[In the essay below, Hall stresses that the crisis of identity experienced by Antipholus of Ephesus is related to his inability to honor his pledge as a merchant, and that through Antipholus of Syracuse, the mercantile, “venturing hero,” Shakespeare explored anxieties concerning eroticism.]

The advent of mercantile capitalism should not be understood as a purely “economic” transition, if by that term we mean the severely delimited and specialized set of theories and practices characteristic of the epoch of bourgeois hegemony. The later “science” of political economy tends (naturally, as it now seems to us) to obscure its own basis in an alienation of the practices of monetary power and rationalized administration from all other social interrelations and cultural practices. It is constituted as an impersonal science precisely through a “forgetting” of its nonetheless persistent and real connections with the politics of the everyday, that is interpersonal relations of every sort and, consequently, the organization of even supposedly private desire. But this economic scientism, so familiar to us as to appear almost unquestionable (except occasionally on moral grounds), is a late development of bourgeois culture, and in our epoch of monopoly capitalism it sits rather awkwardly with the culture of individual enterprise. Capitalist “adventure,” with its sense of personal risk, still has its practitioners, however few and far between, but it is now inescapably marked out as the glamorous myth of an inglorious practice. This is not a moral issue alone, for imperial “adventurers” always had their critics; it arises rather from the sense of there being an already established world market, in which some win and some lose, but neither outcome makes any real difference to general social conditions. In short, nothing collective is any longer at stake in the individual “adventure.” And yet, as Marx remarked à propos of post-revolutionary bourgeois culture in general, such a prosaic state of affairs nevertheless had heroic beginnings.¹ One could make the same point about early capitalist “adventure” itself, which borrowed quite a lot of its imaginative self-representations from feudal quest narratives. As Michael Nerlich points out in his Ideology of Adventure, the earlier “quête de l'aventure,” whereby a knight sought to define himself as a true knight, is taken over by the despised “borjois” with the necessary modifications of the ideal.²

I will start my enquiry into Shakespeare's dramatic and poetic participation in the construction of the new modalities of mercantile desire with a comparison between Shakespeare's first merchant comedy, The Comedy of Errors, and its Plautine models, Menaechmi (and to a lesser extent Rudens), not to study influences but to explore the radically different universes of discourse in which both authors construct their heroes' desires. It is no doubt true to say that both plays draw on the ancient device of the comic double which throws identity into doubt, and that their pleasures arise from dealing with the anxiety which this entails.³ My approach, however, will not be to pursue what is historically constant in Shakespeare's comedy and its ancient sources, but, on the contrary, to address the difference in the two plays' negotiation of that crisis of identity. I will argue that the historical specificity of Shakespeare's rewriting of the crisis has important reverberations in the representation of desire and the unconscious in his play. Shakespeare's manic plot does not merely “out-Plautus Plautus,” as Theodore Weiss observes,⁴ but sets up a relationship of anxiety and decentering completely alien to Plautus's universe of discourse.

In Plautus's play, names and property go astray, and in the last resort, it must be said, wife and mistress are close to being considered as forms of property, whose alienation does not greatly disturb the owner. Indeed, the play ends with the wife being auctioned off along with the other household effects. This comic auction, which provides the closure of the play, is the ultimate affirmation of ownership, and ownership is understood as the right to consume or enjoy. The twin double appears as a rival consumer of the sexual favors of Menaechmus's mistress, and of the meals prepared by his wife. There is another minor rival, who is comic because of his impotent parasite status. That is Peniculus, whose name is usually translated in the secondary literature as “little brush” or “table-sweeper.” But, of course, it also means “little penis.” Both wife and mistress are metonymically linked to the meals that they serve to male appetite throughout the play, which tends to underline the link between ownership and consumption.

