SOURCE: Feldman, A. Bronson. “Shakespeare's Early Errors.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 36, no. 2 (March-April 1955): 114-33.

[In the essay below, Feldman presents a psychological biography of Shakespeare based on a detailed analysis of the plot and characters of The Comedy of Errors.]

Veterem atque antiquam rem novam ad vos proferam

1

If we could understand the motives that impelled William Shakespeare to the writing of plays, what were the reasons for his giving a whole life of wealthy imagination to the theatre, we might come into possession of the main keys to the psychology of the stage itself, of plays, the players, and their public. In the hope of contributing toward this achievement I have undertaken an intensive analysis of a play by the paramount dramatist which most historians regard as one of the earliest—if not the very first—of his creative efforts in theatre: The Comedy of Errors. Because of the crude frivolity, the juvenile character of this drama, scholars have not paid it serious attention. The eyes of psycho-analysis turn the more readily to it precisely because of this juvenile character. We know how the childishness of an artist will betray the deepest secrets of his mind, the unconscious origin of the passions of his life. If it is true that the Errors stands the nearest of Shakespeare's works to his infancy, we may expect to discover in it the primary springs of his fantasy, the driving forces of all his dramatic work.

Analysis of the comedy is not an easy task, for Shakespeare bequeathed it to us in a palimpsest form. There is plenty of evidence that he revised this product of his youth several times, and it did not reach the press until he had been in his grave many years. We need not be dismayed by the rapid shifts in quality of its stagecraft and the abrupt variations of the style. The changes in the drama will mystify us only when we lose sight of its substance, the farcical plot, which throws over all the sophistications of Shakespeare's mature art the unmistakable shadow of his novice mind. Scarcely any of his other plays exhibits so hearty an interest in plot as the Errors. The plot is the thing in which we shall catch the conscience of the poet. Shakespeare apprehended this fact and therefore laboured to fill the fabric of the comedy with snares and delusions, ever hopeful of escape from knowledge. With extreme cunning he wrote and rewrote the drama, turning it into a net of Gordian knots which nowhere present a single loose end to enable us to unravel the purport of the play. At whatever point we select to begin our analysis we are bound to use a sharpness without subtlety, to cut the fabric so that it can be untied with the loving patience it deserves.

Suppose we begin the investigation of Shakespeare's Errors with the obvious motive of the farce. Manifestly its purpose is to provoke laughter, extravagant, strenuous, far-fetched laughter, not without tears. The poet means to be merry, like his hero in the middle of the drama, ‘in despite of mirth’ (III, i). With its wild, unbelievable story and dreamlike duplication of characters, the comedy aims at delirium. The prime emotion appears to be one of hysteria, as if the author produced it from a desperate want of hilarity, feeling that he must have merriment or run mad. He does not leave us in doubt about the source of this manic humour. It functioned for him in the same way that the clown Dromio of Syracuse serves his curious master. ‘When I am dull with care and melancholy,’ the master remarks, Dromio ‘Lightens my humour with his merry jests’ (I, ii). Again and again Shakespeare stresses relief from a devouring sorrow as sufficient excuse for his jokes, no matter how ribald or fierce. He seems to have put such gaiety on the plane of athletic sports, considering it precious recreation:

Sweet recreation barr'd, what doth ensue
But moody moping, and dull melancholy,
Kinsman to grim and comfortless despair … ?

(V)

Below the surface motive of the comedy, then, we can plainly see the motive of evading melancholiac depression.

The intensity of the poet's depression on the threshold of his Errors may be estimated by the fact that he altered the raw Roman material of the play in order to give it a groundwork of tragedy. For the sake of its sorrowful opening scene Shakespeare sacrificed elements from his Latin source which would have made the plot more plausible.

In the Menaechmi of his beloved Plautus the twins around whom the comedy revolves are separated by a commonplace event. The father takes one to a distant market town and the boy is lost in a crowd. A merchant finds the little Menaechmus and carries him away across the Adriatic Sea to Epidamnus. The lad's father dies of grief. Back in their native Syracuse the grandfather, learning of the double loss, and anxious to preserve the memory of the lost boy, who was named after him, changes the name of the remaining twin from Sosicles to Menaechmus. The new Menaechmus grows up and travels across the Adriatic hoping to find out what happened to his dear brother. Shakespeare desired more sensational reasons for the parting of the twins. He invented a tempest and a shipwreck to account for it. He refused to let the father die of grief, but increased the old man's torments by parting him from the second son. This boy leaves his father to go in search of a brother whom he has never known. And old Aegeon is compelled, years later, to sail in search of both his sons, across the Mediterranean Sea to Ephesus. Shakespeare completes his disruption of the family by having brutal seamen separate the mother from the child she saved in the wreck. In the midst of this welter of narrative we are disappointed to observe that he names the twins Antipholus and fails to explain why they have identical names. To augment the mystification he bestows on their twin servants the single name Dromio. We know that he got the idea for his two sets of twins from another comedy by Plautus, Amphitruo, but the Latin dramatist adequately accounted for his twins here by making one of each pair a god masquerading to delude mortals.

Plautus opens his Amphitruo with the statement, from the mouth of the god Mercury, that the play commences as a tragedy. Shakespeare may have been encouraged by this to start the Errors in the same manner. But the Roman playwright shows us nothing piteous and terrible, like the first scene of Shakespeare's play. Plautus's excuse for the tragic element in his work is that ‘it is not right to make a play where kings and gods talk entirely comedy’. The tragic element in Shakespeare's work concerns no god or king, only the poor old merchant Aegeon, who has no parallel in Plautus.

What could have driven Shakespeare to make these drastic alterations in his material? Why did he discard the simple disappearance of a twin in a crowd for the barely credible separation at sea? The tempest must have had a special meaning to the dramatist. The central image of Aegeon's tragic tale, the splitting of his ship, must have exerted an irresistible fascination on Shakespeare's mind. He lavished so much imagination on the disaster that he neglected to make clear the reason for calling both of Aegeon's sons Antipholus. The reckless omission of this important detail gives us a glimpse of the hysterical haste with which the poet went to work on the comedy. His reason appears to have been overwhelmed by the images of the storm and the wreck.

He makes the old man speak of his misfortune as ‘this unjust divorce’ (I, i). Now, matrimony has often been compared to a sea, and divorce to shipwreck. How conscious of these metaphors the dramatist may have been, we cannot say. It is incontestable, however, that the thought of divorce was running in his mind when he composed The Comedy of Errors. Its central events occur in consequence of an estrangement between the hero, Antipholus of Ephesus, and his wife. And the two Latin comedies from which Shakespeare derived the raw stuff of his farce obtain their effects of fun from breaches of marriage.

So far as I am aware, only one of Shakespeare's critics, Frank Harris, has recognized that the poet's own alienation from his wife was a stimulus to the writing of the Errors (1). Unfortunately Harris's interpretation of the play raised more riddles than he solved, obscuring the merit of his discovery. He erred in attempting to sift details from the drama to fit his imaginary biography of the poet. In this essay I intend to steer clear of questions of biography, relying for argument exclusively on the text of the play and its literary analogues.

The ‘unjust divorce’ of Aegeon and his Aemilia is the work of wind, water, and stone, or the caprice of the goddess Fortune, as the venerable traveller insists. The alienation of Antipholus and his Adriana, on the other hand, is portrayed as an error, the climax of a series of errors. The marriage of this couple, Shakespeare seems to say, is nothing but a comedy of errors, indeed a mistake from the start. Adriana's sister suspects that Antipholus married her for her riches (III, ii). He grew cold to her, if not cruel. Before the action of the play commences, he was in the habit of keeping late hours away from his house. ‘His company must do his minions grace’, Adriana complains, ‘Whilst I at home starve for a merry look’ (II, i). She accuses him of unkindness and he charges her with shrewish behaviour. Both are right. Yet until the confusions of the comedy begin, we are led to believe, their temperaments have never exploded in hate. For only a week (prior to the day of the drama), Adriana declares near the end, her husband had been behaving strangely.

This week he hath been heavy, sour, sad,
And much different from the man he was;
But till this afternoon his passion
Ne'er brake into extremity of rage.

From the lips of Luciana and Aemilia the poet casts the blame for the estrangement on the wife. They rebuke her for ‘self-harming jealousy’, for breaking the peace of her household with wicked thoughts of her husband wandering abroad in pursuit of unlawful love. According to the judgement of these women, her conduct toward Antipholus is enough to explain his melancholy and the ‘unjust divorce’ of their souls.

The dramatist's compassion for the melancholy Antipholus bears witness for our conviction that Shakespeare identified himself with the outraged husband. He had broken away from his own wife and felt a strong impulse to justify the act on the stage. It could not be shown straightforwardly, of course. In the first place the poet was too blind with tears of self-pity to see the naked truth. Moreover he sensed that his wife did not hold a monopoly of the guilt in their disgrace. He had the intelligence and the courage to admit that he had contributed wrongs and miseries to the marriage; but his courage took the peculiar path of confessing his sins under the mask of comedy. Adopting the counsel of his Luciana, ‘Be not thy tongue thy own shame's orator’ (III, ii), he showed the world his shame by means of a variety of tongues. He discloses his guilt with a mirthy grimace while protesting, in an agony of remorse, that he is innocent. The core of the whole play is an apology for Shakespeare's errors in matrimony. He is not to blame, the drama pleads in its grotesque fashion: nor should the woman in the case be condemned, though discerning persons of her sex might decide that she was responsible. The fact of the matter, Shakespeare wishes us to think, is that the marriage had been wrecked because the bride and the groom did not really know the individuals they wedded. It was a case of mistaken identity.

