SOURCE: Garton, Charles, “Centaurs, the Sea, and The Comedy of Errors.” Arethusa 12, no. 2 (fall 1979): 233-54.

[In the following essay, Garton suggests the significance of Shakespeare's use of Greek mythological sources in his naming and implicit characterization of the brothers Antipholus.]

There exists a belief, which is as yet uncontroverted, or at least inadequately controverted, that when Shakespeare named his principals in The Comedy of Errors—the twin sons of the Merchant of Syracuse, the confusion of whose identities, pending their reunion, is the most overt theme of the play—the poet did not succeed in saying exactly what he meant or what he ought to have meant. That is to say, he muddled the twins' name in such a way that even when the Errors proper have been untangled, and even when the adventitious misspelling of the twins' name in the stage directions of Acts One and Two in the First Folio has been rectified, the audience or reader is still debarred by a wisp of haze from seeing who, in onomastic terms, these two characters really are. What I hope to show is that Shakespeare in fact said with perfect accuracy what he meant, and moreover, that his choice of name, rightly understood, becomes nodal to the patterning of the play as a whole, to its complex of themes and images, to its symbolism and its mythopoeic qualities.

“Because of the nature of its origins,” T. W. Baldwin wrote, “The Comedy of Errors gives us the fullest illustration we shall ever have of Shakspere's methods of composition.”¹ This is true. Baldwin wrote it in the preface to his 422-page book on what he called the “compositional genetics” of the play. It is an erudite and valuable book, and it might seem gratuitous to try to add anything, but the slight failing of ear, whether for English or for the classical languages, to which his choice of title-phrase bears witness, impedes his discussion at one or two points, and particularly in this matter of the twins' name. Yet it is the opinion he espoused which at present holds the field.

According to this view, not wholly original to Baldwin but developed by him, the poet in search of a name for separated identical twins, one of whom conducts a yearning quest for the other, began from the notion of reciprocal dearness, mutual love. His classical learning probably led him to think first of Antiphila, a girl in Terence whose name has exactly this meaning (in adjectival form) and was moreover explicitly declared to have it in contemporary lexicons and commentaries. The masculine counterpart of this name in Latin, which Shakespeare would next think of, is Antiphilus, the existence of which is well attested, though he need not necessarily have come across it. Antiphila and Antiphilus are Latin transliterations from Greek, the Greek masculine being Antiphilos, which is not rare as a proper name and was listed as such in H. Estienne's Greek lexicon of 1572.² On the basis of a little learning, Shakespeare was inclined to settle for this, but the limitations of his Greek led him astray and the name was corrupted “by probably unintentional metathesis” to Antipholis. This is the form that, whether by Shakespeare's inattention or another's erroneous expansion of his abbreviation, got into the Folio stage directions up to 2.2.110. When, at this point, he came to need the name as an actual part of his text, the greater familiarity of Latin drew him over to the -us ending and thus he finally “decided for” the form Antipholus. This appears uniformly through the rest of the play and there is no doubt that it is authentic, though a textual difficulty at 3.2.2-4 prevents us from saying with certainty that it is confirmed by rhyme.³

Foakes, the Arden editor, arrived more compendiously at a similar conclusion, though he did not think that responsibility for coining the name was necessarily to be laid at Shakespeare's door. “Antipholus appears to stem from the Greek ‘Antiphilos’ … but we do not know where Shakespeare found it.”⁴

I do not wish to oppugn this line of reasoning in toto, but it is surely very shaky. The best thing to be said in its support is that the name Antipholus does not occur in antiquity. If it did, it would have a valid etymology of its own, and the present one would thus fall to the ground. The most we could then say about the Anti-philos idea is that it may (as I think it does) supervene upon the true meaning by aural association. Caution recommends that we should think of it in these terms, and then come back to the name as it is actually given. This may put us in mind of a further, and equally possible, aural association. Syracuse and Ephesus are each the home of one of the twins. In the opening speech of the play Duke Solinus says:

It hath in solemn synods been decreed, …
To admit no traffic to our adverse towns.

