SOURCE: “Egeon's Friends and Relations: The Comedy of Errors,” in Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealths, University of Toronto Press, 1993, pp. 13-31.

[In the essay below, Slights studies the portrayal of personal and political relations in The Comedy of Errors.]

‘We being strangers here, how dar'st
thou trust …’

(I.ii.60)

Preaching on Ephesians 5, a text that seems to lie behind the setting of The Comedy of Errors,¹ John Donne offers an analysis of the essential nature of all human societies since the birth of Eve's first son: ‘from that beginning to the end of the world, these three relations, of Master and Servant, Man and Wife, Father and Children, have been, and ever shall be the materialls, and the elements of all society, of families, and of Cities, and of Kingdomes.’² Whether or not all societies of all times consist of these three relationships, as Donne alleges, The Comedy of Errors does. The reunion of Egeon with his wife and sons provides the telos of the plot, and the scenes of mistaken identity that constitute the action ring changes on confused relations between master and servant and husband and wife. The comedy is also consistent with Donne's analysis in its representation of these relations as forms of power. According to Donne, ‘(because the principall foundation, and preservation of all States that are to continue, is power) the first relation was between Prince and Subject, when God said to Man, Subjicite & dominamini, subdue and govern all Creatures; The second relation was between husband and wife … ; And the third relation was between parents and children’ (113-14). In the play, a ruler demonstrates his power by sentencing a man to death in the first scene and by rescinding the sentence in the last. In the intervening scenes, confusions of identity are manifested by masters beating the wrong servants and by a husband and wife's struggle for power.

A third significant parallel between the play's representation of society and Donne's account is the connection between the human and non-human worlds. In Donne's exposition, the relationship between prince and subject was established ‘when God said to Man, Subjicite & dominamini, subdue and govern all Creatures.’ In the comedy, Luciana explains that ‘Man’ is

Lord of the wide world and wild wat'ry seas,
Indu'd with intellectual sense and souls,
Of more pre-eminence than fish and fowls.

(II.i.21-3)

As the immediate context of these lines specifies, the man who dominates physical nature in Luciana's account is not inclusively human but, rather, exclusively male:

There's nothing situate under heaven's eye
But hath his bound in earth, in sea, in sky.
The beasts, the fishes, and the winged fowls
Are their males' subjects and at their controls:
Man, more divine, the master of all these,
Lord of the wide world and wild wat'ry seas,
Indu'd with intellectual sense and souls,
Of more pre-eminence than fish and fowls,
Are masters to their females, and their lords.

(II.i.16-24)

In both accounts, then, the relations of dominance and subjection in human affairs are natural and necessary and posited on human control of physical nature.

Donne's version suggests that these arrangements serve human convenience—the ‘preservation of all States’—but the emphasis is on the divine institution of this distribution of power: ‘God said to Man, Subjicite & dominamini.’ In fact, Donne derives the structure of human society from the nature of the Godhead: ‘God was always alone in heaven, there were no other Gods … but he was never singular, there was never any time, when there were not three persons in heaven … As then God seemes to have been eternally delighted, with this eternall generation, (with persons that had ever a relation to one another, Father, and Sonne) so when he came to the Creation of this lower world, he came presently to those three relations, of which the whole frame of this world consists' (5:113). Luciana, intent on reconciling her angry sister to her wayward husband, describes men as ‘more divine’ than the rest of creation and refers to ‘heaven's eye,’ thus suggesting divine approval of the distribution of human power. But the play as a whole treats human society not as divinely ordained but as practically necessary. The misadventures of Shakespeare's hapless twins occur in a world where human society is a necessary protection against the harsh conditions of physical existence. In the opening scene, Egeon's account of the shipwreck that started his troubles evokes the dangerous world beyond the boundaries of the city. The violence of wind and water and ‘mighty rock’ (I.i.101) dispersed his family. Subjected to an unjust Fortune (I.i.105) and unpitied by the ‘merciless’ gods (I.i.98-9), Egeon hopes only that people will know that his misfortune ‘Was wrought by nature, not by vile offense’ (I.i.34).

Although Egeon protests that the world of physical nature is unjust and merciless, he does not perceive it as random or chaotic. He registers no surprise or awe at the ocean storm that began his misfortune, recalling matter-of-factly:

A league from Epidamium had we sail'd
Before the always-wind-obeying deep
Gave any tragic instance of our harm.