The identification of the Menaechmi as a family of maritime merchants seems curiously perfunctory when the play is viewed retrospectively, back across the Renaissance when the merchant is seen as a more complex, and even heroic figure. In Plautus, the merchant is represented merely as owner and consumer, and the greatest threat to Menaechmus through the appearance of his twin concerns the comic interruption of his rights to consume. Insofar as there is a utopian or festive ending, it consists in the restoration of those rights, and in the expansion of the circle of consumers to include the twin brother, Sosicles, and the freed slave Messenio. The social identity of the merchant that is disturbed and then restored in Plautus's play, is the identity of a consumer within a stable world momentarily interrupted. The ending is a restoration of the “familia” as a stable social unit.

Plautus's play has within it a formal potential which Shakespeare develops much later, but in a way which transforms the whole discourse. The contrasts between land and sea, between safety and danger, between fixed property and mercantile movement, are represented in the difference between the established, propertied, and initially satisfied twin and his traveling alter ego. The threat to the propertied self comes from this uncertain other, who is also part of the merchant's own self. But there is no suggestion in Plautus that the mobile twin is the representative of a different form of desire, a desire which might seek to perpetuate its own motion even at the expense of fixed property and the satisfactions of consumption. In other words, Plautus's play is about merchants within a landed, agrarian society. Their confirmation as owners and consumers in the final celebration is the achievement of their desires within a utopian overcoming of rivalry. In Shakespeare's play, by contrast, whatever the formal closures at the end, the desiring (male) self seeks a perpetuation of its mobility. My argument, then will be that Shakespeare reexplores the ancient topos of the loss of the self within a newly “monetarized” world, and this has large implications for his representation of the male erotic drives. In Shakespeare's play, identity is constructed within a totally different social and political order, although the word “constructed” does not sufficiently suggest the precarious and provisional nature of the construction. In Ephesus, identity is equivalent to reputation, which is supported by the ability to pay cash at a specified time. Angelo expresses the normality of the belief that, as some still say, a gentleman's word is his bond, when he gives the golden chain to a baffled Antipholus of Syracuse on the mistaken grounds that the latter has “bespoken” it:

SYR. Ant.
Made it for me, sir? I bespoke it not.
ANGELO.
Not once, nor twice, but twenty times you have.
          Go home with it, and please your wife withal,
And soon at supper-time I'll visit you,
And then receive my money for my chain.
SYR. Ant.
I pray you, sir, receive the money now,
For fear you ne'er see chain nor money more.
ANGELO.
You are a merry man, sir; fare you well. [Exit]

(The Comedy of Errors, 3.2.170ff.)⁵

The assumption is that the public name should ensure that the spoken word corresponds to an ability to provide cash at the agreed time, without the slowing and (literally) deadening recourse to law, written bonds or contracts, and the force of the state. That is why there is also a residual aristocratic sense that a name carries value in itself. Only a nobleman's utterance would command sufficient trust. L. C. Knights points, very pertinently, to the insistence in England at the time on the difference between the noble trader in overseas commerce and the ignoble domestic retailer.⁶ In Elizabethan society, the hybrid social identity of the merchant as nobleman permits the mobility of that political economy, in which the socially guaranteed identity of the nobleman itself functions as credit. And it is precisely this precarious identity that is disrupted, in Shakespeare's play, when the name goes astray. The crisis is not a metaphysical affair but an economic and semiotic one, culminating in Antipholus of Ephesus' apparent failure to honor his pledge (4.1.1ff). The crisis of identity is a failure of credit (etymologically derived from “belief,” but, from 1542, denoting the delivery of goods in the belief in a future ability to pay [OED]). The failure of credit brings about an immediate threat of violent “reterritorialization.”