In some such way, I imagine, the ego of the poet defended itself against his conscience or superego in the supreme court of his unconscious mind. I and my woman, the dramatist inwardly contended, have done nothing more damnable than entertain strangers as lovers.—She took me in, like Alcmena in Amphitruo, thinking that a hero was going to sleep by her side, and in happy ignorance she united with a god. Alas, poor god! He took in holy wedlock what he thought was an angel, and she turned out to be a termagant, at any rate a woman of torturing whims. Nevertheless, as Plautus says, ‘The god will not allow his sin and fault to fall upon a mortal's head.’ In our pitiable and ridiculous way we are trying to correct our mistakes. Anyhow, I am.—Thus seeking balm for hurt vanity, and excuses for his marital follies and cruelties, the dramatist contrived his Comedy of Errors.

The dramatic process in his unconscious took the shape of a dreamlike confusion of identities. He pictured himself as two persons, the husband Antipholus and his double, the unmarried twin, Antipholus of Syracuse, who is taken for the husband by his unhappy Adriana. There is nothing here to prove a split in the dramatist's personality. On the contrary, he has retained his ego entire and dealt himself the luxury of an alter ego. He demonstrates the sort of esteem for himself which makes people say of certain gentlemen that they are too brilliant, they should have been born twins.

The resemblance between the brothers Antipholus is more than skin-deep. The Duke of Ephesus indicates their true relationship when he exclaims.

One of these men is genius to the other.
… Which is the natural man,
And which the spirit? Who deciphers them?

(V.)

On the first appearance of the brother from Syracuse he reveals himself as a victim of the same unexplained melancholy that the brother of Ephesus suffers from:

He that commends me to mine own content
Commends me to the thing I cannot get.

(I, ii.)

The Syracusan may well be described as the ‘genius’ or spiritual double of the husband. He is more lyrical in speech, and briefly manifests a tendency to speculative thought. On his arrival in Ephesus, weary from a long voyage, he delays his dinner to gratify a desire to look on the town, ‘Peruse the traders, gaze upon the buildings. …’ His enthusiasm for sights and insights leads him to bewilderment and hazard, but nothing can diminish it. He vows that he will ‘in this mist at all adventures go’ (II, ii). The Syracusan's intellectual faculties are never so vivid as his carnal ones. He is almost as brutal as his brother. Both of them are quick to beat their servants' skulls for similar audacities. They cherish in common a profound and unfunny antagonism to the woman Adriana. After making her acquaintance for an hour or two the Syracusan twin confesses,

She that doth call me husband, even my soul
Doth for a wife abhor.

(III, ii.)

The Ephesian bursts into a fury against his wife for barring him mysteriously from their house. He orders a rope's end to be brought with a view to punishing her (IV, i). He even threatens to pluck out her eyes (IV, iv)! In short, his soul abhors her too. It is not the spirit of virtue in the twins that shrinks from the shrill lady. Shakespeare does not depict them as patterns of chastity. The Ephesian pays a bold homage to the harlot who runs the Porpentine inn. His brother makes love to Luciana shortly after their first sight of each other, and plans to leave her city the same day. The egoism of this fellow is oddly displayed by Shakespeare in his pretext for abandoning Luciana. Her charms, he says, ‘almost made me traitor to myself’.

But lest myself be guilty to self-wrong,
I'll stop mine ears against the mermaid's song.

(III, ii.)

His scruples do not prevent him from accepting the wifely services of her sister; he lets Adriana labour under the impression that she is doing her duty to her mate. The promptitude of the twins in embracing female hospitality is nearly equalled by their good-will to men, especially men of their station in society. To these singular features we should add their mode of showing anxiety as soon as they experience a loss of money. All these touches of nature make them more than kin. The creator wisely relinquished his attempt (traces of which survive in three old stage directions) to mark the twins apart by styling the Syracusan ‘Erotes’—the amorous—and his brother ‘Sereptus’—the stealthy.

Incidentally, the poet gives two different statements of their age. In the first scene we learn that the Syracusan journeyed at eighteen in quest of the other. Since then, Aegeon remarks, five summers have passed, or, to be exact, as he is in the final scene, ‘seven short years’. To the father, then, the twins are twenty-five years old. The mother dates their birthday earlier. ‘Thirty-three years,’ she declares, ‘have I but gone in travail Of you, my sons’ (V). We are sorry to miss the evidence of those she calls ‘the calendars of their nativity’. The two Antipholi are presented as men of ‘gravity’ and ‘serious hours’, but demeanour is no index to age. Adriana in chagrin asserts that her mate is ‘deformed, crooked, old and sere’ (IV, ii). But can we trust her testimony in the face of the romance of his twin and her sister Luciana? We cannot even be sure that Dromio of Ephesus tells the truth when he says, examining Dromio of Syracuse, ‘I see by you I am a sweet-fac'd youth’ (V). The cause of the poet's discrepant chronology lies, I feel sure, in his revision of the play at different stages of his career, and may be of use to biographers.

I have been unable to locate in Latin or Greek literature the name that Shakespeare chose for his ego surrogates. There was a famous artist, a painter, named Antiphilus in the era of Alexander the Great. Possibly he was remembered by the dramatist when he cloaked his unconscious self as Greek for The Comedy of Errors. The principle of determinism in the choice of names still challenges us to elucidate Shakespeare's designation for his doubles. It strikes me that the spelling ‘Antipholus’ was intended characteristically for a pun. We know how fond the poet was of trifling with words; he could truly be called a pun-addict. Also well know is his conviction that by means of wit and drama he could purge the stupidities, the intellectual diseases of the world (2). In the light of these facts I suggest that the name of his heroes may be translated into English as anti-follies. Otherwise the appellation is just Greek to me. If I am right in this surmise it would help to explain Shakespeare's failure to record the reason for the twins bearing the same name. The humane development, the culture of his psyche would not permit him free rein in self-righteousness. As a fool of Fortune in marriage he must have felt uneasy in his posture of justice above the fools of the world. In the conflict between righteous vanity and the woe and shame of his ‘unjust divorce’ the memory of the latter would suffice to make him oblivious of the motive for naming his protagonists Antipholus.

There is no difficulty in accounting for the name of the twin servants, Dromio. It is simply an Italian variation of the name the Roman playwright Terence bestowed on slaves in his first comedy, The Woman from Andros, in The Self-Tormentor, and The Brothers. Shakespeare unquestionably had Italian buffoons in mind when he created the brothers Dromio. A drum, by the way, was a typical property of clowns in his time.

As twin slaves of the Antipholi, one a bachelor like his master, all of precisely the same age, the Dromios could be viewed as simply burlesques of the aristocratic twins. They share certain qualities of their respective employers. The married Dromio, for example, expresses with his scullion Luce the lechery which his master has subdued and refined. The unmarried servant shows less carnality than his brother, and more religion and imagination. His spiritual attributes form a remarkable contrast of Shakespeare's dramatic method with that of Plautus, since the English artist modelled his Syracusan clown on the role that the god Mercury plays in Amphitruo as the double of the slave Sosia. The English poet transformed the divine Sosia into a human being with a rare talent for superstition, just as he changed the Jupiter who usurps Amphitryon's bed into a mortal proud of his chastity, with a rare talent for metaphysics. Between Plautus and Shakespeare, clearly, there was a progress of reason in theology, ensuing in the wake of a tremendous restriction of libido. The Syracusan twins, with all their fleshly frailty, are unquestionably superior in morals to the Roman gods. If the Roman dramatist has any advantage over Shakespeare in ethics, I would say that it consists of his superior passion for liberty. Plautus never lets pass an opportunity to express his sadness and hatred at the sight of humanity in chains. To Shakespeare's eyes the bondage of a Dromio was too light to be taken seriously. He seems to have enjoyed a feudal sense of intimacy between lord and labourer. Antipholus depicts the feudal idea when he warns Dromio not to let ‘Your sauciness jest upon my love’ because ‘I familiarly sometimes Do use you for my fool, and chat with you’ (II, ii). Their relation might be defined as even more intimate, anagogically. It is possible that Dromio incarnates the ‘earthy-gross conceit’ which Antipholus deplores in himself (III, ii), that is the vulgar and servile qualities of the genius who created them both.

The Comedy of Errors contains another set of mental twins, who have eluded the scrutiny of Shakespearean experts and critics. It is conceivable that the dramatist himself was not aware of their identity. Their likeness is drawn with so much dexterity and painstaking cleverness that I am inclined to think he meant them to be equals and opposites. He struggled cordially to discriminate them, and the opinion of generations of scholars on their portraits is proof that he was too successful. The cost of this success, in my opinion, is the defeat of the dramatist's honest intention, and injustice to the woman whom he sketched twice as the wife Adriana and her sister. There are good reasons for thinking that when Shakespeare outlined their characters he proposed, perhaps unconsciously, to limn two aspects or phases of the same lady, his own wife. Luciana would then represent the girl he made his bride, beautiful, tender, and gleaming with extraordinary wisdom; and Adriana would stand for the woman she became, or rather the creature Shakespeare fancied lay potential in his bride. In changing her image to the two distinct heroines he surpassed the metamorphoses of his favourite poet, Ovid, whose mythic transformations he constantly held in the ‘quick forge and workinghouse’ of unconscious thought.

The essential identity of the sisters emerges when we compare their characters in detail. The outstanding trait of Adriana is her shrewishness. Antipholus of Syracuse contrasts her with Luciana primarily on account of the unmarried sister's kind and courteous manner, her ‘gentle sovereign grace’ (III, ii). Next to this quality he adores her ‘discourse’, or adroitness in conversation. Now Luciana herself, though critical of her sister's headstrong attitude to Antipholus, testifies that

She never reprehended him but mildly,
When he demean'd himself rough, rude, and wildly.