(I.i.62-4)

As the waves obeyed the wind, so the people in their makeshift boat were ‘obedient to the stream’ (I.i.86) until the more powerful sun dispersed the storm and calmed the seas. Egeon assumes that the physical world follows its own laws by which the inferior is obedient to the superior. Egeon and his family, without their ship and abandoned by its crew, are helpless against the superior power of violent nature. After the shipwreck, Egeon and his wife managed to save their lives and those of the two pairs of infant boys in their care by fastening themselves to the small masts which ‘sea-faring men provide for storms’ (I.i.80) until they were rescued by ships from Corinth and Epidaurus. Evidently, then, men can become lords ‘of the wide world and wild wat'ry seas’ (II.i.21) only in concert with others of their kind. In an orderly society people can protect themselves and establish control over nature. Thus when Egeon's search for his family brings him to Ephesus, he defers without protest to Ephesian authority. Solinus, the Duke of Ephesus who sentences Egeon to death as an enemy alien, justifies his action not as an expression of his divinely granted personal right to rule but as the application of a law he is powerless to change. He justifies the law not as an embodiment of natural law or of transcendental justice but as an exercise of the power and responsibility of the state to protect its citizens against an external enemy. He explains that both the Syracusians and the Ephesians have decreed

To admit no traffic to our adverse towns:
Nay more, if any born at Ephesus be seen
At any Syracusian marts and fairs;
Again, if any Syracusian born
Come to the bay of Ephesus, he dies,
His goods confiscate to the Duke's dispose,
Unless a thousand marks be levied
To quit the penalty and to ransom him.

(I.i.15-22)

Personally, Solinus pities Egeon as an innocent victim of ‘dire mishap’ (I.i.141), but officially, he sentences him to death according to Ephesian law. The power of the state exists to protect its own citizens; Egeon, deprived of relationships with his ruler and his family, is outside society and so ‘Hopeless and helpless’ (I.i.157).

Throughout The Comedy of Errors the importance attached to belonging to society is suggested both by the amount of dialogue directly concerned with social machinery like making appointments and paying bills and by the play's imagery, which typically is drawn from the details of social activity. For example, when Antipholus of Syracuse woos Luciana, after one fairly perfunctory reference to her as a ‘fair sun’, he avoids the roses, stars, and pearls of traditional love talk and praises her instead as ‘My food, my fortune, and my sweet hope's aim’ (III.ii.56, 63). Nature imagery in this play usually suggests danger and destruction rather than beauty or fertility. Thus Egeon thinks how old age brings changes that hide his identity in ‘sap-consuming winter's drizzled snow’ (V.i.313). And Antipholus of Syracuse expresses his loneliness far from home by likening himself to ‘a drop of water’ in the vast, formless ocean (I.ii.35). Even Antipholus' vision of Luciana as a mermaid contains as much fear as admiration:

Sing, siren, for thyself, and I will dote;
Spread o'er the silver waves thy golden hairs,
And as a bed I'll take them, and there lie,
And in that glorious supposition think
He gains by death that hath such means to die.

(III.ii.47-51)

Although Antipholus feels willing to submit to the destructive sexual element at this point, he soon decides to flee from the ‘mermaid's song’ that has ‘almost made me traitor to myself’ (III.ii.164, 162).

The characters in The Comedy of Errors are social beings who habitually contrast the familiarity and safety of human society with the dangers outside its boundaries. They see the world of nature as threatening but ordered according to a hierarchical pattern in which people participate. They defer to the Duke and look to him to settle their disputes. The subjection of servants to masters is similarly unquestioned. The relationship of the two Dromios to their masters is neither servile nor solemnly formal. Antipholus of Syracuse, for example, is obviously fond of the ‘trusty villain’ who, ‘When I am dull with care and melancholy, / Lightens my humor with his merry jests’ (I.ii.19-21), but there is no question but that the servant must submit to his master's power. As Dromio ruefully acknowledges, he must obey orders ‘although against my will, / For servants must their masters' minds fulfill’ (IV.i.112-13).

Some critics have seen a conflict between two incompatible views of marriage in Adriana's bitter complaints about her husband and Luciana's advocacy of wifely submission. To Peter Phialas, for example, Luciana represents romantic love, whereas Adriana is the shrewish wife, ‘who thinks of love in terms of possession, ownership, and mastery’ and ‘rejects the notion that the man should be master in the home.’³ But Luciana makes an odd advocate for romantic love. Her primary motive is to quell open dissension. She reprimands Adriana for being insufficiently submissive, and she urges Antipholus to conceal his infidelities from his wife: ‘if you like elsewhere, do it by stealth’; ‘Be secret-false: what need she be acquainted?’ (III.ii.7, 15). Adriana's complaints serve not to contrast with her sister's romanticism but to elicit a defense of the gender hierarchy within marriage. When Adriana asks, ‘Why should their [men's] liberty than ours be more?’ (II.i.10), Luciana tells her at length in the passage quoted earlier. And in spite of protesting against Antipholus' infidelities, Adriana never questions her duty to love, honor, and obey her husband. She describes Antipholus to the Duke as ‘my husband, / Who I made lord of me and all I had’ (V.i.136-7). Nor is this public orthodoxy belied by private rebellion. Her self-abasement to the man she takes to be her strangely standoffish husband should satisfy the most demanding proponent of male domination:

Thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine,
Whose weakness, married to thy stronger state,
Makes me with thy strength to communicate:
If aught possess thee from me, it is dross,
Usurping ivy, brier, or idle moss,
Who, all for want of pruning, with intrusion
Infect thy sap, and live on thy confusion.

