[In the essay below, MacCary maintains that Antipholus of Syracuse is the primary focus of The Comedy of Errors, noting that his search for his brother may be viewed as a search for himself.]

A common structural aspect of the early comedies is delayed marriage; this fact emphasizes the importance to these plays of the young male's trepidation at committing himself physically and emotionally to a woman. In three of these plays the alternative of identification with other males is first tried, and then, only with regret, dismissed as inadequate. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love's Labor's Lost the other males are friends, but in The Comedy of Errors the protagonist seeks his twin brother, whom he speaks of as “myself.” It is in this play that we are closest, then, to the narcissistic pattern of object-choice. We do not find in Antipholus of Syracuse the sensational aspects of the love life of pathological narcissists as defined by Kernberg—polymorphous perversity and sexual promiscuity; rather social isolation is his characterizing feature. We might rather choose to use the Elizabethan term melancholy for this, and associate him with Antonio, The Merchant of Venice, and Jaques in As You Like It, those outsiders who know not how to love.

Before defining this trait further with an examination of the “drop of water” speeches, and before pressing the contention that it is from Antipholus of Syracuse's point of view that we see the action of the play, I think it would be helpful to show that this kind of investigation does not raise new problems, but responds to those raised by other critics, namely, that the play is strangely without an end in marriage, and thus seems not to fit the romantic pattern of comedy. Legatt observes of the final scene and of the relation between Antipholus of Ephesus and his wife Andriana: “The director may contrive a forgiving embrace, but nothing in the text requires it. … For the critic, with only the text before him, the final state of the marriage must remain an open question.”¹

Palmer and Bradbury, in their preface to the collection of essays Shakespearean Comedy, explain why this play is not included in their discussion:

Of the ten comedies which belong to the first half of Shakespeare's career, only The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew and The Merry Wives of Windsor are not given detailed consideration here: an omission which reflects less on their merits than on the volume's prevailing interest in the more “romantic” plays.²

I have argued elsewhere that the comic tradition prejudices us against The Comedy of Errors, and this might account for its low estimation by critics in the Shakespearean corpus.³ We have been accustomed by Menander, Plautus, and Terence, and their successors, to expect marriage to be not only the end of comedy, but its goal, i.e., that the genre's teleology is marriage and the immersion of the individual in society that marriage symbolizes. Frye, Barber, and Salangar, as we have seen, epitomize the criticism propounding this romantic tradition in comedy. There is, however, a different kind of comedy, represented for us by Aristophanes, some Plautus, some Shakespeare, Molière, and a few later comic poets, in which desires are fulfilled, but not for the male in the female. Rather, this tradition focuses on the male's search for and expression of himself, and this is figured with twins, doubles, friends, and other mirroring devices. I call this kind of comedy narcissistic, and in Aristophanes, at least, I find the polymorphous perversity and sexual promiscuity which Kernberg places at one extreme of his continuum of configurations.

J. R. Brown says that “the audience of Shakespearean comedy is not led towards an intimate knowledge of a single character,”⁴ and that the doubling of pairs of lovers in Shakespearean comedy is a means of “dispersing our interest, and giving us range rather than concentration.”⁵ This seems to me again a function of the socialized view we have been encouraged, at least since Barber, to impose on the comedies. In The Comedy of Errors we are introduced to Antipholus of Syracuse by his father, and from this beginning we know that the driving force behind him is his search for his lost twin brother, which we soon come to realize, through language and incident, is a search for himself. Egeon tells us:

My youngest boy, and yet my eldest care,
At eighteen years became inquisitive
After his brother, and importun'd me
That his attendant, so his case was like,
Reft of his brother, but retain'd his name,
Might bear him company in the quest of him;
Whom whilst I labour'd of a love to see,
I hazarded the loss of whom I lov'd.

(I.i.124-31)

Then, immediately, we meet Antipholus of Syracuse, and almost his first lines create an image of his self-concern; he meditates in an aside on a local merchant's valediction, “Sir, I commend you to your own content”:

He that commends me to mine own content
Commends me to the thing I cannot get.
I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
(Unseen, inquisitive) confounds himself.
So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.

(I.ii.33-40)

Rhetoric is overripe in parts of the play, but this is not one of them; here the paradox is a function of the psychological condition described, not of the language used to describe it. The whole content of the play is figured in “content”: he cannot find “contentment” until he finds his “content,” his brother, his external self. The drop of water image flows then naturally from this notion of the lost object as the whole of the subject. In order to assure himself of his own existence Antipholus of Syracuse sets out to find his brother (and mother), but in that search he loses the image of himself in the world which teems with others. The project in the stage of primary narcissism is for the subject to introject the image of himself which first his mother and then others project to him. Until that task is accomplished the choice of objects different from the self (both unlike and distinct from the self) is impossible. Indeed, first the mother and then the entire world are seen as a threatening, engulfing void.