The failure of this identity is a social crisis entailing a general arrest in both senses of the word. As Angelo, the goldsmith is arrested, he in turn arrests Antipholus of Ephesus for a failure to back up a verbal promise with money. Credit enables exchange, being a system of generalized belief, no longer held without anxiety, that the mere sign (which is what name or reputation has now become) should correspond to a “real” value (gold). Reputation, and its potential ruin, is not an individual matter, nor is it any longer a purely feudal family matter of honor, where the nobleman defends and defines his name with his body and blood if necessary. If identity fails, in the specific social form of mercantile reputation, then there must be a recourse to the law. It is ultimately the law, and not persons themselves, which underwrites the system of mutual trust, and it is only the law which guarantees that the value of a promise will inhere in a real body. Thus the law is the last resort of the system, the violence whose existence is necessary, but whose emergence into visibility is itself a sign of crisis. Its violence is the guarantor of stability at the center of a system of circulation and deferral, but its emergence brings about the death of the system that it guarantees.

For capitalism, as we know, “time is money,” and time in this play becomes an organizing principle in the plot in a way entirely absent from Plautus. The golden chain must be paid for by five o'clock, or the law will ineluctably swing into action. Meanwhile, Egeus must also find money to redeem himself from the law within twenty-four hours, or the law will inevitably exchange his blood for the amount due. This father figure escapes from the dangers of the sea only to be more deeply engulfed in those of the market. Furthermore, as this monetarized time becomes more active in the structuring of plot, it too contributes to the surreptitious subversion of the solidity of identity. Not only is it no longer a question of who you are and whether you can pay (which will re-establish who you are), but correlatively whether you can pay by a stipulated time. This makes identity (reputation) dependent upon external factors over which even the nominally powerful have no control. Just as the system of circulation is permanently liable to sudden arrest, so is the individual, and his arrest can take the form of a complete stop. The monetarization of both time and the bourgeois individual involves this perpetual danger.

The judicial violence, represented unwillingly by the duke, is the necessary precondition for all the social mobility in the play, although it is also its absolute antithesis. That mobility depends on “credit,” which is the understanding that the name stands in for golden coinage (just as the “names” which underwrite Lloyds of London still do). When the violence emerges into visibility, it arrests the very movement that it is supposed to guarantee. This has in fact already happened, in a serious register, before the main action. In this sense the main action repeats in a comic register the sociopolitical scenario that has condemned the merchant father, Egeon, to death at the very outset. The duke states clearly the reasons for the law's exaction:

The enmity and discord which of late
Sprung from the rancorous outrage of your Duke
To merchants, our well-dealing countrymen,
Who, wanting guilders to redeem their lives,
Have sealed his rigorous statutes with their bloods,
Excludes all pity from our threat'ning looks.

(1.1.5ff.)

The duke himself makes no claim for abstract or universal principles of right here. He is not talking within the terms of Roman law, but from within the constraints of a mercantilist polity. The system is no longer centered on the duke himself, and does not even coincide geographically with his territory. The madness of proliferating doubles is not limited to the Antipholus and Dromio couples in this play, for the duke of Ephesus is also the double of the duke of Syracuse. In other words, there is a decentering of power; the constraints upon the duke come from outside his realm and point to a loss of sovereignty in the nominal sovereign himself. That is why the duke shares the patriarchal impotence of Egeon, with whom he sympathizes. At the same time, this decentering of power must be negated by the exercise of judicial violence. The statutes must be sealed in blood. As blood must replace ink, the body must replace the abstract word, and power must be seen to reside in territoriality and the duke's own person. However, this violence is not really identical with personal rule because personal rule implies a sovereign decision on whether to use violence or mercy, and the duke is not so free. He is constrained to negate by reterritorializing violence the half-acknowledged truth of his loss of sovereignty.

This division in power entails a psychologization of the nominal powerholder, and the duke becomes a figure of split desires. When, like the sultan in 1001 Nights, he commands the reluctant Egeon to tell his tale and postpone his death for twenty-four hours, it is he who desires to “procrastinate” the death which he must pronounce, not Egeon. And this desire for the story is the agent of deferral which enables the play to take place. In other words, although he continues to talk of himself as the embodiment of the law, he in fact behaves as its reluctant and constrained representative, putting himself in the position of the audience and seeking the deferral of the sentence through the narrative of the play itself. This noncoincidence of even the ruler's desires with his “own” discourse is a significant effect of the decentering of power which haunts this comedy.