(II.ii.174-80)⁴

Thus, although Luciana's counsels of avoidance and appeasement contrast with Adriana's bitterness, their basic understandings of marital obligations do not differ. In spite of twentieth-century interpretations of Adriana as a portrait of a sixteeth-century shrew, her insistence on her husband's marital responsibilities is remarkably similar to John Donne's interpretation of St. Paul on marriage. According to Donne, ‘The generall duty, that goes through all these three relations, is … Submit your selves to one another, in the feare of God; for God hath given no Master such imperiousnesse, no husband such a superiority, no father such a soverainty, but that there lies a burden upon them too … The wife is to submit herselfe; and so is the husband too’ (5:114). The nature of that submission, he says, ‘is love: Husbands love your wives’ (115). Although the Ephesians in The Comedy of Errors give no evidence of knowing St. Paul much less the Dean of St. Paul's, they assume a similar view of social hierarchy. Even in her defense of male supremacy, Luciana stipulates that ‘There's nothing situate under heaven's eye / But hath his bound’ (II.i.16-17), and she and Balthasar, as well as Adriana, try to recall Antipholus to his ‘husband's office’ (III. ii.2. cf. III.i.85-106).

The corollary of the duty of mutual submission and assistance, Donne observes, is the interdependence of master and servant, husband and wife, father and son: ‘They depend upon one another, and therefore he that hath not care of his fellow, destroys himselfe’ (114). Similarly, Balthasar assumes the mutual dependency of husband and wife when he argues that Antipholus' violent assault on the locked door of his house would dishonor both him and his wife, and Adriana invokes this concept when she berates Antipholus for rejecting her. She begs Antipholus not to ‘look strange and frown’ (II.ii.110) because ‘thou art then estranged from thyself’:

Thyself I call it, being strange to me,
That, undividable incorporate,
Am better than thy dear self's better part.
Ah, do not tear away thyself from me.

(II.ii.120-4)⁵

For either wife or husband to violate their marriage vows is to damage both:

For if we two be one, and thou play false,
I do digest the poison of thy flesh,
Being strumpeted by thy contagion.
Keep then fair league and truce with thy true bed,
I live dis-stain'd, thou undishonored.

(II.ii.142-6)

This plea for love and fidelity is not the tirade of a comic virago bent on mastery.

Parental authority does not cause the frustration and suffering that the power of masters and husband does for the Dromios and Adriana. No one neglects his or her obligations as parent or child, and no character is moved to instruct another in the duties of care and love. But the obligations of parents and children are nevertheless a source of dramatic tension. Egeon's narrative of the shipwreck assumes that parents are responsible for protecting their children and emphasizes his helpless inability to save his babies from disaster. Even more poignantly, in the last scene Egeon mistakes Antipholus of Ephesus, who has not seen his father since infancy, for his twin brother. Egeon's initial certainty that his son will save his life withers before Antipholus' blank incomprehension, and Egeon concludes that his son is ashamed to acknowledge a miserable old man as his father.

Since for these characters, as for Donne, the constitutive elements of society are personal relationships, a man without political or family ties remains pretty much at sea. Antipholus of Syracuse is not threatened with death as his father is, but he is nonetheless aware of his vulnerability as an outsider. Arriving in a strange city without any established relationships, he feels that he is losing his individual identity:

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), ah, lose myself.

(I.ii.35-40)

Loss of personal relationships brings physical danger as well as psychological disorientation. ‘We being strangers here’ must be constantly on guard (I.ii.60), Antipholus warns his servant Dromio.

If the literal loss of home and family is fraught with danger, so too is the disruption of basic relationships. Adriana warns her husband that he cannot neglect their relationship without injuring her identity and his own:

For know, my love, as easy mayst 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.125-9)

While Antipholus of Syracuse uses the water-drop analogy to express fear that his personal identity is dissolving in a sea of undifferentiated humanity, Adriana uses the same image to argue the complementary point that a separable, autonomous self cannot exist independent of human relationships. Anyone who deliberately damages his basic social relationships is dangerously self-destructive and anti-social. In The Comedy of Errors conflict arises not from competing values or goals but from mistaken identities in the context of universal dependence on social roles.

Despite my misleadingly solemn account of attitudes towards society in The Comedy of Errors, dependence on social relations is central to the play's comic tone. Its humor is posited on the decorum demanded by social roles. The scenes of mistaken identity are not of the kind where a dignified, solemn man is taken for and treated as a notorious libertine. Individual temperament has little—and the responsibilities of social role much—to do with the comedy. For example, Adriana's eloquent plea against marital estrangement creates humor rather than pathos because it is addressed to the wrong man and elicits the comically deflating response—but I am a stranger:

Plead you to me, fair dame? I know you not:
In Ephesus I am but two hours old,
As strange unto your town as to your talk.