Kernberg describes the overcoming of these feelings, and, with reference to an image first used by Freud himself, speaks directly to the dilemma of Antipholus of Syracuse:

Sexual passion assumes the capacity for continued empathy with—but not merger into—a primitive state of symbiotic fusion (the “oceanic feeling” of earlier psychoanalytic literature), the excited reunion or closeness with mother at a stage of self-object differentiation, and the gratification of oedipal longings in the context of overcoming feelings of inferiority, fear and guilt regarding sexual longings.⁶

It is, of course, these oedipal feelings that Wheeler concentrates on; indeed he sees the great comic problem (especially in the “problem comedies”) as overcoming the guilt oedipally associated with sexuality because of the incestuous pattern which is the origin of its longings. But I stress the anxiety which is a consequence of pre-oedipal fragmentation in the sense of self: the child is still shoring up fragments of his object-relations against the ruins of his symbiosis with his mother. Kernberg always insists that ego boundaries must be maintained in a happy love relationship, just as he insists that ego boundaries must be securely drawn before mature love is possible; hence his distinction between “empathy” and “merger.” It is about merger that Antipholus of Syracuse fantasizes, and not as an experience of love, but rather as a consequence of having failed to integrate his ego through a normal sequence of object-relations beginning with his mother, but focused on his brother.

I am not constructing a psychobiography for Antipholus of Syracuse; I am not treating the separation from his mother, almost at birth, as the traumatic genesis of recurrent pathology. Rather I am suggesting that Antipholus of Syracuse is the focus of attention in The Comedy of Errors because we readily identify with him, and we readily identify with him because we have all passed through the phase of primary narcissism—more or less successfully. The less successful we have been, the more compulsive we become at recapitulating its pattern, and thus we understand what Antipholus of Syracuse tells us about his sense of deprivation. He raises to consciousness in us memory traces of our own psychic development—not because we have all had twins and lost them, but because we have all struggled to find in our early environment (“the precursor of the mirror is the mother's eyes”) an image of ourselves we can assimilate towards, or, rather, introject as ourselves. In this way, by a very complicated (here completely abridged) argument, we can claim that Antipholus of Ephesus represents the ideal ego of Antipholus of Syracuse, and that, ontogenetically speaking, the ideal ego preexists the ego.

Just as Antipholus of Syracuse was introduced to us by his father, and we hear first from another that the young man seeks his twin and then hear from his own lips that this is his sole concern; so we first hear of Antipholus of Ephesus from his wife and his sister. Next we meet not him, but Antipholus of Syracuse again, confused by them for him. From all of them we learn of two different attitudes toward marriage: should the wife restrain, inhibit, and bind her husband to her, claiming he is a part of her, or should she allow him his free movement in the world, waiting patiently at home, never presuming to question or complain? The two Antipholi move in different directions: Antipholus of Syracuse seeks his mother and his brother, and in the process loses himself, while Antipholus of Ephesus flees his wife to find himself. Adriana and Luciana, the dark, binding wife and the bright, liberal wife-to-be, clearly polarize the sexual argument that runs through all the early comedies: the man's sphere is outside, the woman's inside; the man acts and the woman obeys. Though we might find the strongest statement of the first proposition in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and of the second in The Taming of the Shrew, it is in The Comedy of Errors that the overriding theme of male and female identity is clearest: women define themselves by their relations to men, but men define themselves in their own terms. Adriana hauntingly recapitulates the drop of water imagery of Antipholus of Syracuse's opening speech, and, thinking she is speaking to her husband, speaks to a stranger and so drives him mad, as later her husband will appear.

How comes it now, my husband, O, how comes it,
That 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;
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.119-29)

The dominant point of view in the play is that of Antipholus of Syracuse, and hence the male's. Here we have a strong statement by the woman of what she requires from the man, but it is negated by another woman, that man's mother, at the conclusion of the play.

And thereof came it that the man was mad.
The venom clamours of a jealous woman
Poisons more deadly than a mad dog's tooth.