(V.)

Shakespeare presents the shrew as a model of tenderness in the scene where she humours her husband, believing him almost insane—‘poor distressed soul’ (IV, iv). She exhibits her devotion to him in worry over his arrest for debt, which she hastens to pay off despite his torrent of insults. As for Adriana's ‘discourse’, we have every reason to believe her when she affirms that her conversation has been dulled and her wit turned barren by the chill hostility of her husband. ‘If voluble and sharp discourse be marr'd,’ says she, ‘Unkindness blunts it more than marble hard’ (II, i). There is no sign that Antipholus ever acted toward her with generosity, except before their wedding, when she was certainly Luciana-like. The unmarried sister, however, is by no means exempt from Adriana's defects. She too can pour a swift shrillness of epithets on people who offend her (II, ii). Her volubility on occasions can be bluntly evil (III, ii). We may trust the judgement of Adriana when she states that her sister will want to ‘bear some sway’ after she weds, and upbraid her husband if he strays from home to linger in sirens' taverns. Apart from temper and talent in talk the girls are supposed to be distinguished by their looks. Adriana speaks as if ‘homely age’ had deprived her of virgin loveliness, but a moment later she declares that a ‘sunny look’ from her husband would quickly restore her beauty: ‘he hath wasted it’ (II, i). If he had never led her to the nuptial altar she would have glittered precisely as alluring as her sister and the hostess of the Porpentine, whom Antipholus praises as ‘Pretty and witty, wild, and yet, too, gentle’ (III, i). Shakespeare does not tell how old she and Luciana are. If there is any difference in their ages, it is not enough to cleave their souls asunder. They too are one.

In the names of the two girls, I suspect, the dramatist has informed us, in his paradoxical way, that they are twins. If we take Luciana to mean ‘the bright one’, by the facile substitution (in accordance with Grimm's law) of a t for the d in Adriana, we could translate her name as ‘the dark one’. It may also signify the lucent or luscious one gone dry. (For my purpose it is unnecessary to render the last syllables of their names more concretely. To the reader who wishes to take them as meaning simply Anna, I answer: As you like it.)

It is not unlikely that Shakespeare designed these ‘witches’, as Antipholus of Syracuse calls them (III, ii), to stand for the great moon goddess of their city, Diana. Another name for the moon divinity, in the religion of ancient Rome, was Lucina. The Syracusan worships Luciana as ‘more than earth divine’, hails her ‘Fair sun’, and speaks of her sister as ‘night’. In the writer's unconscious, according to my surmise, the feminine ‘sun’ was nothing but the shining face of the moon. He symbolized her sister by the dark side of Diana. The name of this goddess might be interpreted, without stretching the patience of philology, as meaning ‘the double one’. Frazer has observed that Diana appears in ancient myth like a partner of Janus, the two-faced god of Rome (3). The idea of the twofold deity could have provided our poet with the inspiration to change the setting of the Errors from Plautus's Epidamnus to Ephesus. Presumably he was tempted to keep the scene in Epidamnus, since the name appealed to his passion for puns and devilry. He made that town the birthplace of the Antipholi (I, i), and the Syracusan brother is told to pretend that he voyaged from there to Ephesus. When he plans to abandon Luciana his servant buys him passage on a vessel bound for Epidamnus. At all events Shakespeare made Ephesus serve his dramatic aims as a city of the damned. The Epidamnus of Plautus is a town of swindling, sponging, and seduction. Shakespeare's Ephesus is a town of deeds more dreadful, infernal crafts, ‘And many such-like liberties of sin’ (I, i). Its wenches, according to Dromio of Syracuse, are accustomed to cry, ‘God damn me’, which he says is equivalent to the prayer, ‘God make me a light wench’. These girls are therefore worthy to function as ministrants of the moon. Dromio argues that their heavenly bodies are hellish: ‘It is written, they appear to men like angels of light: light is an effect of fire, and fire will burn; ergo, light wenches will burn’ (IV, iii). But Dromio, like his master, is an enemy of all things pagan, when these confront them in the flesh. For the literate Antipholus the cult of Diana would surely have poetic charms, with its visions of wildwood nymphs and vestals entranced or dancing by her silver flame. Outside poetry, however, he would agree with the illiterate Dromio that her religion was witchcraft or else sheer lunacy. Both master and slave are devout Christians—actually Roman Catholics—and according to Christian tradition the sylvan retinue of Diana eventually turned into ghosts and monsters, like the ‘goblins, owls, and elvish sprites’ whom Dromio sees everywhere in Ephesus (II, ii). In the period of Shakespeare a host of scholars were convinced that warlocks and beldames of hell worshipped her: ‘in the night-times,’ it is written, ‘they ride abroad with Diana, the goddess of the Pagans’ (4). The divinity receives no worship in Shakespeare's play because he converted Ephesus to a Christian town. Nevertheless we can glimpse her ‘sovereign grace’, divided among the women of the comedy, performing its magic in the afternoon and dusk. She exercises her spells not only through the dextrous Luciana and the sinister Adriana, but also through the unnamed inn-keeper whom Dromio fancies might be ‘Mistress Satan’ (IV, iii).

By the supernal power of sex which Diana represents the characters are all flung into craziness. True, this does not occur until the hero Antipholus of Syracuse sets foot in the city. Shakespeare toiled hard to impress us with the notion that Antipholus is ever on guard against the power of sex. How could he act as the prime mover of its madness in the comedy? My answer is that, despite his piety, he is the evil ‘genius’ of the Errors. To each of the women in it his apparition radiates a satanic magnetism, of which he is blissfully unaware. His Dromio seems to comprehend this. When Antipholus warns the hostess of the Porpentine, ‘Avaunt, thou witch!’ Dromio dryly remarks: ‘Fly pride, says the peacock’ (IV, iii). Apropos of the peacock, we recall that the bird was a companion of the goddess Juno, in whom Frazer has discerned a twin of Diana (5). So the Syracusan may rightly be regarded as a minion of the moon. Wherever he walks it looks as if lunacy prevails; no wonder he must ask himself,

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

(II, ii.)

He might well speak of his experience in the words of another of Shakespeare's heroes:

                    It is the very error of the moon;
She comes more near the earth than she was wont,
And makes men mad.

(Othello, V, ii.)

The adventures of Antipholus prove to be ‘well-advised’. He manages to enjoy himself among the Ephesians, and unites with Luciana in the end.

The omission of the moon-goddess from Shakespeare's Errors was probably dictated by discretion more than religious propriety. The educated subjects of Elizabeth were accustomed to hearing the Virgin Queen extolled as the English Diana, and literary allusions to the divinity of the moon were frequently assumed to imply an opinion of her Majesty (6). Shakespeare apparently endeavoured to banish all thought of Elizabeth from the minds attending to his farce. Perhaps he remembered the penalty inflicted on his forerunner Richard Edwards when that comic dramatist referred to classic Greek personalities in language that was construed as criticism of some Tudor courtiers (7). Shakespeare could not afford to have any wit of the royal court construe the function of Diana in his comedy as a joke on the Queen. He described the city of Ephesus, remember, as a hotbed of black magic, swarming with

Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,
Soul-killing witches that deform the body.

(I, ii.)

If he had introduced the goddess of these magicians in the play he would have risked damnation as one who hinted that Elizabeth was the mistress of mountebanks and hellhags. Insofar as her Majesty is glanced at in the Errors it is through the glare of the authority of Solinus, the ‘sweet prince’ of Ephesus. The Duke is barely more than an abstraction, law and order incarnate. The first syllable of his name, Sol, would serve to ward off suspicion that the poet delineated him as a deputy of Diana, the antagonist of the sun. Solinus will not stand for nonsense and moonshine; he is emblematic of system, a foe of anarchy, indeed a deputy of the superego in us all.

So Shakespeare expelled the magnificent moon-woman from The Comedy of Errors. A quick look at a concordance tells us that the moon is not mentioned even once. Yet the shadow of the goddess is perceptible in every scene. She glows above the heads of the women in their excitement or serenity and broods tenebrously over the men. When the young Shakespeare wrote the comedy, in the darkness of his unconscious, he must have offered a mocking reverence to her ‘whom all Asia and the world worshippeth’, and echoed the cry of the silversmiths against the apostle Paul: ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians!’ (Acts of the Apostles, xxix, 28).

To the learned of Shakespeare's period Diana was the goddess of virginity. Luciana would therefore seem to be a truer embodiment of the Diana ideal than Adriana. Let us not be deceived by this seeming. The emphasis of the poet on the ‘unviolated honour’ of the wife, her horror of the licentious (II, ii), her lack of offspring, and the gestures of frigid purity that drove her husband to the Porpentine inn, prove her deserving of a vestal's glory.