(II.ii.147-9)

The assumption that the husband is master of the house creates comic incongruity when Antipholus of Ephesus brings friends home for dinner. As the scene begins, Antipholus is feeling some misgivings at being late and arranges for a friend to provide an excuse for his tardiness, but his apology that ‘My wife is shrewish when I keep not hours’ (III.i.2) is clearly jovial in tone. He confidently expects his wife to welcome his guest. To Balthasar's courteous demur, ‘Small cheer and great welcome makes a merry feast’ (III.i.26), Antipholus responds with the polite diffidence of a man who takes pride in the hospitality he offers:

Ay, to a niggardly host and more sparing guest:
But though my cates be mean, take them in good part;
Better cheer you may have, but not with better heart.

(III.i.27-9)

This elaborate exchange of compliments anticipates the civilities with which King Duncan is made welcome to Dunsinane and serves a similar purpose, indicating through a minor social ritual the intricate network of pride, humility, deference, and hospitality that binds a community together. The shattering of the promised welcome is much less sinister in the comedy than in the tragedy, but no less complete. Antipholus finds the door locked against him and himself defied and ridiculed by his servants and repudiated by his wife. At these blows to his belief that the household is his to command, Antipholus passes quickly and ludicrously through bewilderment, embarrassment, shock, and rage.

A similar comedy of crossed purposes takes place when Luciana hears declarations of love from a man she believes to be her sister's husband or when one of the Dromios delivers a message to his master's uncomprehending twin. For example, when Dromio of Ephesus proudly delivers the rope he has been sent to find while his master impatiently expects the bail money that can release him from arrest, they sound like Abbott and Costello discussing ‘Who's on first’:

e. ant. How now, sir? have
you that I sent you for?
e. dro. Here's that, I warrant
you, will pay them all.
e. ant. But where's the money?
e. dro. Why, sir, I gave the money
for the rope.
e. ant. Five hundred ducats, villain,
for a rope?
e. dro. I'll serve you, sir,
five hundred at the rate.
e. ant. To what end did I bid thee
hie thee home?
e. dro. To a rope's end, sir,
and to that end am I return'd.
e. ant. And to that end, sir, I
will welcome you.
                                        [Beats Dromio.]

(IV. iv.9-17)

The comic point is that in spite of their mutual acceptance of the terms of their relationship both the master's power and the servant's obedience are totally futile.

Thus the usual judgment that The Comedy of Errors relies on farce and physical comedy is only partly accurate. The play certainly contains a good deal of slapstick and lacks scenes of such multiple ironies as that where Rosalind disguised as Ganymede plays the part of Rosalind and warns Orlando that as a wife she will be ‘more jealous of thee than a Barbary cock-pigeon over his hen’ (AYL, IV.i.150-1). But the earlier comedy is not simple. When Adriana turns her sarcasm and eloquence on her husband's genuinely mystified twin brother or when she unleashes Doctor Pinch on her true husband because she is trying to do her duty by the ‘poor distressed soul’ (IV.iv.59), Shakespeare has given several twists to the stock portrayal of shrewish wives and tormented husbands. The central irony is that the bitterest quarrels grow out of fundamental agreement. In the last scene when Antipholus appeals to the Duke for justice against Adriana, he charges that his wife has ‘shut the doors upon me’ (V.i.204). Antipholus' complaint interrupts Adriana's appeal for justice against the Abbess, who ‘shuts the gates’ (V.i.156) and so frustrates her determination to take her husband home where she can care for him:

I will attend my husband, be his nurse,
Diet his sickness, for it is my office,
And will have no attorney but myself.

(V.i.98-100)

Antipholus' outrage and Adriana's insistence on the duties of her ‘office’ (V.i.99) emphasize their mutual adherence to the norms of conduct defined by social role. Similarly, Antipholus of Syracuse, who delivers short lectures on the art of domestic service—‘If you will jest with me, know my aspect, / And fashion your demeanor to my looks’ (II.ii.32-3)—is understandably exasperated when his servant appears to flout him deliberately and repeatedly. And, of course, both Dromios are no less frustrated that their faithful diligence consistently provokes scoldings and beatings.

A complex picture of the strength and fragility of the human relationships that constitute society emerges from these confusions. The complications of plot pit the individual characters' sense of themselves as unique and irreplaceable against their dependence on other people for their sense of who they are and against the fact that to other people they are indistinguishable from each other. In III. i., when an unknown and unseen porter calling himself Dromio refuses entrance to the master of the house, the response by Dromio of Ephesus epitomizes the baffling predicament experienced by all the major characters:

O villain, thou hast stol'n both mine office and my name:
The one ne'er got me credit, the other mickle blame.
If thou hadst been Dromio to-day in my place,
Thou wouldst have chang'd thy face for a name, or thy name for
an ass.