(V.i.68-70)

The extraordinary thing that Shakespeare accomplishes in all this is, of course, first the expropriation of Antipholus of Syracuse's own image by Adriana, a threatening, demanding, inhibiting woman. I mean to play on the two meanings of image: she speaks of him as a drop of water just as he had spoken of himself as a drop of water earlier, and in that drop of water we see, of course, his mirror image, his twin brother, his ideal ego, his external soul—but certainly not his wife. Then the reunion of the twins occurs under the mother's auspices: she is the woman who matters most, and she effaces herself.

The situations and language of the play so specifically equate individual psychological needs with socially imposed sexual roles that we are encouraged to add, from later comedies, the physical distinction of the sexes as an explanation. Adriana and Luciana debate the nature and convention of sexual difference:

ADR.
Why should their liberty than ours be more?
LUC.
Because their business still lies out o' door.

(II.i.10-11)

Shakespeare follows the social convention of domesticating women: they stay at home. When they go out into the world, they are dressed as men, equipped with swords, and their tongues are sharpened to a rapier wit. Julia and Portia will debate their wearing of codpieces, the addition to their lack. Clearly Shakespeare encourages us to see for these women an identification between the house and the body: while they are women they stay inside, hidden, like their genitals; but when they become men, they go outside, and wear their genitals openly, even accentuated, in the male fashion of the day. Adriana is usurping male prerogatives, so that she frightens the man she thinks is her husband to madness, and locks him up inside; she is corrected in this behavior by her sister and by the mother of both that man and her husband. Portia and Rosalind are threatening to males in their transvestism; Julia, Viola, and Imogen are not. We shall consider their difference. Now we need only appreciate that Shakespeare, playing upon men's fears, figures women as expansive, absorbing, engulfing creatures whose roles and natures must be defined by walls and social conventions.

The second drop of water speech, in which Adriana pleads conjunction with her husband—the first half of which was quoted above—continues with a suggestion of venereal disease:

How dearly would it touch thee to the quick,
Shouldst thou but hear I were licentious?
And that this body, consecrate to thee,
By ruffian lust should be contaminate?
Wouldst thou not spit at me, and spurn at me,
And hurl the name of husband in my face,
And tear the stain'd skin off my harlot brow,
And from my false hand cut the wedding-ring,
And break it with a deep-divorcing vow?
I know thou canst; and therefore, see thou do it!
I am possess'd with an adulterate blot,
My blood is mingled with the crime of lust;
For if we two be one, and thou play false,
I do digest the poison of thy flesh,
Being strumpeted by thy contagion.

(II.ii. 130-44)

One need only compare Sonnet 129 to appreciate what Antipholus of Syracuse would hear in all this:

The expense of Spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action, and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
.....          All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
          To shun the Heaven that leads men to this Hell.

From the male perspective the sin of fornication and the threat of disease are both in the woman, in that waist of shame, that Hell, to which is compared the Heaven of the Poet's union with the Fair Youth, and Antipholus of Syracuse's reunion with his lost brother.

The basis of Shakespeare's male characters' fear of the females who would marry them is derived from their fear of reincorporation by the pre-oedipal mother. Water we know to be the most frequent dream-symbol for the birth process.⁷ In his drop of water speech Antipholus of Syracuse acknowledges his origin from the mother but, deprived of some image of himself in another drop of water (his twin brother, but also his ideal ego), he fears reversal of the birth process. Of course, this is the latent content of this dreamlike speech; the manifest content (though it, too, is unconscious, so only we, the audience, having just heard the family history, can appreciate it) is the separation of child from mother by shipwreck. The sea is actually prominent in several other plays where reintegration of the nuclear family is a goal: Twelfth Night, The Tempest, Pericles. This fear of the overwhelming mother is, then, articulated by Antipholus of Syracuse, and reenforced by Adriana, who would lock him up, and indeed does lock up her own husband, claiming he is mad, the state to which she has almost driven Antipholus of Syracuse. The whole situation can be corrected only by the real mother Emilia, who appears at the end and says, essentially, everything is going to be all right: “You two boys have found each other and me—your father is here, too, but he is not so important in this pre-oedipal struggle for identity which you are recapitulating—and now you can even think about marriage.”⁸ Shakespeare develops the theme of madness then in the framework of the nuclear family: madness is being two of the same or nothing at all. The twins are confused for each other, so they each think there is an other of them in the world, which is maddening, but they also fear the loss of self entirely, so that two became none, all being absorbed by the sea, the threatening mother and her representations.