The duke talks from within the language of contemporary political imperatives, which are actually the guarantees of overseas trade. But those same imperatives, when credit fails, freeze trade and life itself. Then the body of the debtor is answerable to the law. In important ways the issues of The Merchant of Venice are prefigured here. The reason why the duke in this early comedy is helpless before the law (given that he no longer embodies but represents it), is that his (i.e., its) power, authority, and “honor” are indeed at stake, as he says (1.1.142ff.). To restore them requires that he impose death. In the main action of the play, when gold and jewels are restored to their owners, ownership is not the most important aspect of the restoration, as it is in Plautus. What is more important is the avoidance of the last resort of the law.

At a simple level, of course, the audience is gratified because the destruction of bodies is avoided, but this is dependent upon another subtler gratification: namely that spoken words re-acquire value without the resort to the systemic violence that both underwrites and destroys credit. Circulation becomes possible again. Time can become productive instead of being death-bound. The ship for Persia can depart, and the loving address from Antipholus of Syracuse to Luciana becomes permissible (5.1377ff.). The duke is released from his reterritorializing obligation by this resolution of the plot. But, although his sovereignty is restored, this restoration can never be absolute, since the plot has also revealed its contingent quality. Critics have often noted an alleged inconsistency (whether psychological or compositional) in the way that the duke no longer requires the guilders in payment for Egeon's life as soon as they are in fact available. The real point would seem to be that the duke only reacquires the sovereign power to act mercifully when the system of credit is restored. Then the actual surrender of gold coinage to the state is neither necessary nor desirable. The main issue is its return to circulation. Properly speaking, too, the crisis of identity is not resolved in Shakespeare's play, but postponed. The postponement only looks like resolution, because what is restored is a polity that requires a permanent deferral of its last resort of power in order to function at all. Stability is deferred, because in this polity the only stability is death. This is rather like saying that the system requires a permanent crisis of identity in order to function at all. So it is to this question of the psychological counterpart of monetarization that we must now turn.

It is not only the power of the sovereign that is decentered in the process of mercantilist “deterritorialization,” but the discourse of (male) desire itself. It is often noted that the town of Ephesus appears to be governed by witchcraft, and that the duke's exclamation near the end, “I think you have all drunk from Circe's cup” (5.1.271), sums up a great deal, particularly with regard to sexual identity. It is significant that the town of Ephesus is also governed by another magic, which is even more deceptive than that of Circe's isle. This magic, which also dissolves the self, is the market, and it operates as the silent condition of possibility for the metaphoric equivalence of self and money (which, as we have said, is the basis of credit). When Antipholus of Syracuse thinks that he has been robbed, he exclaims:

Upon my life, by some device or other
The villain is o'eraught of all my money.
They say this town is full of cozenage,
As nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,
Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,
Soul-killing witches that deform the body,
Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,
And many such-like liberties of sin:
If it prove so, I will be gone the sooner.
I'll to the Centaur to go seek this slave;
I greatly fear my money is not safe.

(1.2.95ff.)

Through Antipholus of Syracuse's extended metaphor, the normal or commonplace fear for the loss of money is translated into a demonization of the everyday deceptions of the marketplace. This speech is factually erroneous in its misapprehension of the plot situation, but its governing metaphor articulates a psychic truth. In other words, it functions to convert an “error,” which is a factual matter to be resolved by clarification, into psychic truths of desire. These can never be resolved. For the most striking power of the market is that it has already worked its own particular magic upon Antipholus' speech. The magic power is already there in the way in which Antipholus accepts the metaphoric equivalence of himself and his money. This governing metaphor blurs a distinction between clear factual “error” and the psychic disposition which produces it and unwittingly displays itself. So, even as Antipholus produces a comically inappropriate demonic version of its power, for the amusement of the audience who see it as an “error,” he confirms that demonic power in a way that makes it less certain for them that it is simply an “error.”