(III. i.44-7)

On the one hand, Dromio is denied the social role that defines his identity. On the other, the faithful performance of that role has unpredictable, incomprehensible, often unpleasant results. Dromio himself is aware of that much about his own experience. Only the audience appreciates the further irony that the man addressed has, in fact, ‘been Dromio to-day in [his] place’ and beaten as an ass.

The Comedy of Errors presents the tension between the characters' sense of uniqueness and their dependence on precarious social identities as both terrifying and absurd. After the introductory dialogue between Egeon and Duke Solinus demonstrates the life-and-death stakes of belonging, the play transforms nightmare into absurdity, projecting the deep fear of being excluded or rejected from society in a series of hilarious misadventures. All the major characters undergo the Kafkaesque experience of suddenly finding themselves in a nightmare world of strange transformations and inexplicable events. But, of course, in Shakespeare's play the audience knows the simple facts that can explain the inexplicable and replace bewildering rejection with recognition and acceptance. Our awareness that all will end happily when the pairs of twins eventually meet (as we are sure they will) dissipates the potential terror and enables us to laugh freely at the increasing confusion.

The mistakes that make up the plot take the form of violations of social conventions. Since such artificial systems as those governing time, money, and law provide the coherence and stability necessary for society, even minor infractions of these conventions disturb social harmony.⁶ In Shakespeare's Ephesus, persistent violations almost destroy all social order. In one sense, of course, time is a natural reality over which people have no control. Egeon, for example, attributes his son's failure to recognize him to the unavoidable changes brought by ‘time's extremity’ (V.i.308). Even Luciana's exposition of man's dominion over nature acknowledges that ‘Time is their master’ (II.i.8). But of more importance in this play than the ineluctable passing of time is the human ordering of time. Significantly, Luciana continues: ‘Time is their master, and when they see time, / They'll go or come’ (II.i.8-9). The confusions pivot on how people see and measure time. Because Antipholus of Ephesus does not come home at the conventional dinner hour, his wife goes out to find him and brings his twin home in his place. Because Angelo the jeweler fails to deliver the chain Antipholus of Ephesus has ordered at the time and place arranged, he gives it instead to the wrong Antipholus. Thus, failures in punctuality lead to Antipholus' humiliating exclusion from his house and to his arrest for debt when he refuses to pay for a chain he never received. These actual mistimings are hopelessly entangled with apparent ones. In the first scene of mistaken identity, Antipholus of Syracuse and Dromio of Ephesus accuse each other of being guilty of mistiming. Dromio, sent by his impatient mistress to bring her delinquent husband home to dinner, accuses Antipholus of being late, while Antipholus, who has ordered his servant to wait for him at the inn, accuses the wrong Dromio of returning too soon and interprets his talk of a waiting wife and dinner as jokes that are ‘out of season’ (I.ii.68). Similarly, when Antipholus next meets the true Dromio of Syracuse, he beats his servant for denying the earlier conversation ‘a second time,’ and Dromio protests at being ‘thus beaten out of season’ (II.ii.46, 47).

Just as Antipholus' and Dromio's real and apparent mistimings are interpreted as breaches of their duties as husband and servant, so too the confusions over money are perceived as violations of the obligations imposed by social role. Money is valued primarily not for any intrinsic worth nor as a means for securing goods and services but as a symbol of the trust necessary for the social exchanges that form human relationships. The chain Antipholus has promised his wife is the source of most of the confusion. When Antipholus decides to give the chain to the courtesan in revenge for Adriana's locking him out, he is symbolically rejecting his role as husband, although he wants to see his action as an expensive prank rather than a serious repudiation of his marriage.⁷ When he denies receiving the chain and refuses to pay for it, the jeweler is most outraged by the impeachment of his ‘credit’ and ‘reputation’ (IV.i.68, 71). Conversely, when Antipholus of Syracuse receives the chain and the money intended for his brother's bail, they have little value to him because they have no part in comprehensible human relationships. In spite of the mysterious generosity of the Ephesians, he plans to flee as quickly as possible from a place where ‘every one knows us, and we know none’ (III.ii.152).

While most of the incidents in the plot revolve around discrepancies in how people see time and money, the law is the primary concern at the beginning and end of the play. As we have seen, in Act I the violation of a law directed against natives of Syracuse puts Egeon's life at risk. By Act V all the confusions over time and money have become questions of law, as the Ephesians appeal for justice to the Duke as the guardian of social order. But both the Duke's conscientious execution of his office and the respect for his authority by both Ephesians and strangers are ineffectual. Until the two pairs of twins finally meet at the end of the play, respect for law and order merely exacerbates confusion. The comedy of errors reaches its climax in Act V as Adriana and Antipholus of Ephesus, supported by a bewildering cloud of contradictory witnesses, demand justice and testify to totally incompatible versions of what has happened, and the poor Duke concludes that they are all mad. With the Duke's inability to dispense justice and establish order, the relations between parents and children, master and servant, husband and wife, and creditor and debtor have broken down, and all social structure seems ready to collapse in chaos.

