” The Law says, in effect, “what else can we do?” It is not the brutal imposition of iron statute that the more literal-minded commentators imagine. So, when Aegeon hopelessly acquiesces,

Yet this my comfort; when your words are done,
My woes end likewise with the evening sun.

(26-7)

the Duke, somewhat uneasily, invites Aegeon to keep the conversation going; something might turn up.

Well, Syracusan, say in brief the cause
Why thou departed'st from thy native home,
And for what cause thou cam'st to Ephesus.

(28-30)

The play now changes, for all its dramatic energies are concentrated upon Aegeon. The prisoner transforms the court. As narrator, he takes over; he holds the audience in a spell. It is a display of magic, the power of the story-teller. In performance it is not to be sabotaged by the director.¹⁵ Length here is not tedium, but the evocation of a primitive experience, the submission of an audience to the teller's capacity to create a world (cf. Sheherezade). Its immediate consequence is a shift in roles for Aegeon and the Duke. Prisoner and judge become story-teller and audience; hence Solinus becomes a suppliant:

Do me the favour to dilate
at full
What have befall'n of them and thee till now.

(122-3)

His next speech is openly apologetic, “Now trust me, were it not against our laws … My soul should sue as advocate for thee” (142, 145). The power of the teller has already wrought against the framing definition, tragedy. There are hints in the main narrative, too: “happy but for me, / And by me, had not our hap been bad … Was carried towards Corinth, as we thought … By fishermen of Corinth, as we thought” (37-8, 87, 111). The actor is entitled to glean some laughs from the repeated “as we thought”: he is obeying the larger instructions of the script, and “as we thought” is a pointer towards the whole.¹⁶ Having proposed itself as tragedy, the play converts into an intimation and promise of comedy. The narrator, defying the logic of therefore by law, wills the marvellous, the death-suspended, the comic, and the audience assents to the logic. The “law” will yield to a yet stronger force.

This force manifests itself through fantasy. The Comedy of Errors is organized along two lines of psychic advance. One is that of erotic promise, unbelievable good fortune, discovered identity, the fulfilment of all one's desires. The other is that of loss, shattered identity, pain. The first line is stronger, and its triumph never really in doubt. The second is always present, often uppermost, at all times shadowing the experience of cast and audience. Threat and promise make up the fantasies of this play, and we ought to catch at their blurred shapes.

IV

Antipholus of Syracuse has the largest speaking part, and channels much of the play's experience. His character-note is longing, a yearning for fulfilment in relationship; and the refused dinner-invitation leads to

Farewell till then. I will go lose myself,
And wander up and down to view the city.

(I. ii. 30-1)

For him the action is compounded of vague threats:

They say this town is full of cozenage,
As, nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,
Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,
Soul-killing witches that deform the body,
Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,
And many such-like liberties of sin.

(I. ii. 97-102)

and allure:

To me she speaks; she moves me for her theme.
What, was I married to her in my dream?
Or sleep I now and think I hear all this?
What error drives our eyes and ears amiss?
Until I know this sure uncertainty,
I'll entertain the offer'd fallacy.

(II. ii. 180-5)

The fear, be it noted, is of foreigners. The archetypal challenge to self comes from strangers. Equally, the invitation comes from the exotic, the alluringly strange. So, through the curtain of doubts:

Dromio S. This is the fairy
land. O spite of spites!
We talk with goblins, owls, and sprites:

(II. ii. 188-9)

and his own confusions:

Antipholus S. Am I in earth,
in heaven, or in hell?
Sleeping or waking, mad or well-advis'd?

(II. ii. 211-12)

Antipholus goes into the house:

I’ll say as they say, and persever so,
And in this mist at all adventures go.

(II. ii. 214-15)

The echoes are of a fairy world. There is the house, there is the fair witch, offering whatever inducement of gingerbread or blandishment that can tempt the hero—or victim. Antipholus, a little o'erparted with the hero-role, quakes: but enters.