In general, the fears of Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse, who are the mercantile “venturing” pair, provide more of the disturbing comedy in the play than the pair resident in Ephesus, because of the way in which they mentally transform errors into sorcery, and the women whom they encounter, into fearful witches and sirens. The inappropriateness of this response provides a comedy of “errors,” but Shakespeare's use of the comic goes much further than this. Shakespeare's dramatic discourse explores, through the metaphors, the anxieties which sustain both the comedy and the eroticism of his venturing hero. For him, the market and the town are like a fair, in which all the familiar forms of seduction and deception are present, but they are also a scene in which deception is indistinguishable from magic, and the self is therefore at risk. And there is fascination in the fear, which implies a strong desire for the loss of self that is feared.

The psychological possibilities of reading which emerge here, in marked contrast with the Plautine models, should not be understood in terms of Shakespeare's revelation of the timeless truths of the psyche, however. What happens is more interesting. Shakespeare constructs the very possibility of modern psychologistic readings by reworking the Plautine versions of what Bakhtin calls the “involuntary adventure” of the classical narrative:

It goes without saying that in this type of time, an individual can be nothing other than completely passive, completely unchanging. … to such an individual things can merely happen. He himself is deprived of any initiative. He is merely the physical subject of the action.

[emphases in original text]⁷

Bakhtin is concerned with what he terms “chronotopes,” namely the narrative modes of constructing a hero within certain pregiven conditions of space and temporality together with the limiting possibilities of action which they imply. But Michael Nerlich's comment, which provides the point of departure for his own Ideology of Adventure, makes a very telling point:

What Bakhtin overlooks, strangely enough, is the fact that the passive, suffering, unchanging human being to whom things happen is the absolute opposite of the modern view of adventure or the adventurer.⁸

Nerlich's overall argument, in a nutshell, is that the feudal “quête de l'aventure,” later appropriated by the mercantile bourgeoisie, posited “adventure” as active desire, not as unsought and unwelcome event. Here, I would argue, is the historical issue in Shakespeare's transformation of the quest narrative of romance into metaphors of desire in this play. This refers us back to the dominant maritime metaphors.

Unlike the storms in Plautus's Menaechmi and Rudens, the storm in this play is psychologized into revealing metaphors of desires in the male self.⁹ The storm which has separated the whole family from each other, sets up a desire for reintegration, which is partly gratified at the level of family and state, by the end of the play. But if we focus on Antipholus of Syracuse, who is in search of his brother and mother, the storm at sea which separated him from both his mirror image (his twin) and his nurturing mother, is also what has constituted him as a desiring subject, precisely through that primal separation. Thus what he is seeking is his own annihilation as separate individual, and the sea which threatens to engulf him is also the goal of his desire. As he says early in the scene, at the level of his desires he is not a separate entity but is constituted by a loss and a regressive desire to return to the engulfing sea:

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.

(1.1.33ff.)

The quest for the mother and brother involves the loss of isolated self-hood. He is not only seeking “to find his fellow forth” (the identical brother), but also the mother who is identified with the ocean. So we have in the metaphor of the ocean and the two drops, a search for a separate male identity in the twin brother, and less avowedly, a search for fusion with a mother figure which overthrows identity by engulfment. It might appear farfetched to say that this constitutes an erotic drive, if it were not demonstrable that Adriana unknowingly returns his metaphor to him, but reaccentuated so that the merging of male into female is an image of fulfillment and not of loss:

How comes it now, my husband, O how comes it
That thou art then estranged from thyself?—
Thy “self” 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.

(2.2.122ff.)