When social structures cease to function in this world where individuals are helpless against nature and fate, the only possible responses seem to be hopeless resignation, ineffectual anger, or patient suffering of what cannot be avoided. The first alternative is Egeon's habitual reaction. Far from begging for mercy from the Duke, he urges on his own execution:

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

(I.i.1-2; cf. 26-7)

As he reluctantly tells the story of his misfortunes, he reveals that in the earlier catastrophe also he ‘would gladly have embrac'd’ (I.i.69) death but that the tears of his wife and babies forced him to ‘seek delays’ (I.i.74). To the Duke's offer of time in which to raise money for the fine and so to save his life, he responds despairingly:

Hopeless and helpless doth Egeon wend,
But to procrastinate his liveless end.

(I.i.157-8)

The other characters react to their troubles with a good deal more excitement and energy. Anger is the usual response. Antipholus of Ephesus threatens to pluck out his wife's eyes. Adriana reviles her husband as deformed in mind and body and threatens to crack her servant's skull. Both Antipholi repeatedly curse, threaten, and beat whichever Dromio is within reach. Like Egeon's hopelessness, the Ephesians' violence is not new. In the first scene of mistaken identity, Dromio of Ephesus' answer to Antipholus of Syracuse's inquiry about his thousand pounds indicates the angry violence of ordinary life in Ephesus:

I have some marks of yours about my pate;
Some of my mistress' marks upon my shoulders;
But not a thousand marks between you both.
If I should pay your worship those again,
Perchance you will not bear them patiently.

(I.ii.82-6)

Patience, the third response, is often preached but seldom practiced. When Luciana counsels Adriana to bear her husband's transgressions patiently, Adriana interprets the advice as the ignorance of inexperience:

So thou, that hast no unkind mate to grieve thee,
With urging helpless patience would relieve me;
But if thou live to see like right bereft,
This fool-begg'd patience in thee will be left.

(II.i.38-41)

Her husband, who is frequently advised to be patient, is even more decisive in his contempt for patience. When Antipholus and Dromio escape from Doctor Pinch's ungentle ministrations, the finishing touch to their revenge is a sarcastic exhortation to patience:

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 piles 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.169-75)

Appeals to patience are no more effective than appeals to marital love and loyalty in the face of outright denial of identity and relationship.

The aggressive impatience of the characters in this reworking of a Plautine comedy comments irreverently on the classical concept of patience. Although some Renaissance humanists found moral guidance in discussions by classical authors of the virtue of enduring adversity with equanimity, others contrasted the classical concept of patience as passive endurance based on control of passion by reason with Christian patience, an active virtue based on faith and hope. While classical patience was summed up in the proverb ‘Bear and forbear,’ a patient Christian, maintaining faith in a providential order in spite of adversity, avoids both wrath and despair and lives in obedience and charity.⁸ The virtue recommended in Ephesus is essentially the self-protective discretion of classical patience. Thus, Luciana argues that a wife should ‘forbear’ (II.i.31) if her husband strays because jealousy is ‘self-harming’ (II.i.102), and Balthasar advises Antipholus to control his anger because creating a public scandal would damage his reputation. Christian patience is exemplified by the Abbess, who turns out to be Aemilia, the long-lost wife and mother. Her reputation as a ‘virtuous and a reverend lady’ (V.i.134), her religious vocation during the years of the family's dispersal, and the calm dignity with which she performs the ‘charitable duty of [her] order’ (V.i.107) contrast with the intemperate anger of Adriana and Antipholus of Ephesus and with the despairing hopelessness of Egeon. In spite of her life of ‘long grief’ (V.i.407), she neither wishes for death nor strikes out at others but sets herself against ‘grim and comfortless despair’ and the ‘infectious troop / Of pale distemperatures and foes to life’ (V.i.80, 81-2).

When all this has been said, however, it is still evident that The Comedy of Errors is not a cautionary tale demonstrating the evil consequences of impatience.⁹ The patient Abbess doesn't appear until the last scene where her despairing husband and impetuous and angry sons fare as well as she. The characters' follies and vices do not cause the plot complications. In fact, their occasional lapses into patience cause as much confusion as their more usual impatience. When Antipholus of Ephesus threatens to break down the door of his house, Balthasar counsels patience: ‘Have patience, sir, O, let it not be so!’; ‘Be rul'd by me, depart in patience’ (III.i.85, 94). Antipholus uncharacteristically agrees, ‘You have prevail'd. I will depart in quiet’ (III.i.107)—and so effectively postpones the discovery of his unknown twin.