Shall we assent to the proof? Is it not also seeming, a tissue of ostensible truth? We have seen Luciana portrayed as a temptress, a siren luring the bachelor Antipholus to ‘self-wrong’. Shakespeare in fact makes her an advocate of hypocrisy. In the belief that Antipholus is her brother-in-law, she instructs him to execute his lust by stealth: ‘Teach sin the carriage of a holy saint; Be secret-false’ (III, ii). The purity of her sister is no less illusory. Some may reject the accusations of her husband—‘Dissembling harlot!’ ‘O most unhappy strumpet!’ (IV, iv)—as products of fallacy, brought on by the revelation that she welcomes an unknown man in his absence. Those who think so should try to explain the slip of her servant Dromio's tongue when, early in the play, he talks of her husband's delay in coming home: ‘Why, mistress’, he blurts, ‘sure my master is horn-mad.’ She responds at once to the indictment of adultery. ‘Horn-mad, thou villain!’ He hastens to correct himself, ‘I mean not cuckoldmad’ (II, i). From the psychopathology of such mistakes we can deduce a hint of veracity in Dromio's slip. Apparently his master has behaved like a man stung by fancies of his wife's adultery long before her afternoon's entertainment. Is it conceivable that the headstrong Adriana had done absolutely nothing to promote those fancies? Hours before he calls her strumpet she weeping brands herself with the stigma. She calls herself a ‘stale’ of Antipholus. Later, in fantasy of his own sins, she announces:

I am possess'd with an adulterate blot;
My blood is mingled with the crime of lust.

(II, ii.)

Her basis for this self-accusation is a mere metaphor of marriage, that she and her mate are in wedlock one. Under the tones of uxorious indignation we can detect the voice of repressed sensuality, just as under the chambers of Adriana we find dwelling the kitchen-wench Nell, or Dowsabel, whose lascivious advances frighten Dromio of Syracuse. The acuteness of Shakespeare's unconscious satire on the virginal sisters may be perceived in the third name he invented for the obscene kitchen-wench. He also calls her Luce, as if to invite comparison with the chaste yet hypocritic Luciana.

The truth is that the sisters, like the brothers, are impure in heart. Among the paradoxes of the comedy the confidence they display in their virginity and virtue is perhaps the most absurd. They are all sinners, all fools—what you will: ‘Smother'd in errors, feeble, shallow, weak’ (III, ii).

2

Our investigation of the Errors thus far leads to the conclusion that the comedy was precipitated out of the poet's unconscious by marital troubles and disaster. We have still to elucidate the riddle, what made a gentleman of his courage and intelligence prone to sexual conflict and disaster? How did he ever come to entertain strangers as lovers? His marriage could not have been the first enterprise of this sort. Before he married he must have committed other erotic errors more or less like those he has caricatured in his play. In all his affairs of the heart, we may be sure, the blind god Cupid led him blind, quelling his intelligence and making his courage flare up. In the mist of passion he would go at all adventures, no matter what tortures and remorse might follow. The Narcissus in him could usually single out somebody to blame for his stumbling and sprawls. If not, there was always fortune to be cursed, or his birth stars.

The answer to our riddle must lie in the nature of this Narcissus in Shakespeare, the colossal self-love which could project itself into the twin heroes of the comedy and have enough energy left to make their twin clowns and other characters ruddily vital and radiant. From the Narcissus pool of his soul he drew the power—and ‘will in overplus’—to surmount the tragic defeats and comic humiliations of his life. From mysterious fountains in the same pool his ego also drank sweet poison, mistaking jets of self-pity for the elixir of self-love, and so steeping itself in a melancholy that not seldom resembled madness. It was in flight from the peril of utter unreason that Shakespeare wrote The Comedy of Errors. For the play not only endeavours to explain the struggle of the poet's conscience with an event; it struggles to explain the poet, to assist the understanding of the stranger he felt was himself. To love oneself and win self-knowledge: is the feat possible?

So far as Shakespeare had the strength, when he composed the Errors, to venture the feat—handicapped by his terror of baring himself to taunts and mental rapine—he did it in meditation and development of his ‘personae’, the two Antipholi. Naturally he endowed them with his admirable traits—his dignity, his noble charity and generosity, his affection for the arts of peace, his grace to women and good-will to men. Dignity or honour obliged him to add his less attractive traits—his impulses to jealousy and revenge, his severely controlled lust and ferocity, and the will to lie, steal, mutilate, or kill. We have already noticed how the Ephesian, on being locked out of his house, commands the purchase of a rope's end to lash his wife, and later, when she brings a doctor for his distraction, threatens with his own nails to pluck out her ‘false eyes’ (IV, iv). In a parallel scene of the Menaechmi the slave Messenio threatens to gouge out the eyes of some men who are trying to drag his master off as a lunatic. The memory of this probably lurked in Shakespeare's mind when he pictured the half-crazed husband menacing his wife. Antipholus vents his sadistic wrath on Dr. Pinch instead, applying fire to his beard, extinguishing it with pails of puddled mire, while his servant nicks the doctor with scissors (V). Meanwhile his brother turns thief with the golden chain that the Ephesian wished to give a courtesan to spite his wife. The theft ensues on the dinner which the Syracusan has obtained from Adriana by turning cheat. Afterward he and his Dromio scare off the two sisters and the courtesan with naked swords (IV, iv). These little larcenies and bestialities recompense the twins for their grand refusal to tread the path of unholy dalliance and adultery.

It is curious to see how the bachelor brother treats the house of Adriana like an inn, and makes love to one of the hostesses, immediately before the espoused one determines to dine at the inn whose mistress Shakespeare merely names Courtesan. In neither episode does the house become a brothel, like the home of Erotium in Plautus, where Menaechmus the newcomer dines with the prostitute at his brother's expense. The wish, which George Meredith styles sentimental, to get pleasure unpaid for is obviously behind the comic conception of both playwrights. But Shakespeare's horror of indulging the wish deprives his play of much humour. He presents Antipholus of Ephesus as a paragon of idealism in morals. ‘How dearly,’ says his wife, ‘would it touch thee to the quick, Shouldst thou but hear I were licentious.’ She conjures a vision of him tearing the wedding ring from her finger to ‘break it with a deep divorcing vow’ (II, ii). Less than two hours later her husband gives the hostess of the Porpentine the chain he had promised Adriana, and takes or snatches a ring from the courtesan (IV, iii). It is likely that Shakespeare considered this a token of second wedlock, a marriage made in hell.

In the poet's self-portraiture his attitude to matrimony reveals a profound and painful ambivalence. Luciana lectures her sister on the divine rights of the male in wedlock and the necessity of obedience in wives. The essence of this sermon runs veritably through all of Shakespeare's dramas, apparently integral to his dogmas of church and state. At the same time he preaches the doctrine that male and female are incorporated at the wedding altar into one. By this ritual the wife partakes in the godlike rights of her mate, and therefore can limit or confine them. She can demand obedience from him. Shakespeare recognized the privilege, the sovereignty of the wife, yet could not bring himself to admit it frankly. Instead he tossed in childlike anguish between the horns of his dilemma.

The heroines of Plautus exhibit a pride of sex, or sense of feminine dignity, unknown to the women of The Comedy of Errors. Alcmena refuses to endure her husband's charges of unchastity. She demands her goods and slaves from him and prepares for divorce. The wife of Menaechmus, lacking her solitary strength, still castigates her husband for his thieving, and summons her father to protect her from outrage. Erotium is stronger: she storms at her double-crossing lover and drives him out of her house. The men in the Menaechmi and Amphitruo are forced to appease, cajole, and act subservient to their women.

Except in the case of Aemilia, Shakespeare commands his ladies to act subservient to their men. Even that grand dame mainly functions as a guardian of her men, and condemns the woman who troubles their voluptuous peace. The freedom that Aemilia enjoys from sexual bondage is the outcome of her holiness. She is a governess of nuns. For women who did not covet the virgin's gloriole, and set their hearts on independence, the poet seldom had anything but anger, mockery, and tears.

At the root of his agony seems to burn the irresistible urge to embrace strangers as lovers. His ego, as I conceive it, constantly hunted for objects on whom to shower the surplus of his libido, and invariably learned that the objects were doomed to be foreigners. Again and again he must have tried to join an alien soul to his own and waked from the dream of friendship or the honeymoon aghast and bewildered by the discovery that he was once more alone with the unknown, marvelling like his Antipholus:

What! was I married to her in my dream?
Or sleep I now and think I hear all this?

(II, ii.)

The plot of The Comedy of Errors, if we interpret it truly, will provide us with clues to the mystery of the poet's tendencies in love.

Ordinarily when one hears the popular phrase, a man's better half, one thinks it refers to his wife. Sir Philip Sidney employed it in his Arcadia as equivalent to true-love. When Shakespeare uses it—or a variant—we cannot tell what he means. Sidney's usage appears to be intended when Antipholus of Syracuse appeals to the stranger Luciana as ‘mine own self's better part’ (III, ii). Earlier in the comedy we find the phrase aimed differently. Adriana, reproaching the man she fancies is her husband, exalts herself as ‘better than thy dear self's better part’ (II, ii). If we take this as a boast of superiority to the woman of his heart, we are confronted with an enigma. Who could this rival woman be? Judging by Adriana's jealousy, we might guess it is her husband's courtesan, though the wife gives no sign of having information about the temptress of the inn. Adriana simply suspects that his eye offers ‘homage’ somewhere (II, i). It is surprising to hear her, suddenly definite about his alleged sin, allude to the rival with the phrase of respect. Presumably Shakespeare designed it here for irony. The rest of Adriana's speech, however, is so earnest and tragic that we feel it imperative to search for a deeper design.

She pleads for compassion to the frostily intellectual Antipholus of Syracuse:

How comes it now, my husband, O! how comes it,
That thou art thus 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,
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.

Thus Adriana sees her husband's inner existence as a structure of three parts: himself, a ‘better part’, and herself, the best, the only one she calls estranged.

With the probe of psycho-analysis we are able to explore the identity of the second person of this trinity, and determine the moment of her mingling with the hero's self. Shakespeare has betrayed her unaware.