(1.1.13, 15)

It is the fact that the towns are “adverse” which creates danger and lends the play a background of tension and seriousness. Now the emphatic notion “adverse towns” could not be more accurately or succinctly expressed in Greek than by anti-poleis. At least one classical writer⁵ does so express it, but if Shakespeare could think of anti-philos, he did not need prompting to think of anti-poleis too and to give the twins a name which would call this word to mind. Each association is equally valid. Thus, regardless of whether we know what “Antipholus” means, it is possible to say that “reciprocal dearness” and “adverse towns” are both among its harmonics and, as such, are meant to be heard by the attentive listener or reader.

Where then does the name come from? Although no Antipholus is known from antiquity, there is a Pholus known. He is a centaur, Pholus in Latin, Pholos in Greek. He appears in the work of ancient poets and mythographers, sometimes merely as a typical centaur, when there is occasion to list representative names, and sometimes as one of the two or three centaurs who have separate parentage from the rest and myths of their own. His story occurs as a piece of mythographic tradition recounted most fully by Diodorus (first century b.c.) and in the Bibliotheca (first or second century a.d.) misattributed to Apollodorus of Athens.⁶ The myth ran approximately as follows. Pholus was the offspring of Silenus and a Melian nymph and lived in a cave in the mountain area between Arcadia and Elis. When Hercules passed that way on his third or fourth labor, Pholus entertained him. He gave him roast meat, but ate his own meat raw. Hercules asked for wine, and when Pholus hesitated to give it because the jar belonged to all the centaurs in common, Hercules opened it himself. All the other centaurs smelt the wine and arrived in anger. They came armed with rocks and fir-poles and a fierce fight took place, in which some were killed and the rest routed, with Hercules, who had fought with arrows and firebrands, in hot pursuit. In Hercules' absence his host Pholus, who had survived, pulled one of the hero's poisoned arrows from the body of a dead centaur, surprised that such a slight weapon could kill such a large creature, one of his own kind. The arrow slipped from his hand, pierced his foot, and killed him. Hercules returning found him dead, gave him burial, and then proceeded on his own business. In one of the two versions the mountain area where Pholus lived was called Pholoe apparently already before this incident. The other version says that Pholus was buried at the foot of the mountain which was then called Pholoe after him.⁷ This second version is more attractive because Pholoe is a quasi-adjectival form and would seem to derive directly from the name Pholus.

With goodwill, and by dint of a little quasi-structuralist pulling and tugging, it would be possible to homologize this unpromising story in certain respects with Shakespeare's. Hospitality, meat, and wine are prominent in both, and in both lead on to uproar and violence. Death ensues in the one story, and is narrowly averted in the other. In the poisoning of Pholus could be seen the original of that hyperbole by which E. Antipholus is said to have been poisoned by his wife's words:

The venom clamours of a jealous woman
Poison more deadly than a mad dog's tooth

(5.1.69-70)

—a poison reciprocal to that which she, Adriana, claims to have suffered through his adultery:

I do digest the poison of thy flesh.

(2.2.143)

Or it could be seen as the congener of that potent drug which is imagined to have wrought upon all the principal characters:

I think you all have drunk of Circe's cup.

(5.1.271)

The name of Aemilia, mother of either Antipholus, could be heard as an echo of that “Melian” nymph who was the mother of Pholus. Dipping further below the surface of mythopoeia into anthropology, we could point out that in terms of the nature/culture antinomy, which is the matrix of so many myths, Pholus, who is friendly and hospitable, is a partial representative of culture; yet, since he eats his meat raw, a stubborn streak of nature persists in him, uniting him to the other centaurs who, though half-human in form, are more predominantly “anarchic and uncontrollable, wild figures always prone to run amok.”⁸ And his humaneness with a streak of wildness or confusion could be homologized with the character and fortune of the Antipholus twins.

But it is not necessary to elicit and brandish these common elements, and it would be misleading to do so. Shakespeare knew of the existence of Pholus, and might have got a smatch of his story from a brief allusion in Virgil (Aeneid 8. 293-294) or from somewhere else. But we cannot fairly suppose him conversant with Diodorus or Apollodorus, and in any case the total absence of any Hercules-element in The Comedy of Errors surely cripples the homology. One or two parallelisms may be due to chance, but many of them could be drawn equally between the Comedy and other centaur passages in ancient literature to which Shakespeare had far readier access. Since this is so, it becomes immaterial whether he had read this particular story in detail or not. He thought of Pholus primarily just as “a centaur,” because that is how Pholus usually appears in the other authors who mention him.