The play now enters III. i. upon its most intense and symbolically resonant phase, for it becomes the experience of Antipholus of Ephesus, shut out from his own home. The situation is enduringly fascinating: modern folklore abounds with tales of people who slip out of their apartment for a moment, usually in déshabillé, and find themselves locked out with alarming consequences. No doubt some of the anecdotes are true, but the market is larger than the instances. Antipholus of Ephesus, rooted in the reality of his calling and on his home territory, sees the world transformed. The familiar marks crumble. Moreover, behind the obvious shock of exclusion, there is a profoundly disturbing sexual threat, one which commentators habitually ignore.

Act III, scene i, as all agree, is based on Plautus's Amphitruo. It was a popular grammar school text, and Baldwin thinks that Shakespeare read the Latin original in the fourth form.¹⁷ In the Plautine original, Amphitrion is shut out of his house, while Jupiter makes love to his wife Alcmena. Plautus dramatizes a primal fear. And a section of Shakespeare's audience would recognize the Plautine source. But the remainder of the audience would in any case receive the impression of sexual congress behind locked doors, which the play creates in its own right. The previous scene has ended on a note most favourable for Antipholus of Syracuse: Adriana is clearly in a mood to charm her husband, and is insistent that they are not to be disturbed:

Come, sir, to dinner. Dromio, keep the gate.
Husband, I'll dine above with you today
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.
Come, sister. Dromio, play the porter well.

(II. ii. 205-10)

The audience is now to be teased with a sexual fantasy.

It is confirmed in the heavy verbal underlining of III. i. There's an easy bawdry in

Dromio E. Let my master in,
Luce.
Luce Faith, no; he comes too late …
Dromio E. Have at you with a proverb:
Shall I set in my staff?

(49, 51)¹⁸

If Antipholus of Ephesus does not realize the appalling implications of his “Are you there, wife? You might have come before” (63), the Elizabethan audience will help him out. Dromio adds to the effect with “Your cake here is warm within” (71), “cake” being “woman”,¹⁹ and his next line, “It would make a man mad as a buck to be so bought and sold” presents his master as a male deer in rutting season, and a cuckold. The worst, so the audience is led to suppose, has happened. Antipholus thinks it too, and evidently plans a sexual revenge with the co-operation of the Courtesan:

I know a wench of excellent discourse,
Pretty and witty, wild, and yet, too, gentle,
There will we dine. This woman that I mean,
My wife—but, I protest, without desert—
Hath oftentimes upbraided me withal.
To her will we for dinner …
Since mine own doors refuse to entertain me,
I'll knock elsewhere, to see if they'll disdain me.

(109-14, 120-1)

“Knocking” is standard slang for sexual entry.²⁰ But above all, the double-entendres and bawdry of the text stem from the stage symbolism itself: the house, perceived from earliest times as the coding for woman, and the knocking at the gates, the male attempts at entry. The symbolism is the more charged if the nature of the inner action is considered. What is held before the audience as a theatrical possibility is incest.

Incest takes up some space in the canon. The remarriage of Gertrude to Claudius is held to be incestuous, and the charge is repeated in Hamlet's final words to Claudius (“thou incestuous, damnèd Dane”). Father-daughter incest appears in Pericles. Though not named by Henry, the “incest” of his marriage to his brother's widow is the core of the discussion in Henry VIII, II. iv. The word is a metaphor for the relations of Isabella and Claudio (“Is't not a kind of incest, to take life / From thine own sister's shame”, Measure for Measure, III. i. 138-9), and a type of hypocrisy for Lear: “thou simular of virtue / That art incestuous” (King Lear, III. ii. 54-5). Lucrece has “Guilty of incest, that abomination” (The Rape of Lucrece, 921). Richard III plans to marry his niece. If one takes the canon as a giant exploration of human consciousness, incest, in several of its variant forms, is more than a marginal presence in that consciousness. Here in III. i., at the midpoint of The Comedy of Errors,²¹ incest is the compelling fantasy which is held before the audience as a likely reality. It is the dark centre of a play shot with fitful visions. Has it happened?