The comedy of “errors,” or mistaken identities, at this point permits an extraordinary effect: Antipholus' metaphor of desire, strongly marked by a “death wish,” is returned to him as a metaphor of completion. What he fears is also what he seeks. To put it another way, his quest is already aimed at a loss of selfhood, although at the same time that loss is what he fears. Within the situational “error” and its attendant amusement, Adriana confronts him, and the audience, with a disturbing truth of desire, that its fulfillment would be the “confounding” of the self that it seeks and fears.

By psychologizing the external storm, previously the agent of Fate or Fortune, Shakespeare transforms that purely narrative event into a strange collaboration with the subjective desire of the mercantile “adventurer.” This does not mean that such events simply discard their external or “accidental” quality. They certainly retain that unwilled quality, but they also become ambiguously doubled with subjective desire. What happens in these narratives of adventure capitalism is extremely ambiguous. The adventurer has a conscious goal shadowed by an unconscious self-destructive one. This contradictory desire, which requires an “adventure” narrative, is a new construction of the (male) self, and it is explored through the principal metaphors of this comedy. This fear of the loss of self, which is also the secret truth of desire persists in the comic situation of mistaken identity when Antipholus of Syracuse tries to declare his love to Luciana, and she rejects it because she takes him for Adriana's husband. At the situational level, the “error” is clear to the audience. They can see the honest intention in the duplicity of Luciana's discourse when, thinking that she is talking to a deceiving husband, she urges him to be even more deceitful in order to spare her sister's feelings:

If you did wed my sister for her wealth,
Then for her wealth's sake use her with more kindness;
Or if you like elsewhere, do it by stealth,
Muffle your false love with some show of blindness.
Let not my sister read it in your eye;
Be not thy tongue thy own shame's orator;
Look sweet, speak fair, become disloyalty;
Apparel vice like virtue's harbinger;
Bear a fair presence, though your heart be tainted;
Teach sin the carriage of a holy saint,
Be secret false; what need she be acquainted.

(3.2.5)

Although she then turns to talk of women as the victims of deceit, this speech begins to cast a lot of doubt on the speaker's known “honesty,” for how could honesty be so eloquent about the strategems of duplicity? Despite her honesty, her words are the site of psychic mobility, because what happens here is that Luciana speaks from an assumed position of dialogue with a hypocrisy that she attributes to Antipholus. An utterance is conditioned by its addressee even when that “other” is imagined. An audience which saw the joke here must also feel a disquiet, because even honest language is no longer an expression of a self.

It is, of course, an impenetrable problem to Antipholus of Syracuse, who is attempting to declare his love in accordance with neo-Platonic conventions, which hold that love is the language of truth. He perceives that her words are deceitful, not just in the sense that she is enjoining deceit, but also in the sense (lethal for neo-Platonism) that they are not expressive of the being that inspires love in him. This disastrous disruption—and let us not forget that it is funny—leads him on to the idea that her words are an attempt by her to separate his soul from its truth (i.e., that they are a soul-changing enchantment, Circe-like, close to witchcraft). Although this is actually an erroneous interpretation of her intentions, it is not untrue about her words' effect upon him. Once again, then, the “error” of situation goes on to disclose a truth of his desire: his self-abandonment to the destructive magic which he fears (earlier he has said “I'll entertain the offer'd fallacy”; 2.2.185) is the truth of his discourse of desire:

Teach me, dear creature, how to think and speak;
Lay open to my earthly gross conceit,
Smother'd in errors, feeble, shallow, weak,
The folded meaning of your words' deceit.
Against my soul's pure truth, why labour you
To make it wander in an unknown field?
Are you a god? would you create me anew?
Transform me then, and to your power I'll yield.

(3.2.333ff.)

This perplexed, but enthusiastic lover transforms her first into a masculine god that will recreate him (above), and then into a mermaid and siren whose love will kill him:

O, train me not, sweet mermaid, with thy note
To drown me in thy sister's flood of tears;
Sing, siren, for thyself, and I will dote;
Spread o'er the silver waves thy golden hairs,
And as a bed I'll take thee, and there lie,
And in that glorious supposition think
He gains by death that hath such means to die;
Let love, being light, be drowned if she sink.