He is most likely to have obtained the name from Ovid, who does not tell the story but at Metamorphoses 12.306 mentions Pholus among the centaurs—Nubigenas feros, the cloud-born wild ones (12.211)—in the detailed account of their fight with the Lapiths which turned to havoc the marriage feast of Pirithous and Hippodame. Short of consulting a detailed commentary, a reader of that passage would glean no more than that Pholus was a typical centaur. Shakespeare picked out the name, in the first instance, as such and, possibly with a glance at 12.460, where Ovid mentions another typical centaur called Antimachus, he formed from it the name Anti-pholus to use for each of his twins. The anti- served a double purpose. First, it meant that each twin was “counterpart to a Pholus,” that is, “counterpart to a centaur” and having symbolical affinities with one; second, it meant that each twin is “reciprocal to a centaur,” i.e., reciprocal to the other twin. If Shakespeare looked at Golding's translation of the Metamorphoses he almost certainly (as it is now known that he did in so many other cases) consulted the Latin as well. In Golding he would read that various centaurs took to flight.

And so did Phole. …

Golding's anglicizing of the name makes it monosyllabic and gives it a long “o,” whereas in the Latin it has two syllables and an unmistakable short “o.” Shakespeare needed this short “o” in order for the preceding syllable of his “Antipholus” to carry the main stress, as it clearly does wherever it occurs in his verse.

Shakespeare drew other ideas for his play from this and other parts of the Metamorphoses. Six lines after the mention of Pholus, Ovid has a line

Perculit adversos. Adversum tu quoque, quamvis. …

A subconscious reminiscence of this, in the poet's mind, could have given him the “adverse towns,” each the home of an Antipholus, which feature so prominently in the opening speech of the play. Then too, besides domicile, he needed a father for the twins. Ovid (12.210-211) represents the centaurs as offspring of Ixion and a Cloud. Ixion would not do for the new context. But another person prominent in Ovid's story is Theseus, son of Aegeus. Theseus is twice in this passage (237, 345) referred to as Aegides, as he is also in three other places in the poem. With Aegeus as a father-figure vaguely in mind, Shakespeare could have turned firmly leftward in the book—you turn leftward in the Metamorphoses when you want to be sure of getting to an earlier generation—and picked out the name Aegaeon (2.10). Associated with both of these is the Aegean sea (mentioned at 9.448 and 11.663), which is highly relevant to Shakespeare's purpose.⁹ The mythical bird called the phoenix, which Shakespeare adopts as a house-name, occurs twice in the fifteenth book (393, 402). Bits of Ovidian material in the play have been recognized by Baldwin and others. But the Metamorphoses was really more than a casual quarry. There is a legitimate sense in which it was a source.

In fashioning the name Antipholus Shakespeare probably had one eye on its being appropriate, or at least not inappropriate, to twinhood and to sonship. Pholus himself was not a twin, but since Ixion, the sire of centaurs in general, begot them on a Cloud under the delusion that it was a goddess, we should probably think of that as a nonce occasion, and of their births as a multiple birth rather than a series of separate events: this prepares the way for twin Antipholuses. But there is another thing. In the ship-race described in Aeneid 5, one of the contenders is a ship called the Centaur, and at the end its captain is given as a prize a captive or slave-woman and her infant boy twins—

Cressa genus, Pholoe, geminique sub ubere nati.

(Aen. 5.285)

The pointedness of the gift has, so far as I know, escaped the notice of Virgilian commentators both ancient and modern. Virgil's mind has anticipated Shakespeare's in a leap of association and given us the picture [of the Captain of the Centaur given Pholoe and her twin sons.]

Pholoe clearly gets her name (by association) from the centaur Pholus and the mountain Pholoe where he was buried. And Virgil already has made the transition from myth to a human individual (a thing which he does likewise with the name Pholus itself at 12.341). Or, if Pholoe's context is still myth, it is myth of such a different kind that many anthropologists would exclude it from the category. Pholoe's twin sons, who by poetic logic are a kind of descendants of Pholus, may have helped to suggest human Antipholuses to Shakespeare, while the further detail, that Virgil's gemini were clearly destined to be servitors, may have chimed in with his next thought, the parallel twinhood of the Dromios, servants to the “counterparts of centaurs.”¹⁰

The name Pholus may also have been taken by Shakespeare as an appropriate symbol for sonship and the younger generation. We must not forget that if he saw the name at all in Golding's translation, he saw it as a monosyllabic “Phole.” It is even possible that by a false but plausible enough piece of freelance etymology, he may have half-consciously supposed the name ultimately connected with the root from which we have “foal”—just as one might be tempted to connect “Pholoe” with the (ultimately identical) root from which we have “filly.” Because philology discountenances any such link, or rather has no suggestion at all to make about these names, it does not follow that Shakespeare spurned the idea. Ostensible allusion to a common etymology, figura etymologica, was for him one of the most profound kinds of poetic association, so much so that at times he convinces us against our will and against the evidence of our dictionaries. Did he not ask in King Lear—

Why bastard? Wherefore base?