The simile Adriana employs for her spouse's original ego—a drop of water—is familiar to Antipholus, since he has employed it in soliloquy for himself. In one of his first utterances in the play he muses:

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.

(I, ii.)

The ‘breaking gulf’ of Adriana's speech recalls the comparison of matrimony to a sea. The ocean of Antipholus he himself compares to the world. It strikes me as a less extensive vastness. Long before Edward Carpenter consciously thought of sex as oceanic, poets and other visionaries had established the likeness in their dreams, and written rapturously about the ocean unaware of its sexual analogy. The real meaning of Antipholus's ocean springs to view in the lines of his soliloquy that follow the mournful image. In these verses the ‘fellow’ he seeks becomes twofold:

So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.

The emergence of the mother in the goal of his search may perplex us after reading the reference to his fellow, especially when we remember that Aegeon had not mentioned the mother as an object of his boy's voyages. No such motive appears in the Menaechmi, where the twins' mother, Teuximarcha, is named once and conveniently forgotten. In The Comedy of Errors the mother Aemilia plays a majestic and strategic part. Until the last scene, only her Syracusan son manifests a faith that she is still alive, but he manifests it only in these two lines. Shakespeare obviously found the subject too venerable or extremely touchy. My readers may seize this occasion to protest that the brother of Antipholus could not be sanely regarded as an object in the ocean of sex. Granting they are right, at the hazard of their tolerance, I am tempted to suggest that the ‘fellow’ whom Antipholus yearns to find is in a potent sense feminine. In view of my belief that the Syracusan is a ‘genius’ or demon double, it is logical (by the laws of folklore) to assume that he is seeking a body, a material form. Insofar as the Ephesian is earthier and more matter-of-fact he performs this material function. Since earth and matter are from ancient times symbolic of the maternal, I am led to wonder if the ‘water’ Antipholus longs for is not—more than just feminine—motherly?

In consequence of this reasoning we have to translate the quest of Antipholus for reunion with his mother as a dream-journey of desire for rebirth. In dreams, and in dramas too, ‘Birth is almost invariably represented by some reference to water: either we are falling into water or clambering out of it, saving someone from it or being saved by them, i.e. the relation between mother and child is symbolized’ (8). Shakespeare in fact nearly stripped away the last web of glamour between our scientific insight and his poetically concealed sperm-drop endeavouring to reach the womb. It will be noted that Adriana speaks of a drop of water falling in and then being taken from ‘the breaking gulf’. To the woman there is hope of ultimate redemption for the ‘drop’. To the malcontent Antipholus the falling drop is fated to devastation, to ‘confound himself’. Nevertheless he travels on, ‘unseen, inquisitive’.

Just as he fancies himself confounded and lost in the ocean of the world, he looks with fascination on the city of Ephesus and resolves to wander through its labyrinth of streets: ‘I will go lose myself’ (I, ii). Shakespeare was well acquainted with the poetic practice of hailing cities as foster-mothers. His fellow-playwrights (for diverse examples, Thomas Watson and Thomas Dekker) fondly alluded to their birthplace London as a mother. To Shakespeare the metropolis must have seemed a stepmother, with all the charms and criminal appetites of stepmothers in fairy tales; for many years London let him starve for love.

At this point the sceptical reader will have ripened for me a cluster of pungent questions. Among the foremost perhaps is this: Will the venerable Aemilia fit into the equation which Adriana proposes for her distressed mate's ego? In other words, Is the mother his dear self's better part?

From the text of the comedy I have extricated but one piece of proof that Aemilia is the true rival of the wife in the heart of her son. In the final act Antipholus of Syracuse, flying from the wife and her compatriots, escapes into the sanctuary over which the long lost Aemilia rules. She and the Syracusan are of course ignorant of each other's identity. Adriana, frustrated, demands from Solinus protection of her marital rights, not knowing the relation of Aemilia to her man: ‘Justice, most sacred duke, against the abbess!’ Her grievance plainly sounds as if the abbess had stolen her beloved. Unconsciously, so to say, Adriana has fathomed the abyss of the Antipholus mind. Old customs of matrimony ordain that a man shall hold his wife above his mother in the scale of his values. The spouse is generally judged more valuable in political economy. So the miserable girl is justified in claiming that she is better than her husband's ‘better part’. Love, notwithstanding, laughs at her priority. Safe in the bosom of the priory church the ‘genius’ Antipholus can defy both wife and duke. The genuine Antipholus, by the dictates of Shakespeare's reality principle, stays outside the sacred refuge and faces the music of political economy. On his ego wounds the abbess cannot perform the miracles which her ‘wholesome syrups, drugs, and holy prayers’ promise the spirit from Syracuse. With the confidence of maternal power she expects ‘To make of him (the fugitive) a formal man again’. But she is powerless to make a healthy head of a family out of the profane or ‘natural’ son.

A sequel question we have to meet is—How could Aemilia be the ‘better part’ of the twins when one of them extols Luciana as his better part? The evidence for my answer is scanty and fragmentary, but it is the best we could hope to obtain from the poet at the stage of his self-knowledge and self-revelation where he wrote his Errors. My answer is twofold. When the Syracusan makes love to Luciana the poet revels in the illusion that the mother's image in this interval is demoted in his heart. And in that interval he is eager to entertain a stranger as a lover. The poet's unconscious remains undeceived by the gesture of demotion and goes ardently ahead with its drive for the assimilation of Luciana to the image of Aemilia. Whatever real person he had in view when he conceived the younger character vanished while the erotic scene was plotted; or rather her memory dissolved into the familiar and permanent memory of his mother. Luciana could become the ‘better part’ of Antipholus solely by metamorphosis into Aemilia.

At once the vigilant reader will inquire, Does this mean that Aemilia is a simulacrum of the goddess Diana? I think, no. Diana in the drama—insofar as she is visible—is actually a simulacrum of Aemilia. She has been converted from pagan goddess to Christian abbess, from a queen of vestals to a governess of nuns. That is why the influence of the Ephesian moon-woman is felt throughout the play. The influence of the mother assumes the mythical radiance. She is the goal of the Syracusan's journey and therefore the driving force of Shakespeare's plot. In the love song of Antipholus to Luciana I find a faint proof of her immanence in the moonshine of the dramatist's soul. He imagines her sister weeping continually till she creates a ‘flood of tears’. Then he begs Luciana not to drown him in the flood—not to unite him to Adriana out of pity—since he wants her alone for his love:

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.

(III, ii.)

The waves are silver, we know, because the moon beams on them. By what magic could the golden locks of Luciana fall on her sister's silver tears? Only by identification of the two. This becomes possible to fantasy if we translate them into phases or aspects of a personification of the moon. But Antipholus does not dream of reclining on the moon; he visions himself on a white-crested sea. In the language of homely reality, he wishes to lie on his mother's breast and suck her milk. We can now understand why the two sisters, the bright and the dark, may claim to possess parts of the hero's self. Having convinced his ego of their semblance to his mother, they gained admission to her fane in himself and in turn enjoyed his idolatry. In exchange for this reverence they had to give up his love. Loving them signified to him ‘self-wrong’ and internal treason, i.e. betraying the maternal deity erected by his ego in childhood. Since the goddess belonged to none but himself, worshipped without prospect or hope of sexual intercourse, she could reign in his unconscious both as mother and as virgin. This psychic contradiction has its mythic parallel in the cult of Diana, who was revered for her strict and frosty chastity and adored for her warm sympathy with women giving birth. In the sanctuary of Diana at Rome her statue displayed many breasts, as if she herself had known the bliss of maternity (9). The Roman women, delivering their babies, invoked the assistance of Lucina, the moon.

Aemilia's children are restored to her at the end of the comedy, and Shakespeare down-rightly indicates her stature in their twin minds. He denies the daughter-in-law an apology for Antipholus's truculence or a pardon for her faults. For the sake of popular romance he bestowed on Luciana three lines of reassurance of the other brother's love. There is no mistaking the significance of the happy ending. It is joy over the return of the twins to the supreme love of their life. For the sake of this overwhelming attraction one Antipholus is cruel to her rivals, and the other hardens his heart to the allurements of girls. Under the mask of the abbess we discover the secret cause of her son's unjust divorce. From some abysmal temple in his brain her moon-coloured idol governs his sexual tides. She is a jealous goddess, and will have no other mistresses before her. Union with another is iniquity to her, and she is never slow to revenge the sin. In retaliation for her child's efforts toward liberty, to hunt for a new love elsewhere, she flogs his ego from her stronghold in his head, with silver cords.

The wish for maternal pillow and milk brings to the surface of the dramatist's mind the idea of death. In the ‘glorious supposition’ that Adriana's tears and Luciana's hair have been made a bed for Antipholus, he is ready to believe ‘He gains by death that hath such means to die’. In the midst of his ecstasy the thought of extinction becomes sweet to him. Why? The sole reply that occurs to me is that the mother in the dramatist's mind must be dead. Whether the woman in whose image he fashioned his goddess was really in her grave is a question beyond our present interest. Our business is to explain the connexion in Shakespeare's drama of the thoughts of mother and death. The apparition of Aemilia near the final curtain, like a dea ex machina, leaves me with an inkling that she is a holy ghost. Her sacredness is stressed to a degree unworthy of mortals, summoning to mind the observation that humans must perish before they turn angelic or divine. We can glimpse the phantom character of the abbess more plainly when a minor individual of the play defines in her presence the background of her home:

                                                  … the melancholy vale,
The place of death and sorry execution,
Behind the ditches of the abbey here.

(V.)

The odour of tombs and hecatombs hangs over the happiness of the comedy's last scene. Could such things be close to the mother of the poet's doubles if death was not irrevocably close to the poet's own mother in his thoughts?