The bizarre experiences suffered in Shakespeare's Ephesus do not demonstrate the need for patience or test individual character in adversity so much as they demonstrate that without shared social structures reality becomes unintelligible. In the last scene, Duke Solinus responds to the deluge of incompatible evidence by observing, ‘I think you all have drunk of Circe's cup’ (V.i.271), and then a few lines later concludes, ‘I think you are all … stark mad’ (V.i.282). The Duke is not alone in deciding that everyone in Ephesus is either mad or bewitched. Although conventions such as the time set for meals and the alacrity with which bills should be paid are artificial and arbitrary, they are so basic to social functioning that the persistent collision of discrepant views violently disrupts the relations between people. The loss of such social roles as husband, wife, and servant threatens the characters' sense of their own identities and destroys their sense of reality. To explain such utter confusion they have recourse to theories of madness or magic. Antipholus of Syracuse finds the experience of being assigned new identities by strangers so disorienting that he doubts his own sanity, wondering whether he is ‘Sleeping or waking, mad or well-advis'd’ (II.ii.213; cf. IV.iii.42). More often, he favors the theory that he is surrounded by the supernatural. In his first appearance he remembers that Ephesus has a reputation for magic and sorcery, and his subsequent experiences confirm his suspicion that ‘There's none but witches do inhabit here’ (III.ii.156). Meanwhile the intermittent appearances of the two Antipholi convince the Ephesians that the Antipholus they know and love has gone mad. At first Adriana does not take literally Dromio's charge that his master is ‘stark mad’ (II.i.59). But when she hears that Antipholus is not merely inconsiderate of members of his household but publicly abusing social relationships, she changes her mind. After the courtesan reports that Antipholus has taken a ring from her in exchange for a chain and then refused to give her the chain, Adriana decides that such anti-social behavior justifies the conclusion that Antipholus is mad. ‘His incivility,’ she reasons, ‘confirms no less’ (IV.iv.46).

The hypotheses of insanity and witchcraft are essential to the play's structural dynamics, in which a movement towards isolation pulls against a movement towards cohesion. While the audience anticipates a meeting of the two Antipholi where all problems will instantly evaporate, these expectations are repeatedly frustrated by the characters' efforts to isolate madmen and to escape from sorcerers. Initially Antipholus of Syracuse is as open to experience as any traveler, planning to wander around Ephesus to ‘view the manners of the town, / Peruse the traders, gaze upon the buildings’ (I.ii.12-13), and he first reacts to the experience of being greeted by name and claimed as husband by a woman he has never before seen in a spirit of adventure, deciding to withhold judgment and ‘in this mist at all adventures go’ (II.ii.216). But in his next appearance he begins to make arrangements to leave Ephesus. In spite of the attractions of the enchanting Luciana, he plans to board the first ship leaving Ephesus, and in every subsequent appearance he repeats his intention of fleeing from the land of magic and sorcery. Dromio's delivery to the wrong Antipholus of the message that a ship is ready, the wind favorable, and their baggage on board promises some delay, but when Antipholus of Syracuse next appears he is more than ever convinced that the gifts showered on him are only ‘imaginary wiles’ (IV.iii.10) and receives the news that all is ready for departure. He then runs from the courtesan as a ‘devil’ (IV.iii.50) or ‘fiend’ (IV.iii.65), rejects Dromio's plea to stay a while, and exits in full flight for the ship leaving Ephesus that night.

By his growing determination to leave, Antipholus of Syracuse introduces the possibility that he may miss encountering his brother. For Antipholus of Ephesus, meanwhile, the consequence of being supplanted in his social identity by his twin is progressive isolation: locked out of his house, arrested for debt, and finally left bound and gagged in a dark room by Doctor Pinch, whom Adriana hires to cure her husband's madness. The absurdity of the Doctor Pinch episode consists in the fact that Adriana's solicitude for her husband convinces him that she is engaged in a sinister conspiracy against him. The further irony is that the cases of both Antipholi are seen as individual problems and treated by withdrawal and isolation whereas actually they are part of a common mistake that can be corrected only by convergence.

The reunion of twins that corrects errors and restores order does not result from recognizing the disintegrative effects of isolating the strange and incomprehensible. If human agency contributes to the happy ending, it is not through individual perspicacity but through the conventions of time, money, and law. By trying to collect the money owed them, Angelo and the Second Merchant interrupt the departure of Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse and drive them to take refuge in the priory. Similarly, the expectation of justice from the Duke leads all the aggrieved citizens of Ephesus to converge around him. Moreover, although the presence of Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse in the priory is a happy accident, the gathering in front of the priory at 5 o'clock is not entirely coincidental. Egeon's execution is scheduled for 5 o'clock near the abbey, so Adriana and Luciana, the Second Merchant and Angelo, the Duke and Egeon, and then Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus congregate there by appointment. Thus the conventions which have caused so much dissension also serve to bring people together so that reunion is possible.