If he linked “Phole” with “foal,” whether guided purely by sound or imagining something more, this would provide “Antipholus” with an additional aptitude for his purpose.

In the economy of the play, the name is symbolic and mythopoeic. Its primary function is, through its reference to a combination of species in a single form, to symbolize and as it were to enmythologize that confusion of identity and loss of identity which are a constant hazard for identical twins and one which here reaches crisis proportions. As myth, the story also gives a focus to more widespread anxieties in the psyche. Not so much, I think, the “primitive horror of the doppelgänger,” as Northrop Frye suggested¹¹—for it is stipulated in the very core of the play's action that neither Antipholus (and neither Dromio) shall suspect the existence, even the phantom existence, of a second, parallel self there in Ephesus—but the fear, or the actuality, of being unable to find an acceptable response, a recognizable register of oneself, in the reactions of others: an apparent skewing in the outer world which may betoken the breakdown of the sonic radar of the personality and consequently the loss of the self. The psychological aspect of the play—aside from the name which so perfectly resumes it—has often been studied.¹² No more need be said about it here than that, appropriately to anything which puts the Metamorphoses under levy, it blossoms into a full blown transformation theme. There is the sense of estrangement from the self:

I will go lose myself.

(1.2.30)

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

(1.2.39-40)

How comes it now, my husband, O, how comes it,
That thou art then estranged from thyself?

(2.2.119-120)

Known unto these, and to myself disguis'd.

(2.2.214)

What, was I married to her in my dream?

(2.2.182)

And here we wander in illusions.

(4.3.41)

And there is the repeated sense of psychosomatic change, imminent or achieved, brought about by magical agency whether benign or malign:

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

(1.2.99-100)

This is the fairy land.

(2.2.189)

—. I am transformed, master, am I not?
—. I think thou art in mind, and so am I.
—. Nay, master, both in mind and in my shape.

(2.2.195-197)

Are you a god? Would you create me new?
Transform me then, and to your power I'll yield.

(3.2.38-39)

Ultimately it seems that the best hope for an anti-pholus is

With wholesome syrups, drugs, and holy prayers,
To make a formal man of him again.

(5.1.104-105)

But he is, in the event, destined to be made a formal man again by simple anagnorisis, at which point of exit the poet underlines the theriomorphic fantasy:

I think you all have drunk of Circe's cup.

(5.1.271)

The other chief implication of the name Antipholus for the character of its bearers is that they are marked by the generic qualities of centaurs, over and above the matter of ambiguous identity. Though (most) centaurs have Ixion for their father, they tend to be at the same time children or grandchildren of primal powers in nature—Cloud, Sky, Earth, Gods—and the mythical Aegaeon, uncle by some accounts to the centaur Chiron, was the direct offspring of Earth and Sky or Earth and Sea. The Antipholuses have in Aegeon and Aemilia a known, human father and mother, but if we try to trace their pedigree beyond this point, our way is blocked by the great, natural backdrop of the play, and we are left looking at Sea, Earth, and Sky. Shakespeare, in thinking of centaurs, had also in mind the general qualities communicated by the Centaur-Lapith battle in Ovid or the brief allusions in Virgil; for as we have seen, the modest swing of Pholus himself towards the cultural side in the nature/culture antinomy¹³ was probably unknown to him. Centaurs in general swing more to the nature side—it should not be forgotten that to Homer they are beasts (phêres)¹⁴—though their appearance, at once grotesque and handsome, their association with the well-born, and their capacity to wonder and contemplate, leaves them in this respect, too, in an ambiguous position.¹⁵

The Antipholuses share with centaurs the vigor of youthful prime, which can yet be denounced by an angry woman as

Ill-fac'd, worse-bodied, shapeless everywhere.