No, it has not. Act III, scene ii, takes the audience away from the vertiginous edge, and conducts it towards sanity and order. It rapidly becomes clear that the encounter between Adriana and Antipholus of Syracuse has been a fiasco. Luciana's first line tells all: “And may it be that you have quite forgot / A husband's office?” which is plain enough speaking. Luciana upbraids Antipholus for the disastrous dinner-party—here as earlier the play anticipates Macbeth—and Antipholus confirms matters with “Your weeping sister is no wife of mine” (42), by which time, if not earlier, the audience must be aware that Shakespeare has been trifling shamelessly with its sensibilities. The play now modulates into mere comic dalliance with incest, for Luciana believes herself to be courted by her brother-in-law (which we know not to be true). A final tease is to come, for the actress is entitled to garner all she can from Adriana's “Which of you two did dine with me today?” (V. i. 369). But that is Shakespeare the professional milking a situation dry. The real message, which is one of reassurance, has come earlier through numerous channels. And here we should pause to take in one of them, the suggestions that link the action with England.

V

There is no doubt of the archaic character of this play. But it overstates matters to assert that “Shakespeare draws away from everything that is local or specialized in the drama of his day.”²² A residue of dramatic material obstinately insists that The Comedy of Errors is played before an English audience around 1590. The inn references are clear enough; theatregoers know and love hostelries. The “Centaur” and “Tiger” have not yet been located, but the “Phoenix”, thrice mentioned, was the sign of a London tavern and of a shop in Lombard Street. It is referred to in the prologue of Jonson's The Staple of News.²³ The “Porpentine”, mentioned five times, was the name of a Bankside inn; “Shakespeare's audience probably knew it well.”²⁴ The inn references function as psychic stabilizers. Then, money. This play has no truck with drachmas. Guilders it is for the Second Merchant and for Solinus, who also speaks of marks. Marks touches off some wry levity with the Dromios. The coinage of the last two acts is ducats. It appears that “Many foreign coins were in continual circulation in England during Elizabeth's reign”,²⁵ hence the coinage has a distinctly English, as well as Continental, reference. I do not know a more infallibly precise index to the nature of reality, throughout the canon, than money; and these guilders, marks and ducats figure the idea of the foreign at home which is basic to this play. They circulate happily with the honest sixpence, which turns up in the hand of Dromio of Ephesus. His brother takes charge of angels. And gold, of course, is much with us here: “universal, immutable, impartial” as de Gaulle observed. It is the true international currency of the mind.

Dromio's tour of modern Europe, focused on the symbolic geography of fat Nell (III. ii.), extends the audience's reassurance that all will be well. The theatrical point about topical references is that only a home-grown audience can get them. Whatever the precise meaning of “France … arm'd and reverted, making war against her heir” (III. ii. 122-4), the mental dimension of the passage is contemporary Europe, centred on England. Similarly, one makes jokes about Irish bogs and Scots barrenness from England. The comic lewdness of the passage defines its general import, a signal that the play is going to pull out of its baffling and vestigially frightening confusions.

England signifies reassurance. And this subliminal message has been sent even at the shock of III. i., the moment when Antipholus of Syracuse discovers that his own door is locked. Dromio, obeying his master's orders, shouts “Maud, Bridget, Marian, Cicely, Gillian, Ginn!” (31). Suddenly Roman, Greek, Biblical, Mediterranean cease to bear upon the dramatic experience. After all, we are back home. It is impossible to take seriously a setback in which we are excluded from Bridget and Maud. Typically of The Comedy of Errors, its playing with primal anxieties is accompanied by signals of primal comfort.

VI

Even so, the later phases of The Comedy of Errors handle archetypes of serious and compelling authority. Much of Act IV is spun out of purgatory, or hell.

Dromio S. No, he's in
Tartar limbo, worse than hell,
A devil in an everlasting garment hath him …
One that before the judgment carries poor souls to
hell.

(IV. ii. 32-3, 40)

Antipholus's “chain” (51) is in the logic of association the bondage of hell. There are hints of “redemption” (IV. ii. 46), and “Paradise” (IV. iii. 16), but the prevailing state is captivity, with “prison”, “sergeant” and “durance” the guiding terms. Deliverance is the ship, “the bark Expedition put forth tonight” (IV. iii. 37), which Antipholus of Syracuse, as in a dream, is unable to reach. Instead comes the Courtesan, “Mistress Satan … the devil's dam” (IV. iii. 48-50), to frighten Dromio of Syracuse. Hell, however comically rendered, is the motif of Act IV. It is a nightmare, a bondage from which the captive actors struggle to be free.