Alert readers of the play will note the curious fact that Shakespeare designates the home of Aemilia an abbey and also a priory. She herself is always called abbess. In view of the poet's passion for paronomasia we may wonder whether he sensed a likeness between the spirit of the abbess and the abyss, the ‘vale’, behind her house? The airs of both are sublime and malignant, capable of blasting mortal happiness. If our assumption of their likeness is correct we can proceed to unravel some of the most tenacious knots in the drama. The flourishing of the metaphor in the poet's head would mean that he regarded the matrix not just as a fountain of life—Adriana's ‘breaking gulf’—but as a desert of death too. This ambivalence of his concepts of the womb and vagina would account for the antithetical nature of his two heroines, the lucid and cool yet golden Luciana and her arid and hot yet night-hued sister, each an embodiment of the divine mother in the dramatist's brain. When he regarded females as distinct personalities (aliens) his endopsychic mother acted as their prototype, the pattern of all beauty and wit. When he regarded them as creatures entwined in his destiny (lovers) she acted as their severest critic, an implacable competitor of the whole sex. In her activity as the model of loveliness she fomented tempests in his libido; in polar opposition she obstructed it, lifting before his mind's eye the rock on which the loves of his life were wrecked.

The rock in the sexual sea on which Aegeon's family-ship was split is specifically a symbol of the male organ which children often believe the mother possesses within her vagina (10). The infant mind, detecting the absence of the penis in infant females, commonly concludes that they have lost it, that the instrument of virility was mysteriously excised. The idea that stronger, elder females may have retained it persists, and mothers who evoke dread in their sons by exhibiting masculine qualities frequently appear in their dreams with the organ in full view; or else the nightmares show them brandishing emblems of it. By the poetic mechanism of displacement people shift their sentiments of dread from the clitoral zone to the mother's or vampire-woman's ‘hard heart’. When the stony bosom surprises her children by abruptly yielding milk or kindness, folklore pays tribute to the sublime woman by picturing her as a rock which miraculously lavishes a reviving liquid when struck by a magic wand. In the Errors Shakespeare paid tribute to the sublime woman of his dreams by picturing her as an abbess, which may well be englished as she-father. It was the assertion of her masculinity in his unconscious that obstructed his endeavours to love other women. Whenever he engaged in sexual union he became acutely aware of the void in the vagina, and suffered the fear of losing his penis. Fantasies of his own castration blazed in his mind. Under the agony of such thoughts his ego prostrated itself before the maternal image and begged for mercy, repudiating the pursuit of happiness everywhere else. In short, he spiritually castrated himself. Having made himself a eunuch for the goddess's sake, he could approach her bosom with confidence and nestle down to delectable oblivion. We witness a theatrical mimicry of the act in the entrance of Antipholus to his mother's abbey. Cut off from his living family, the hero approaches the rock of the church and it opens to admit him, with the promise of ‘wholesome syrups’ and holy whispers for his peace. Secure within the rock, lulled by his illusion of Catholic death, he could smile defiantly at remembrance of marital or political economy. Not the legion of hell nor the populace of Ephesus could prevail against the maternal stone. Nevertheless the ideas of castration and death were always associated in the poet's head with pangs of cuts and mutilations, sights and smells of blood, visions of skeletons and severed skulls. Even in the final felicity of his play the horrible recollection of such things sticks to his poetry.

Shakespeare was probably persuaded to let the last act take place among these ghastly adumbrations by reasons of dramatic economy. He wanted to disclose the brothers' identity and restore them to their parents on the same street where Aegeon was being led to execution for violating the law of Ephesus.

This entrance of Aegeon reminds us that we have yet to reckon his part in the ego of the dramatist. Surely, if the abbess is the image of Shakespeare's mother, the tragic merchant must somehow stand for his father. Judging by the play we would imagine that the dramatist did not live in awe of his mother's husband. Aegeon does not glow for us with the flame of ideality. He warms us with embers of a singular humbleness, the emotion of a man who knows how little history he is able to make. Shakespeare spends no moonrays of theopathy on him. He seems to have felt for the ineffectual old man a filial pity, bordering on disdain. Since he often felt similarly toward himself, experiencing failure after failure, the poet unconsciously installed his father close to the centre of himself, opposite but intimate.

So intimate was their psychic valence that it might be considered identification. There are moments in the speeches of Aegeon when the voice of the poet can be clearly heard. For instance, in the father's narrative of the calamity that divided his family. He states that when the tempest menaced his ship not far from Epidamnum the sky conveyed to his thought ‘A doubtful warrant of immediate death’, which he himself ‘would gladly have embrac'd’. We are granted no reason for this gladness in the face of the danger to his wife and babes. It makes sense only if we recall that the sea is a symbol for sex and drowning, to Shakespeare's unconscious, a mode of reunion with the mother. The poet is thinking of his own wife and off-spring when Aegeon reports that the incessant weepings of his wife and the ‘piteous plainings’ of the infants forced him to hunt for means of rescue. Aemilia does not impress us as a lady capable of incessant weepings, but Adriana is almost perpetually in tears. Finally, at the end of Aegeon's tale, it is the son, brooding over the central tragedy of his life, the loss of maternal love, who sighs:

Thus have you heard me sever'd from my bliss,
That by misfortune was my life prolong'd,
To tell sad stories of my own mishaps.

The misery and impotence of the son provide us with a mirror of the woeful and ineffectual life of the sire, a mirror which emits the virtues of the father and the genius of his boy. Barring these features, our verdict is bound to be that Shakespeare's personality was precisely what we should expect from the flesh of the heir to his father's natural shocks and outrageous fortune.

Naturally the paternal position in the dramatist's mind was not a static one. During remembrance of the father's fulfilments of claims to the mother's labour and love, the radius between Shakespeare's ego nucleus and the paternal image would certainly widen, and sparks of hate shoot across it. To the boy's way of thinking, the mother belonged to nobody but him. Intruders on their sacred privacy merited all extreme penalties known to savage and child. The father's intrusions were especially resented, because the world and the mother sanctioned them as good or just. Nobody but the boy seemed to object to the divorce of his mother and himself. On such occasions he could contemplate the thought of the father's extinction with a stern joy, the joy of justice done. Doubtless he exhausted his fancy in devising perfect punishments for the old man, according to the law of talion.

The memory of a particular paternal intrusion may have burnt in the poet's unconscious when he invented the legend of Aegeon. He sentenced the old man to death for having dared to enter the precincts of the holy city of Ephesus. Mercantile enmity—so runs the legend—incited the city of Diana and Syracuse to proclaim a state of hatred between them. They decreed a halt of their traffic and intercourse, and resolved, as Duke Solinus puts it,

                    … if any, born at Ephesus,
          Be seen at Syracusan marts and fairs;
          Again, if any Syracusan born
Come to the bay of Ephesus, he dies.

(I, i.)

Aegeon is doomed to decapitation for dropping his anchor in the bay of Ephesus. He can be forgiven only when his sons regain the mother.

Here I will chance the suggestion that the name Syracuse may be interpreted as a pun. Since the dramatist altered the location of his comedy from Epidamnus to Ephesus, but preserved the home of his hero in Syracuse, I felt it necessary to examine the name for a possible motive for keeping it. Since it is pronounced Syracusa throughout the play, construing it as Sire-accuser did not strike me as too fantastic.

It has probably occurred to the alert reader that the name Ephesus may also be a pun. As a city of enchantment and witchcraft it may well have appealed to the poet as a region which effaces the true identities of men and women and puts in their places moon-animated effigies.

If an accusation of Shakespeare's sire prompted the invention of the framework of his plot, another accusation provided the substance of its middle event.

The first scene of Act III, perhaps the oldest portion of our palimpsest, communicates through its metrical antiquity a major trauma of the poet's childhood. Antipholus approaches his wife's door and finds himself locked out. His Dromio calls for servant-girls (all having English names) to open the door. The other Dromio, snug inside, inquires,

Dost thou conjure for wenches, that thou call'st for such store,
When one is one too many? Go, get thee from the door.

The persons in the house are eating a commonplace meal. With these words of Dromio the dramatist conjures up a different feast. The clown is informed that the ‘master’ stands outside; he pretends to be touched:

Let him walk from whence he came, lest he catch cold on's feet.

Now psycho-analysis conjures up a vision of the child Shakespeare straining at the door of his parents' chamber and clamouring to get in. Possibly his humorous father responded in the Dromio way. Antipholus knocks at the barrier hard and listens to Luce the kitchen-girl deride him: ‘Let him knock till it ache’. He rages, ‘You'll cry for this, minion, if I beat the door down.’ The droll inside remarks that the town is ‘troubled with unruly boys’. Adriana orders the newcomer to go away. Injured and perplexed he lingers there, unable to comprehend how his woman could be so frozen-hearted when he stood in need of her warmth. In the autumnal gloom of his heart he murmurs, ‘There is something in the wind, that we cannot get in.’ His slave replies, ‘You would say so, master, if your garments were thin. Your cake here is warm within; you stand here in the cold.’ The forlorn master wishes he had an iron crow to wrench his way in.