(4.2.20)

When S. Antipholus says that a tailor “took measure of my body” (4.3.9), he speaks of it as of an act simultaneously reassuring and extremely strange. While the “pre-eminence” of “man, more divine” than beast, fish, or fowl is emphasized (2.1.15-23), the experience or behavior of the twins several times calls forth imagery of animal and pasture:

But, too unruly deer, he breaks the pale
and feeds from home. …

(2.1.100-101)

Lay open to my earthy-gross conceit …
The folded meaning …
Against my soul's pure truth why labour you
To make it wander in an unknown field?

(3.2.34-39)

As with centaurs, each is credited with a sexual appetition or vigor which in the circumstances of the play takes on a nasty aspect. E. Antipholus, who has been “oftentimes upbraided” for attentions to a courtesan, proposes to renew them to spite his wife (3.1.107-121), while S. Antipholus, who by reason of the romantic exigencies of the plot cannot behave dishonorably in the matter of sex, can in the scene immediately following be shown as “in the spring of love” and upbraided for it as a vice (3.2.1-28). The twins' presence, like that of the centaurs in Ovid, leads to uproar, violence, and the utter bedevilment of the society in which they are harbored. Only, what in Ovid becomes a set piece of lengthily described carnage,¹⁶ in Shakespeare remains a comedy in which the theriomorphism is as much benign as malign, and in which death is no more than a potentiality and a metaphor.

There are several other ways in which the name Antipholus pulls together, and pulls into shape, thematic elements and image-groups. The ship-names in the play, Delay and Expedition, are frankly allegorical, but the house-names are a direct outgrowth from the Shakespearian mythopoeia. The most frequently mentioned of these is the Centaur. Near the beginning of the first Antipholus scene (1.2.9) and near the end of the last one (5.1.140), as well as at five places in between, S. Antipholus is shown to have chosen this for his lodgings. We are intended to imagine him throughout the play as based on a house having a sign-board “The Centaur.” The other twin likewise has a board over the house or shop where he lives saying “The Phoenix.” On the first, Foakes in the Arden edition comments simply, “Possibly a London inn bore the sign, but I have not found a reference to one” (1.2.9n.). Of the second he says that the Phoenix was the sign of a London tavern, but in this case he recognizes a symbolic value. “The image of this bird, rising out of its own ashes to renewed youth, is appropriate to the story of [E.] Antipholus and Adriana, whose love is finally renewed out of the break-up of their marital relationship” (1.2.75n.). It may incidentally be this, though at the end there is not a word in the text about renewal of love between this twin and his wife. Rather, each signboard directs attention to both twins. The Centaur symbolizes the deep-rooted confusion of identity incident to their twinhood, along with the various qualities of character which I have indicated. And play is made on the name. The indignant question of the Syracusan twin to Ephesian Dromio, “You know no Centaur?” (2.2.9) is nicely ambiguous, overtly referring to the house or inn, and covertly and unconsciously to himself. (It is a striking fact that neither Dromio has denied knowing a Centaur, though S. Antipholus thinks one of them has as good as done so). As for the Phoenix, associated with the later-appearing twin but visited by both, it symbolizes the sequel to the confusion, the rebirth or resurrection of the twinhood and of the whole family, what Aemilia pointedly calls “such Nativitie” (5.1.406, Folio reading). Shakespeare carries the symbolism a step further by balancing these two sign-boards against two others, the Tiger (3.1.95) and the Porpentine (3.1.116, etc.). Tiger and porcupine are more bristly and rebarbative than centaur and phoenix: suitable to be encountered amid the stresses of the developing action, but ultimately less germane to the twinhood than are the other two creatures. At the same time, tiger and porcupine are creatures belonging to real life, while centaur and phoenix belong only to myth, and herein once again the poet underlines the fact that his play has more to do with psychology than with history.

If an Antipholus with centaur-affinities has a scolding or would-be dominating wife, we might well expect to find her symbolically characterized as a rider, or perhaps to find a dispute as to which one shall ride. The play loses no time in making this point. In the first scene in which Adriana is mentioned—the same scene in which we are introduced to the Centaur inn—Dromio of Ephesus first relates her heated anger at her husband's non-appearance for dinner, and immediately afterwards refers to sixpence given him by her husband

To pay the saddler for my mistress' crupper.