(3.2.45ff.)

Theodore Weiss calls this “love as the great school, the enlightenment of a young man by a beautiful young woman.”¹⁰ But if there is “enlightenment” here, it is in a fearful destructiveness, because the truth of his desire emerges in these metaphors of love and death, namely that he would hand himself over, body and soul, to what he fears. This, then, is Shakespeare's use of plot of the mistaken identities. The “errors” provide the occasion for the metaphorical utterance of normally unstated truths. The scene ends when Antipholus of Syracuse, (who has been informed of his Dromio's flight from Nell, the engulfing “mountain of mad flesh” which claims to be his wife), responds to this with the same fear of the siren's song:

There's none but witches do inhabit here,
And therefore 'tis high time that I were hence;
She that doth call me husband, even my soul
Doth for a wife abhor. But her fair sister,
Possess'd with such a gentle sovereign grace,
Of such enchanting presence and discourse,
Hath almost made me traitor to myself;
But lest myself be guilty to self-wrong,
I'll stop my ears against the mermaid's song.

(3.2.155)

The goddess who enchants is also the mermaid or witch who threatens. But this is not an accurate statement about Luciana as a character, as though she were represented dramatically by Shakespeare as half-witch, half-goddess. It is no longer a simple “error.” Such images are the product of Antipholus's surrender to what he fears; in short, they are metaphors of his desire, not representations of Luciana's inward being. Although Antipholus of Syracuse succumbs to the disturbing charms of witchcraft, this is not exactly the same as surrendering to Luciana. He surrenders to a false representation of her, but to a truth of his own desire, in which enchantment and fear are contributory. The “madness” of the plot, which disturbs and frightens him, also promises him the gratifications of the loss of self for which the market and the sea are joint metaphors. All this has very little to do with representation of the women through their own speech, which is also part of the plot.

The entirely nonmagic quality of the women, in marked contrast to the power which they acquire over Antipholus, is part of the comic effect. Neither Adriana nor Luciana bear any resemblance to Circe or to mermaid figures. Like Miranda later, Luciana could well protest: “No wonder, sir, but certainly a maid” (The Tempest, 1.2.430-31). The magic arises from the way in which the plot provides an opportunity for the play of male fantasies. Its comic quality arises from its non-coincidence with the representation of the women outside those fantasies. The melancholy “death wish” which promises its own gratifications has nothing to do with Shakespeare's representation of women, but everything to do with his exploration of the new discourse of desire.

Notes

1. “Wholly absorbed in the production of wealth and in the peaceful struggle of competition, it no longer comprehended that the ghosts of Roman times had watched over its cradle. But unheroic as bourgeois society is, it nevertheless took heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war and the battles of nations to bring it into being. And in the classically austere traditions of the Roman republic its gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions that they needed in order to conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles and to keep their zeal on the high plane of the great historical tragedy.” Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978), 11; (originally, New York: Die Revolution, 1852).

2. Michael Nerlich, Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness 1100-1750, volume 1 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 51-64.

3. There is a recurrent association of twins and doubles with death. See, for example, Otto Rank, The Double: a Psychoanalytic Study, trans. and ed. Harry Tucker Jr. (New York: Meridian, 1979).

4. Theodore Weiss, The Breath of Clowns and Kings: Shakespeare's Early Comedies and Histories (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971), 25.

5. All references to Shakespeare's plays in this book are to the Arden editions.

6. L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London: Chatto and Windus, 1937), 51ff. The domestic grocer is still a figure of contempt in British culture. Margaret Thatcher's father marked her off from the patrician wing of the Tory party.

7. M. M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1981), 105.

8. Nerlich, Ideology of Adventure, 4.

9. See Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 199ff. My argument is a location of this psychological reading in a historical discourse.

10. Weiss, Breath of Clowns and Kings, 22.