Hence, in the symbolic logic of the drama, hell modulates into devil and then into possession, which in turn yields to a ritual of exorcisement:

Dr Pinch I charge thee, Satan,
hous'd within this man,
To yield possession to my holy prayers
And to thy state of darkness hie thee straight!
I conjure thee by all the saints in heaven!

(IV. iv. 54-7)

Hell having been redefined as possession, the way is open for Act V's line of strategic advance. Exorcisement gives way to convalescence. Adriana sees the process purely as recovery, “And bear him home for his recovery” (V. i. 41), but the Abbess invests it with religious associations:

How long hath this possession held the man?
… he took this place for sanctuary,
And it shall privilege him from your hands
Till I have brought him to his wits again,
Or lose my labour in assaying it …
… I will not let him stir,
Till I have us'd the approved means I have,
With wholesome syrups, drugs, and holy prayers,
To make of him a formal man again.

(V. i. 44, 94-7, 102-5)

A ritual of healing is envisaged. The Priory, before whose gates the final action takes place, is the sanctuary of body and mind, the guarantor of the values of the close.

But these values are not achieved without an episode of significant turbulence. The cruel and anarchic spirit of comedy, now operating through Antipholus of Ephesus, breaks out of bondage and expresses a myth of liberation. It comes in two versions, the servant-messenger's:

My master and his man are both broke loose,
Beaten the maids a-row, and bound the doctor,
Whose beard they have sing'd off with brands of fire;
And ever, as it blaz'd, they threw on him
Great pails of puddled mire to quench the hair.
My master preaches patience to him, and the while
His man with scissors nicks him like a fool.

(V. i. 169-77)

and Antipholus's:

                   
Along with them
They brought one Pinch, a hungry lean-fac'd villain,
A mere anatomy, a mountebank,
A threadbare juggler and a fortune-teller,
A needy, hollow-ey'd, sharp looking wretch,
A living dead man. This pernicious slave,
Forsooth, took on him as a conjurer,
And gazing in mine eyes, feeling my pulse,
And with no face, as 'twere, outfacing me,
Cries out, I was possess'd. Then all together
They fell upon me, bound me, bore me thence
And in a dark and dankish vault at home
There left me and my man, both bound together,
Till, gnawing with my teeth my bonds in sunder,
I gain'd my freedom, and immediately
Ran hither to your Grace:

(V. i. 237-52)

The violence of this episode is evidently designed to release the emotional tensions created by the action. Liberation, we note, is accompanied by revenge: Antipholus of Ephesus goes in for outright torture of Dr Pinch, a feature he naturally omits from his report. That is why Shakespeare needs to plant two versions. In this most binary of plays, there are always two sides to events: what it looks like, and what it feels like. The messenger reports two dangerous lunatics on the rampage; Antipholus of Ephesus gives us the other side, the experience of hellish incarceration (in the “vault at home”) with the “living dead man”, a kind of zombie,²⁶ as the guardian of the underworld. Freedom becomes a plea to (and for) Grace. And, in the play's terms, grace is bestowed.

It takes on the form of a rebirth:

Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail
Of you, my sons, and till this present hour
My heavy burden ne'er delivered.

(V. i. 400-2)

says the Abbess, making the entire action the convulsions of delivery. The symbolism is confirmed in the lines which follow:

The Duke, my husband, and my children both,
And you the calendars of their nativity,
Go to a gossips' feast, and go with me;
After so long grief, such nativity!

(403-6)

As Alexander Leggatt notes, “the final image of security is not a wedding dance but a christening feast, a family celebration”.²⁷ With the naming of characters comes the affirmation of identity, family, society (for the Duke presides, as he should). The dark coupling at the centre of the play has led to a rebirth of the family, a restatement of relationship. And in keeping with the standard Shakespearean technique, the frankest statement of the implications is given to a clown:

Dromio S. She now shall be
my sister, not my wife.

(416)

The prohibition on incest is the foundation of the family. That, and the graceful settlement of the primogeniture issue, marks the decorous conclusion to the play. What the Dromios exit into, what the audience is left with, is home.²⁸

Notes

1. Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965) p. 77.

2. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1974) p. 81.