(1.2.56)

That is, first we hear of her as a domineering, angry scold, and immediately afterwards as a rider. It is highly appropriate that the following scene should show her deep in discussion with her sister as to whether the male should or should not be the dominating partner in a marriage, and that within a few lines we have the imagery of “out o' door,” “bridle,” “asses,” directly applied to the question.

ADR.
Why should their liberty than ours be more?
LUC.
Because their business still lies out o' door.
ADR.
Look, when I serve him so, he takes it ill.(17)
LUC.
O, know he is the bridle of your will.
ADR.
There's none but asses will be bridled so.

(2.1.10-14)

A closely-connected image-pattern, which runs through the middle Acts (not I and V), is the assimilation of the two Dromios to asses, with “malt-horse” (3.1.32) and “peevish sheep” (4.1.94) as nonce variations. The assification or asininity of the Dromios appears in passages too numerous to quote, but in this pointed example we see one of them not only assified but ridden:

LUC.
Dromio, thou drone, thou snail, thou slug, thou sot.
S. Drom.
I am transformed, master, am I not?
S. Ant.
I think thou art in mind, and so am I.
S. Drom.
Nay, master, both in mind and in my shape.
S. Ant.
Thou hast thine own form.
S. Drom.
                                                                                                    No, I am an ape.
LUC.
If thou art chang'd to aught, 'tis to an ass.
S. Drom.
'Tis true, she rides me, and I long for grass.

(2.2.194-200)

Revealingly, the other Dromio in turn seems to claim that he has been afflicted with similar asininity from the moment of birth:

I am an ass indeed; you may prove it by my
long ears. I have served him from the hour
of my nativity to this instant, and have
nothing at his hands for my service but blows.

(4.4.27-30)

The name Dromio, of course, means a runner, but it is only when we see him as servant to an anti-pholus that we get the full import of his characterization as a clopping ass.

Further image-patterns which come into focus as centaur-characteristics are those which describe rage, furor, and those which locate their subjects in infernal surroundings. These are ultimately, but perhaps indirectly or subconsciously, reminiscences of lines in such poets as Virgil and Statius describing the furentis Centauros … Pholumque (Georgics 2.455-456) or the centaurs and Aegaeon/Briareus along with other fabled creatures located at the entrance to Hades (Aeneid 6.286-287, Thebaid 4.535-537). Such lines give an added dimension to the cry “my master is horn-mad” (2.1.57), to the dazed question—

Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell?

(2.2.212)

and to a lurid sequence later:

ADR.
Where is thy master, Dromio? is he well?
S. Drom.
No, he's in Tartar limbo, worse than hell.
A devil in an everlasting garment hath him,
One whose hard heart is button'd up with steel;
A fiend, a fury, pitiless and rough …
One that, before judgment, carries poor souls to hell.

(4.2.31-40)

Before proceeding to the capstone of the present interpretation, it seems a duty to examine objections which might be raised (or rather, which have been raised by critics who saw advance copies of this essay), in the light of the argument so far. This may as well as be done methodically. Thus—

Objection: The name Antipholus is unusual, and may therefore be unintentional, as Baldwin supposed.

Answer: It is unusual, yes. That is why the compositor at first read it as, or altered it to, “Antipholis”—perhaps by vague recollection of some similar-sounding name such as Amphipolis. But after seeing it enough times he realized that “Antipholus” was indubitably the author's intention and from the end of Act II on adhered to this form, which is accepted as correct by all modern editors.

Objection: The overtones that are here suggested, such as anti-philia, anti-poleis, Phole/foal, twinhood, sonship, etc., are not proved.

Answer: The argument does not depend on the overtones. Overtones can never be “proved.” The argument is essentially concerned with the literal meaning of the actual name we have got, “Antipholus.” It accounts for this name. That is where Baldwin fails. Once the truth about the name is realized, the range of possible overtones can be left to discussion and to the judgment of the individual critic or reader.

Objection: Shakespeare's redende Namen are all English or close, and do not require classical knowledge for their proper appreciation.

Answer: “Dromio,” in this very play, requires such knowledge, being intended to suggest “runner, servus currens.” In other plays, names which require such knowledge are Perdita, Miranda, Iris (a Spirit in The Tempest), Ophelia (from ὠφελία), Desdemona (from δυsδαιμονία), and Titania (τιτήνη, queen). In the same way, the relations of Beatrice and Benedick (she who blesses, he who is blest) cannot be properly understood without a knowledge of Latin.