Kernberg points out that male fears of close relations with women are derived originally from memories of the pre-oedipal mother, that because men know themselves to have been originally dependent on an all-powerful being different from themselves, they resist such attachments in maturity.⁹ Women obviously have a different perspective. I think it is best argued that Shakespeare's perspective is always that of the male, though his so-called bisexuality is often hailed as the hallmark of his genius. Adriana is a male's nightmare image of the overwhelming mother; the chaste Emilia is its correction. Luciana also presents herself as a correction of Adriana's threatening persona. Psychoanalytic critics have pointed out that the names are significant: Adriana is the “dark lady” (ater) and Luciana the “bright lady” (lux). Antipholus of Syracuse spontaneously responds to this heavenly creature, and the play on love and reflected light, on self and other occurs, which also dominates The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love's Labor's Lost:

LUC.
What, are you mad that you do reason so?
SYR. Ant.
Not mad, but mated, how I do not know.
LUC.
It is a fault that springeth from your eye.
SYR. Ant.
For gazing on your beams, fair sun, being by.
LUC.
Gaze where you should, and that will clear your sight.
SYR. Ant.
As good to wink, sweet love, as look on night.
LUC.
Why call you me love? Call my sister so.
SYR. Ant.
Thy sister's sister.
LUC.
                                                                                          That's my sister.
SYR. Ant.
                                                                                                                                                      No,
It is thyself, mine own self's better part,
Mine eye's clear eye, my dear heart's dearer heart,
My food, my fortune, and my sweet hope's aim,
My sole earth's heaven, and my heaven's claim.

(III.ii. 53-64)

This is the Neoplatonic figure of the man defining himself by reference to the woman: he sees himself in her eyes, thinks indeed that he is but a reflection of her light. There is also play on the names: Luciana is light; Adriana is night. We shall see that in The Two Gentlemen of Verona Silvia will be a moon goddess, and first Valentine, then Proteus will play Endymion to her. Here, in The Comedy of Errors, the figure is not developed, but implied in the extravagance of Antipholus of Syracuse's language is the distinction between self and Self which Zweig traces from the earliest Christian literature through Shakespeare and beyond. What Narcissus gazes at is only a deceptive image of himself (the imitation of an imitation), but the true Christian, or the true Neoplatonic lover, sees in himself a manifestation of God's grace, as the world of physical objects participates in (methexis) the Forms. This gives a metaphysical model for love which is generally contradicted in Shakespeare; indeed the extravagance of the language here suggests parody.

Having questioned whether Shakespeare ever centers desire or the universe in Truth or Being, having found instead that both erotically and philosophically he sees a tension of opposites mutually defining each other, we offer the following hypothesis: the Neoplatonic worship of the woman represents oedipal orientation of desire; the search for the self in a twin or friend represents primary narcissism; the fear of the overwhelming mother can be read as either oedipal or pre-oedipal, depending on the imagery of its expression. The “oceanic feeling” suggests those pre-oedipal anxieties which come with the recognition that the mother is separate and independent, i.e., anxieties occurring at the end of the symbiotic phase. The sexualized imagery of binding, of locking in or out of the house, suggests oedipal anxieties, i.e., fears of sexual incompetence. That there is no strong father figure, but only strong women in the play, tilts the argument to the pre-oedipal side. Emilia is awesome; Dromio's kitchen wench is disgusting; Adriana is threatening; Luciana is benevolent but colorless. We do not yet see that assimilation between self-images and images of the desired female which, beginning with The Two Gentlemen of Verona, becomes Shakespeare's major comic concern.

Notes

1. A. Legatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London: Methuen, 1974), p. 9.

2. D. Palmer and M. Bradbury, Shakespearean Comedy (New York: Crane, Russak, 1972), pp. 7-8.

3. W. T. MacCary, “The Comedy of Errors: A Different Kind of Comedy,” New Literary History (1978), 9:525-36.

4. J. R. Brown, “The Presentation of Comedy: The First Ten Plays,” in D. Palmer and M. Bradbury, eds. Shakespearean Comedy (New York: Crane, Russak, 1972), p. 9.

5. Ibid., p. 10.

6. O. Kernberg, “Boundaries and Structures in Love Relations,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (1977), 25:99. The reference to Freud is to the opening of Civilization and Its Discontents.

7. S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in J. Strachey, ed. and tr., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), 5:399-401.

8. Antipholus of Syracuse was only eighteen when he began his search (I.i.125), and is twenty-three when the action of the play takes place (I.i.132). The twins should then be played as young men, and not middle-aged, as they often are. In Plautus' Menaechmi they are technically termed adulescentes; of course, comedy notoriously polarizes its male characters between adulescens and senex to accentuate the difference in the effects of love upon them.

9. Kernberg, “Boundaries and Structure,” p. 108.