Primarily, however, the plot is satisfactorily resolved, as the Duke says, ‘accidentally’ (V.i.362). Working against the conscious efforts to withdraw and isolate that would segregate the twins and thus prevent the comic anagnorisis is the on-stage action that involves growing numbers of characters and increasingly frenetic activity. As the pace quickens, originally separate groups break apart and re-form in new combinations until it seems that the twins must meet eventually. This whirlwind of activity, which seems destined to throw together every possible combination of characters, can be read as the work of a beneficent fate or providence. In the text nothing precludes and nothing necessitates such an interpretation. But the change in the last scene from chaos to clarity focuses on factual explanation of the relations among people, not on moral or spiritual enlightenment. R. A. Foakes has suggested that the discovery of Aemilia saves Egeon's life ‘as if, through her intervention, the harsh justice embodied in the Duke is tempered by a Christian grace and mercy.’¹⁰ This reading seems to me to exaggerate the play's Christian overtones. In The Comedy of Errors, as in Donne's formulation of the orthodox social theory quoted at the beginning of this chapter, power is constitutive rather than instrumental: society consists of a set of unequal relationships. Although both the sermon and the play stipulate limits to human power, neither contests the authority of master over servant, husband over wife, parent over child, or ruler over subject. But while Donne situates the source and purpose of power in the Godhead, the law administered by Duke Solinus has no transcendental significance. Because the banning of Syracusians is a practical measure produced by particular political and economic circumstances, it can be reinterpreted in the light of new information. In waving aside Antipholus' offer to pay his father's fine, the Duke is neither contradicting his claim that personal sympathy cannot justify abrogating the law nor transcending the law in the name of mercy. When he tells Antipholus, ‘thy father hath his life’ (V.i.391), he is responding to a new set of circumstances: Egeon is no longer an alien from a hostile city but the father and husband of respected citizens of Ephesus. The revelation of Egeon's family relationships means that he is no longer an outsider. He belongs, and so the law against outsiders does not apply.

The ending of The Comedy of Errors doesn't subvert or redeem society through the intervention of a higher spiritual force. The play recognizes that actuality falls far short of an ideally harmonious society in which inferiors defer loyally to superiors who honor obligations to protect dependents. The quarrels between masters and servants and between husband and wife display the injustice and violence inherent in the hierarchical social order, but the play invites the audience to see them not as individual sins nor as symptoms of social injustice but, as the title directs, as errors. Antipholus' infidelity, Adriana's insubordination, and the Dromios' beatings, like Egeon's undeserved suffering and the bewilderment of Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse, are consequences of the temporary loss of recognized social roles. The play emphasizes the need to belong to society, not the need to reform it. The dramatic action begins with the helplessness of an isolated individual and ends when individual lives are secured through social relationships. In the Abbess' last speech her metaphor of prolonged birth pains implies that being truly human involves the social manifestation of biological relations:

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

(V.i.401-3)

The baptismal ‘gossips’ feast' (V.i.406) to which the company exits at the end of the play celebrates the entry of the Antipholus twins into a community in which reason is equated with civility and personal identity with social role. It is a community where the relations of master and servant, man and wife, and parents and children are presented as crucially important, but are experienced as sometimes reassuring, sometimes brutal, often ludicrous, and as terrifyingly precarious.

Notes

1. R. A. Foakes, ‘Introduction’ to the Arden edition of The Comedy of Errors (London: Methuen, 1962), xxix.

2. The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953-62), 5:114.

3. Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 25, 11. H. B. Charlton takes a similar view of Adriana as shrew and Luciana as romantic in Shakespearean Comedy, first published 1938 (London: Methuen, 1966), 68, 71.

4. Unhistoricized interpretations of this speech as evidence of Adriana's parasitic dependency ignore the force of the elm and vine as a traditional emblem of marriage, joining masculine strength with feminine fruitfulness. Adriana explicitly associates barren parasites with influences separating Antipholus from her. As Paul Stevens points out, Adriana's image of marriage contrasts with Titania's distorted version that replaces the vine with barren ivy to describe her embrace of Bottom (MND, iv.i.43-4). Paul Stevens, Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 207.

5. I disagree with the critics who see this speech as evidence of Adriana's over-possessiveness. See Arden edition, note to II. ii. 123-9; Phialas, 14, Ruth Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1980), 26.

6. For a perceptive discussion of time, money, and law in The Comedy of Errors see J. Dennis Huston, Shakespeare's Comedies Of Play (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 33-4.

7. Richard Henze discusses the chain as a symbol of social cohesion and of the play's recommended norm, ‘the bridling of headstrong freedom and wandering individuality’ (35). ‘The Comedy of Errors: A Freely Binding Chain,’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 22 (1971), 35-41.

8. Writings and Translations of Myles Coverdale (Cambridge: The Parker Society, 1844), 175; quoted in John F. Danby, Poets on Fortune's Hill (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 109. I am indebted throughout this paragraph to Danby's discussion of the distinction between classical and Christian patience (108-27).

9. James L. Sanderson has observed the importance of the theme of patience in The Comedy of Errors and discussed many of these passages in the context of Elizabethan iconographical and intellectual traditions but has reached different conclusions. He argues that errors are caused and compounded by impatience and curable by patience and sees Egeon as an exemplar of patience. ‘Patience in The Comedy of Errors,’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 16 (1975), 603-18.

10. Arden edition, ‘Introduction,’ xlix.