Objection: The Folio, in its early stage-directions, refers to the Syracusan twin as “Antipholis Erotes” or “Antipholis Errotis,” and the root of Erotes/Errotis, meaning “love,” supports deriving the twins' actual name from “Antiphilus,” with its implication of reciprocal dearness.

Answer: In the first place there is great uncertainty whether “Erotes/Errotis,” with its companion word in the Folio, “Sereptus,” is by Shakespeare at all. Both words are corrupt forms, and may be no more than ignorant expansions of an “E” and an “S” originally intended to mean Ephesian and Syracus(i)an. If Shakespeare did write the two words as they stand, he can only have intended them as additions to the Errors of which this is the Comedy. It has been recognized that “Sereptus” is a garbling of the Latin surreptus, “snatched away,” and that “Erotes” garbles some other Latin word meaning “wanderer.” Errans and erraticus have been suggested. Errator would do equally well, and so would the simple erro. (Any of these words could, on any occasion, be written with a single ‘r’ and a contraction mark above it. If the compositor found er(r)o he could, not recognizing it as a noun, have stuck on his -tes or -tis in the attempt to make it into one.) If the word had come from the root of eros, “love,” it would better have fitted the other twin, whose counterpart in Plautus is in love with the courtesan Erotium. But in any case erotic love does not have anything to do with the philia between the twins—and if it did have, it would apply to both twins, not just one.

Objection: The image of Adriana riding a centaur husband is awkward.

Answer: The image of a woman riding a horse-like creature who is in reality a man is ineluctably fixed by the line “'Tis true, she rides me, and I long for grass” (2.2.200). The speaker here thinks of himself as an ass, the servant of an Anti-pholus. For the idea of riding an actual centaur, see Ovid, Met. 12.401. Of course in a male chauvinist world the image of a wife in the saddle had something preposterous about it, and was meant to have.

Objection: In its formation the name does not conform to ancient onomastic principles, which did not allow an existing name to be compounded with a preposition—the only exception being in the case of theophoric names. Therefore, if “Antipholus” means what is claimed, Shakespeare has done something which no one has done, in antiquity or since, in fashioning a Greek name.

Answer: This objection misunderstands the position of Roman, Medieval, and Renaissance writers, who felt free to coin names which were out of accord with ancient Greek conventions and would have sounded strange to ancient Greek ears. Plautus, for example, has Plesidippus, Pamphilippus, Pseudolus, and Antamoenides, all of which are oddities by the Greek reckoning. And nearer Shakespeare's own time examples are legion: I need only cite Psychephonus, Menaphon, and (a name which Shakespeare certainly knew) Penelophon. Shakespeare himself—and in plays which are set in the pre-Christian world at that—has many names strange to antiquity, such as Cesimon, Dionyza, Dromio, Escanes, Helicanus, Lychorida, Philotus, Phrynia, and Thaisa. And in The Comedy of Errors he is not representing the classical Greek world at all, but a later or a never-never epoch in which Ephesus has a duke, an abbey, and ducats.

With regard to names compounded by prepositions and other prefixes, when Julius Caesar needed a name to express “counter to Cato,” he coined “Anticato,” and this is accepted by Plutarch as 'Αντικάτων. When Germain de Brie in 1519 needed a name to express “counter to Sir Thomas More,” he coined “Antimorus.” At about the same time, when an eminent Swiss doctor wanted to call himself “peer to Celsus,” he coined the name “Paracelsus.” This last is exceedingly like what Shakespeare has done. He was no more bound by ancient Greek rules than were Plautus, Caesar, or the men of the Renaissance.