Obscene notions raced through the dramatist's brain as he wrote the scene. He recalled the passage in Plautus where Amphitryon, knowing that his wife is entertaining a stranger and unable to gain entrance to her quarters, cries out that he will break in the door, and swears to destroy whomever he sees in his path, wife, father, anyone. No sooner does he raise his arm to execute his oath than Jupiter's thunder breaks from the heavens to arrest him. Amphitryon falls flat before the sound of the god. The piety of the Latin poet seems to have stirred Shakespeare to derision of the divine thunder. In the corresponding scene of his comedy the memory of the celestial admonition is evoked by a mere reference to the breaking of wind. The connexion between the anal and the heavenly thunder was long ago pointed out by psycho-analysis (11). That Shakespeare associated paternal efforts at dictatorship with flatulence may properly be disputed. We cannot doubt that he associated paternity with wind. The symbolism of the pompous epithet he invented for the sea, in the first scene of his play, cannot be comprehended otherwise. He calls it ‘the always-wind-obeying deep’. The resistance of the real sea to air-force counted for nothing in his mind when he thought of the sexual sea, in particular his amorous mother, and her submission to father-force.

The memory of his banishment from the mother's room excited ideas of libidinal rancour and amorphous fears. Death-wishes against her and his father, too, must have surged in his head at the time of the trauma, and colliding with pulses of incest produced an unvanquishable terror, a terror he never overcame (12).

A friend, Balthazar, dissuades Antipholus from attacking the door, assuring him that the honour of his wife is unviolated:

          —your long experience of her wisdom,
Her sober virtue, years, and modesty,
Plead on her part some cause to you unknown;
And doubt not, sir, but she will well excuse
Why at this time the doors are made against you.

The friend warns him that violent entrance would bring down on his head ‘vulgar comment’, mob ridicule and calumny,

That may with foul intrusion enter in
And dwell upon your grave when you are dead;
For slander lives upon succession,
For ever housed where it gets possession.

Antipholus calms down, and determines to visit the wild hostess of the Porpentine inn,

Since mine own doors refuse to entertain me,
I'll knock elsewhere to see if they'll disdain me.

And so the scene ends.

What little master Shakespeare did when he departed from the forbidden chamber, we can reasonably surmise. Unruly boys of genius are as prone as the dullest lads to the frenzy and torpor of masturbation. When he grew up he wreaked a vicarious vengeance on his parents. He contrived in imagination to get his ‘spirit’ inside the coveted dwelling, with all its cakes and ale at his disposal, while his carnal self (in empathy with the father as husband) stayed outside with fever and chills.

Shakespeare never lost the conviction that slander was a family heritage, like a curse among the ancient Greeks. It is my conviction that he unconsciously proved it true, by rehearsing again and again, in young manhood and old age, in various disguises, the fatal scene of his infancy, thus inflicting on his children the iniquity of his parents. This repetition compulsion traverses and threads together all his dramatic works.

The sadism of the fantasies Antipholus indulges in after his exclusion reminds me that my summary of Aegeon's death sentence omitted a detail of grave importance psychologically. He is formally condemned because of his inability to pay an exorbitant fine, a thousand marks. The Duke grants him a day in which to collect the money among the Ephesians. By the lucky discovery of his rich sons the old man comes within reach of it, but Solinus releases him from the fine. Money and its worries are never remote from the dramatist's mind. His Syracusan double, in the first act, is fearful that he may lose a thousand marks of his own. In the next act he is portrayed as obsessed with the idea of his gold. In the third he gets the chain his brother had requested and comments on the acquisition with pleasure:

I see a man here needs not live by shifts,
When in the streets he meets such golden gifts.

Later the Ephesian double is arrested for debt to the goldsmith, and the money for his freedom is given to his twin. We are not told the metal of the courtesan's ring, but there is no need to know. The poet's obsession on the yellow treasure is manifest without it. We note that he manifests it, not in ordinary conditions of trade, but luxuriously or anxiously. It glitters for him as gift, fine, or debt. One would think that he suffered from the craving to obtain it free and the dread of losing it. These emotions generally run high in the syndrome of the melancholiac. Psycho-analysis has linked his terror of poverty with the peculiar mode of sexuality known as anal erotic, which frequently explodes in demonstrations of sadism (13). In melancholy the passion for excrement characteristic of this kind of sexuality appears torn out of its normal context of absorbing interest in by-products, commodities, stock-piles, profit and thrift. The anal-erotic mood of melancholy serves as regression under the spur of anxiety to the state of mind where bowel movements signified gifts or obligations to the mother. If the child at this stage of libidinal development does not deliver the ordure on demand, or squanders it in caprice, he hazards the loss of maternal love. Conversely, in the unconscious of the chronically sad, the belief that they have lost maternal love may spur their intellects backward to infantile concern for their ordure, as something wantonly spent or else owed. Under the frown of the maternal divinity in their conscience, their egos writhe in guilt and look forward to doing penance for their financial faults. The result is the dread of penury which we find so active in the melancholiac, and which afflicted Shakespeare most of his life.

The first idea that comes to the abbess's mind when she hears of Antipholus's daily gloom is the likelihood that he has lost money: ‘Hath he not lost much wealth by wrack of sea?’ It is perfectly natural for the mother to worry over the disposal of his gold.

We must not let ourselves be fooled by Shakespeare's costuming of his heroes as merchants. His skull did not carry comfortably the cap of commerce; and he would not have masked his doubles as money-men if he had not been an apprentice in drama emulating Plautus, while steeped in sorrow in a period of financial distress. The Roman dramatist was not bothered by the morals and manners of the market-place. He worked for an audience of buyers and sellers, who rejoiced in the worship of Mercury, god of merchants and thieves. Shakespeare, on the contrary, worked for an audience of spenders and lenders, above all the courtiers of his Queen. Consequently he could not rest content with a hero like Plautus's Menaechmus, who was raised by an Epidamnian trader and inherited his cheap principles as well as his fortune. Antipholus of Ephesus is a soldier rather than a salesman. He was brought to the city by ‘that most famous warrior, Duke Menaphon’, the uncle of Solinus, and earned the latter's gratitude by serving him in battle, taking deep scars to save his life (V). In this conception of Antipholus as a warrior I sense one of those infant inventions which Freud named ‘the family romances’. (14). Nobody understood better than Shakespeare how to spin these daydreams in which children strive to liberate themselves from disappointing and domineering parents by creating imaginary fathers and mothers of nobler blood and more generous hearts. In these fantasies they become the foster sons and daughters of monarchs, or else they are changelings, exiled or stolen from royal cradles and raised by poor but honest wretches who bear a strange resemblance to their real fathers and mothers. Shakespeare's transfer of the lost Antipholus to the care of the martial Duke Menaphon, instead of another merchant like father Aegeon, sounds like a ‘family romance’, and expresses a mild contempt for the old man's occupation.

It is difficult to see how the poet could have dealt with the paternal figure in a manner so supercilious and icy if the old fellow was still alive. The hypothesis that the father was dead has no cult to support it. If my interpretation of his personality is correct, the stately but futile old man could never mount in his son's mind to the pedestal of a god. After death he would stay a ghost. When Antipholus of Syracuse greets his father he asks, ‘Aegeon art thou not? or else his ghost?’ The query may be taken as a conventional phrase of amazement on meeting an acquaintance long unseen or lost. There are features in Aegeon which give the word a lurid precision. He pictures his face as hidden

In sap-consuming winter's drizzled snow,
And all the conduits of my blood froze up.

(V.)

His last words in the play are addressed to Aemilia; they contain not one quaver of affection or anticipation of happiness and peace. Instead he is pallidly conscientious, almost accusing, requiring her to tell the fate of the son she carried with her from the unspeakable rock. This duty done, he is mute.

3

The double Antipholus regains the divine Aemilia. ‘After so long grief, such festivity!’ she cries before departing with her family into the abbey. The felicity of the author, the actors, and the spectators, in the last episode of the Errors is so cordial and uncontrolled that one is reluctant to survey it from the standpoint of criticism. Yet the combination of childish and ghoulish elements in the scene needs to be illumined if we are ever to grasp the psychology of Shakespeare, and eventually the psychology of the stage. Is it necessary for the comedy to conclude in environs redolent of bloody graves? What have these to do with the dominant theme of mistaken identity, the entertainment of aliens as lovers?

The replies to these problems, to which our analysis inevitably leads, can perhaps be presented best in the form of a synopsis briefly reviewing what might have happened to Shakespeare before he could compose The Comedy of Errors. Whether the tale I shall unfold corresponds to the facts of the poet's life is a question for future biography to decide. It will suffice for me to point out that no other hypothesis on the play arranges its details in a coherent and rational structure, casting light on all its parts. What once appeared to be discrete and random inspirations, figures of speech, epigrams and exclamations—poetry scattered from a cornucopia without concord or intrinsic sense—now emerges in a network everywhere meaningful, reflecting real movements of life. By the Freudian dialectic we are able to discern the method in the dramatist's seeming madness.