3. Geoffrey Bullough reprints three works as sources for The Comedy of Errors: the Menaechmi of Plautus; the Amphitruo of Plautus; and a portion of Gower's Confessio Amantis, that relating to the story of Apollonius of Tyre. See Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957-75) I, 12-54.

4. I quote from F. A. Hirtzel's edition of Virgil (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1900).

5. T. W. Baldwin, citing this and the shipwreck incident, believes “that Shakspere consciously borrows from the wandering Aeneas touches for his wandering Aegeon” (William Shakespere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1944) II, 487). Virgil Whitaker accepts that “The first scene is heavily indebted to Virgil's Aeneid for details of Aegeon's travels” (Shakespeare's Use of Learning (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1953) p. 85). For a dissenting view, see J. A. K. Thomson, Shakespeare and the Classics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1952) pp. 48-51: “But this line ‘infandum, regina …’ was so well known and so often quoted and imitated … that familiarity with it would not of itself prove acquaintance with the Aeneid” (p. 50). Similarly, Thomson doubts that Shakespeare read Plautus in the original.

6. A. H. Nason reproduces the record of James Shirley in the fifth form of Merchant Taylors' School. Cicero's first oration In Catilinem led inexorably to the second book of the Aeneid. See James Shirley, Dramatist (1915; reprt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967) facing p. 21.

7. John Dean, “Constant Wanderings and Longed-for Returns: Odyssean Themes in Shakespearean Romance”, Mosaic, 12 (1978) 50-1.

8. Ibid., 50, n. 11. It is accepted that Aegeon also recalls the story Apollonius of Tyre, via Gower's version: “a moderately literate or experienced playgoer listening to Egeon's story could have responded to the echoes in it from the best known of exemplary romances, Apollonius of Tyre”, a story which originated as a Latin romance of the third century a.d. See Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 1974) p. 62 et seq.

9. R. A. Foakes, in his New Arden edition of The Comedy of Errors (London: Methuen, 1962), notes the allusion to the Odyssey and adds: “This line is the culmination of the images of transformation.”

10. Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, VIII, 245.

11. For the “Christianizing” idea of Ephesus, see ibid., I, 10; Foakes (ed.), Comedy of Errors, pp. xxix, 113-15.

12. Alex Aronson reviews the “hostile brother” motif (though without reference to The Comedy of Errors) in Psyche and Symbol in Shakespeare (Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana Press, 1972) pp. 113-25.

13. C. G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of Self, 2nd edn (Princeton University Press, 1968) p. 13.

14. Frye, A Natural Perspective, p. 57.

15. J. C. Trewin bears down hard on such directors, in Going to Shakespeare (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978) pp. 47-8: “it was not hard for a director to find appropriate emphases for a yawning Duke: ‘Well, Syracusian, say in brief the cause’”.

16. One would naturally add the information given in the playbill, but there are always some members of the audience who do not take it in. Every box-office manager can tell strange tales of disappointed ticket-holders.

17. Baldwin, Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, I, 326.

18. The Riverside edition, like Bevington, accepts “staff” as bawdy.

19. Foakes (ed.), Comedy of Errors, p. 46; and E. A. M. Colman, The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare (London: Longmans, 1974) p. 187.

20. See the entries on knock in J. S. Farmer and W. E. Henley, Slang and its Analogues: Past and Present (reprt. in 3 vols, New York: Kraus Reprint, 1965); and Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 2 vols, 5th edn (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961).

21. It is perhaps worth noting that this play's structure depends on a “split” centre. Act III has two scenes, and not, as so often in Shakespeare, three.

22. Frye, A Natural Perspective, p. 58.

23. Foakes (ed.), Comedy of Errors, p. 16.

24. C. J. Sisson, New Readings in Shakespeare, 2 vols (London: Dawson, 1956) I, 93: quoted by Foakes (ed.), Comedy of Errors, p. 49, who also notes that a London brothel bore the name.

25. Foakes, ibid., p. 4.

26. For zombie, Webster's Third New International Dictionary has (lb) “the supernatural power or essence that according to voodoo belief may enter into and reanimate a dead body”.

27. Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London: Methuen, 1974) p. 17.

28. There are 41 references to “home” in The Comedy of Errors, more than for any other play in the canon.