First, there was a tempestuous period which culminated in the wreck of Shakespeare's family. During an absence from home, in a strange city, he had violated his marriage oath; he entertained a stranger as a lover. He did it in absolute ignorance of the real lusts that impelled him. The woman of the adventure had unconsciously reminded him of the dark and marvellous stranger who had been his mother. After the adventure he felt that he had committed a loathsome sin. He thought it was adultery. It was imaginary incest: in a kind of dream he had ascended to his father's place by his mother's breast. The paternal image within him grieved and grew angry. As a child Shakespeare had reverenced his father's might: as a boy he had loved him for his athletic prowess and companionship. Always he had feared and hated him as the man whom his mother obeyed. The permanent residue of these emotions in the poet's brain, circling round the memory of his father, agitated him as self-condemnation. Weakness of paternal authority in his youth, the stealthy disdain he felt for the old man, left him secretly glad that he had done the deed. But the mental image of his mother felt polluted and betrayed. He dreaded her more than any other power in the universe, because she could shut him out from love and leave him eternally alone. To escape these punishments he would happily submit to her whips. The permanent residue of these terrors and the beatitude of their union in erotic pain, circling round the memory of his mother, tortured him exquisitely as self-damnation. With the father's ghost he felt as if he was in purgatory; now he had plunged into hell. He suffered from extreme masochism, and his narcissistic ego refused to bear it. Hunting for avenues of relief, he heard a rumour that his wife was false to him. The proofs were preposterous, but too opportune for his conceit to resist. He wanted an excuse to vent the sadism of his conscience; with barely suppressed exultation he accused his wife of his own crime, without daring to face her with the witnesses or evidence. He fled from her and her offspring, outraged and sorrowing over his exclusion from her love. Consciously he feared that if he faced her he might do something frightful. Unconsciously he flamed with a lust for destruction, which his ego habitually directed on the internal images or external effigies of his parents, because of the scars and frustrations they had imposed on his infant vanity. Sadist thoughts evoked unconscious remembrance of his anal malice to the mother, the way he scattered bowel-gold to her disgust and ire, or refused to pay it forth till she became peremptory. This remembrance was sharpened by the fact that the time of his fury against his wife was also a time of pecuniary distress. Still he lavished money on inns and individuals who enjoyed his flow of talk. Observing that these luxuries only increased his misery, he retreated to a solitude where his main expenses were sweetly sour thoughts, tears, and poetry. He may also have been saddened by the funeral of a friend, for his mind dwelt fondly on graves and effigies of the dead. The urge to self-slaughter kindled memories of his passions of guilt and pangs of outcast love at the time his imagination first confronted the tombs of his father and mother. His heart felt eaten by remorse; the nerves of his maternal temple drained vitality from his Narcissus pool, just as he had once drained life-liquid from her breast.

The poet consciously defined the causes of his melancholy as he knew them in the questions that the abbess asks Adriana concerning the fugitive Antipholus:

Hath he not lost much wealth by wrack of sea?
Buried some dear friend? Hath not else his eye
Stray'd his affection in unlawful love?
A sin prevailing much in youthful men,
Who give their eyes the liberty of gazing.

After the unjust divorce of his wife, in his refuge of tranquil contemplation and poetry, he remembered two comedies by Plautus which appealed to him as works of art full of semblances and lessons of his wicked experience. Turning over the ancient Latin leaves he discharged a heartful of pity and terror with laughter over their lusty gods, jealous husbands, and noble but stubborn wives. The infinitely funny intrigues struck him like a mixture of his own wishes and accomplishments. Possibly, with the aid of alcohol, he fell asleep on his copy of Plautus. Through the laughter and the sleep he replenished the libido in his Narcissus pool, and energetically renewed the ego struggle to control the drives of the id. The source of this new strength is the essence of Shakespeare's genius, and like all genius remains a sphinx to psycho-analysis. The physiology of narcissism may some day solve the riddle. Meanwhile we have our hands full with the problem of the devices by which the genius's ego manages the id. Shakespeare's ego not only declined to give the pulses of his id the outright ecstasies of sex and destruction they craved. He exposed them to the ridicule of the world, twisted, transmuted, and ‘dolled’ or puppeted up. Thus they got the sole outlet his conscience and commonsense could afford.

The basic design for the exposure, the plot, occurred to him in a dream. He crossed in fantasy the four twins of the Amphitruo, with its celestial cuckoldry, and the two twins of the Menaechmi, with its domestic quarrelling, cheating of prostitutes, and final satisfaction of restored brotherhood. The outcome was a farce about himself, on the surface displaying the will to believe that the source of his troubles was erroneous marriage, the mistaken union of strangers. He stated his plea of innocence according to his habit of paronomasia: ‘Not mad, but mated; how I do not know.’ He, put these words in the mouth of Antipholus, courting Luciana (III, ii), and showed their personal significance by repeating the idea from the mouth of Duke Solinus: ‘I think you are all mated or stark mad’ (V). Shakespeare was afraid to find out why mating checkmated him. To be mated, in the English of his lifetime, meant not only to be married; a single man mated was a man confounded, rendered impotent. Shakespeare's impotence resulted from incest-guilt after mating with a facsimile of his maternal idol. No sooner was he free of one facsimile than, like Antipholus's drop of water, he drifted wildly about ‘to find his fellow forth’, that is to mate again. Like that waterdrop he was destined to be confounded and lost (‘mated’), forever looking for a mother from whom he was forever in flight. The dream which The Comedy of Errors ensued displaced the passion of his quest, making its object a brother, a fellow-male, the dramatist's material self. Finding him gave the dreamer the pacific illusion that he was no longer estranged from himself. Latent in the dream was an odyssey of a motherless child, who accused his sire of separating him from the beloved, and sailed alone across a sexual sea to a maternal territory, in which, by the contrary lights of a lunar mother he reached at last the goddess of his desire, the mother-in-death.

By the inner dramatic method which Freud designates the dream-work, Shakespeare saw the fiercest of his unconscious wishes fulfilled. He wanted to rise to his father's place by his mother's breast. He performed the incest in fantasy in a variety of ways. (i) He divided himself into doubles, one of whom floats away with the mother when the father's ship is split. (ii) His doubles end their vicissitudes in the bosom of the mother's church, itself a symbol of maternity. (iii) By identifying himself with father Aegeon he also attained his heart's wish: (a) he sailed the sea of sex as captain of a family vessel, ‘giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel’ (I Peter, iii, 7); (b) he guided his mast into the forbidden harbour of Ephesus, the town of the great mother-goddess Diana. (iv) By identifying Ephesus with the mother, the poet presented his double from Syracuse with a chance to lose himself in her midst. (v) In a regression to infantile rivalry with the father over food, he tricked the wife into serving him a meal while the hungry husband fretted outside. The poet puts emphasis on the sweetness of the meal, comparing it to a cake, an emblem of motherly labour. (vi) He at least made a gesture of sexual promise to the romantic facsimile of his mother whom he named Luciana.—It will be remarked that for each of these incestuous scenes, except the last, the dreamer provided a condign and cruel chastisement, bordering on bloodshed. (i) For floating off with the mother, one double endured not only the hardships of storm and wreck but also suffered a kidnapping by rude fishermen. (ii) For joining the mother in the bosom of her church, the doubles have to bear the sights and smells of its charnel background, a place of capital retribution. (iii) For riding the matrix-boat, the son-incorporating Aegeon is wrecked at sea, and for trespassing on the waters of Ephesus, he is menaced with a hangman's axe, a symbolic castration. (iv) For losing a twin-self in the city of Ephesus, the poet had to pay with the spectacle of the city loosing itself on the twin, hounding him—with his drawn sword—to ‘melancholy vale’ and monastery (a house of symbolic castration, of ‘eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake’—Matthew, xix, 12). (v) For tricking the mistress of the hero's home, his ‘natural’ self must stand in impotent wrath and cold, an exile from her breast, or her larder. By these brutal exactions the poet mentally redeemed his soul from guilt. At the same time, in the theatre of his mind's night, he gratified his lust for falling together with his father and mother to destruction, or rather to sanguine chaos and the brink of death. The coalescence of both these lusts of sex and destruction took place in the fantasy of returning to the womb of the mother in her tomb.

Having accomplished his heart's desires in dream, he woke refreshed, and broke the long fast of his sadness with gusto and glee. Then, after some earnest reflection on raw material and art, he sat down to write The Comedy of Errors. In the affectionate endeavour to justify himself on the stage, he multiplied reasons for the conduct of his puppets, employing a technique analogous to the secondary elaboration of dreams. Next he carried out a tertiary elaboration: he issued his drama-work in a texture to satisfy actors and critics, fulfilling requirements of the contemporary theatre. He garnished the play with coeval allusions (‘modern instances’), indicated erudition delicately, sprinkled the scenes with extra dirty jokes for the groundlings, ‘wise saws’ and singable lines for students and gentry, and crowned the concoction with passages that bright particular ‘stars’ could sink their histrionic teeth into joyously. Despite rubs and botches, contradiction and extravagance, he knew he had produced a gem comparable to the Menaechmi of Plautus, which was said to be that master's earliest drama. Would the world ever realize what it cost him? what bleeding fragments of his life he carved and morselled before he could set forth this dish fit for the lords?

Scripsi et salvavi animam meam.

References

(1) Harris, Frank. The Man Shakespeare (1909), bk. II, ch. 1.

(2) Cf. Jaques's speech on the liberty of motley in As You Like It, II, vii; Hamlet's lines on the purpose of playing (Hamlet, III, i).

(3) Frazer, Sir James. The Golden Bough, abridged edition (1942), 165.

(4) Scot, Reginald. Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), bk. 12, ch. iii.

(5) Frazer. Op. cit., 165.

(6) Wilson, E. C. England's Eliza (1939), ch. v, ‘Diana’. Cf. also ch. vii, ‘Cynthia, the Ladie of the Sea’.

(7) Edwards, Richard. Prologue to Damon and Pythias (1587), quoted by E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (1923), IV, 193.

(8) Freud, Sigmund. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1935), 137.

(9) Frazer. Op. cit., 3, 141.

(10) Freud. ‘On the Sexual Theories of Children’, Collected Papers (1924), II, 65f.

(11) Jones, Ernest. ‘The Madonna's Conception Through the Ear’, Essays in Applied Psycho-Analysis (1923), 274f.

(12) Cf. Sharp, Ella Freeman. ‘From King Lear to The Tempest’, Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 27, (1946), 19f.

(13) Freud. ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Collected Papers, IV, 163.

(14)———. ‘Family Romances’, Collected Papers, V, 74.