However, if Shakespeare had wanted or needed more precise warrant, how far is it reasonable to suppose him to have gone into the theory of ancient Greek nomenclature? The rule cited was not formulated till long after his time, and in any case applied to Greek life rather than in Greek literature. But he could observe that when the Greeks needed a name meaning “counterpart to a father,” they coined “Antipatros.” When they needed “counterpart to eros or to Eros,” they coined “Anteros.” For “counterpart to Ares” they coined “Antares” (a star name), for “counterpart to Alcidas (Heracles)” they coined “Antalcides.” When St. John, or whoever wrote the first epistle ascribed to him, needed a name meaning “(perverse) counterpart of Christ,” he coined “Antichrist.” On this principle “counterpart to a centaur” would have been “Anticentaurus,” but this, besides being a mouthful, was both too crudely obvious and too un-namelike to serve Shakespeare's purpose. “Antipholus,” with the same meaning, is a very neat substitute; it is suitably un-obvious and it pulls in the direction of the shape and sound of real Greek names. “Pholus” is used for a typical centaur, much as Dickens in Our Mutual Friend has one of his characters repeatedly call another “Aaron,” to mean “typical Jew.” And the root pholo- had already been used to mean “centaur-related” in the passage of Virgil discussed above. That the prefix anti, when consciously compounded with actual names, is usually joined with a non-human, i.e., a divine name—this fact, had Shakespeare known it, would only have given “Antipholus” a greater appeal to him, because Pholus, a non-human, is the mythological paradigm, and almost the tutelary deity, in relation to whom the Antipholuses have their being.

The reason why the Greeks did not often consciously compound actual human names with prefixes is that in real life they did not often want to, anymore than we want names meaning “co-Smith” or “against Peter” or “un-Jimmy.” But when the need does occur, as it does in literature, Greek rises to the occasion. In a sense, Homer had led the way by compounding “Paris” with dys- to give “Dysparis,” and Euripides had followed suit with “Dys(h)elena.” In “Philopator,” “father-loving,” a name from real life, the second element is only a common noun. But what if one should want to say “Cleon-loving”? Aristophanes in a comedy did, and coined the name “Philocleon.” There were two ancient comedies named after characters called “Phileuripides.” And, to give a very close formal parallel to “Antipholus,” two other Greek comedies were named for a title-role “Antilais,” i.e., “counterpart to Lais,” Lais being a noted courtesan of circa 400 b.c. If we add to these cases that, scattered about ancient literature, there occur a mythological human called Paphus, another called Antipaphus, a Danaid called Phila, a girl's name Antiphila, a man's name Dorus and another man's name Antidorus; if there could be, as there were, a centaur called Medon and a philosopher called Antimedon; and when, besides all these seemingly (though not technically) pairable names, Greek confronted the Renaissance playwright with numerous other seeming pairs such as Leon and Antileon, Clymene and Periclymene, Chares and Antichares, Dia and Peridia, Menidas and Antimenidas, Theon and Protheon, it is surely going too far to ask that Shakespeare should have fathomed or cared about a rule which no dictionary or textbook of the times could tell him, and to say that he would therefore have abstained from coining “Antipholus” as here explained. Indeed, if he did divine such a rule, I think he would have been all the more set in his choice, since apart from its “theophoric” utility the name is chosen above all to underline confusion of persons. He would also relish the confusion the name has actually caused.

Final objection: The explanation given contributes little to the interpretation of the play.

Answer: As indicated just above, the man-horse image is chosen to underline the concept of confusion of identities on which the play turns, and it enriches the interpretation of almost every passage quoted hitherto, as well as establishing the significance of the Antipholuses in their topographical setting, a larger matter to which the rest of this paper will be devoted.

For the boldest and most spectacular leap of intuition which Shakespeare has made is to sense the propriety of introducing centaurs into a seascape. The questions which confront us here are: first, what is the ancient basis of this propriety? second, what conscious or subconscious associations could have prompted the poet's mind? and thirdly, how has he expressed and elaborated his idea?

As to propriety, centaurs are land-creatures, and attempts to explain them as, by origin, the spirits of mountain torrents have not really prospered; but for some reason—nobody knows exactly why—they seem to have been, as horses were, under the protection of the god of water and the sea. Poseidon, whose original function is somewhat obscure, may in prehistoric times have been “husband of the earth-goddess,”¹⁸ but in the classical period he is god of water, and especially the sea, where he reigns with his trident, and also—as Poseidon Hippios—god of horses, capable of assuming equine form himself and regarded as the begetter of several mythical steeds. Nilsson's idea¹⁹ that he became Hippios because the crests of waves bring to mind “white horses” is nowadays out of favor, and the real reason for the connection remains unexplained. As sea-god and, though more shakily, as horse-god, Rome and the Renaissance naturally equate him with Neptune. Now water and Poseidon both appear in the Pholus story. When the centaurs lost their battle with Hercules and were routed, some fled to the sea-cape called Malea, one to the river Evenus, and “as for the rest, Poseidon received them at Eleusis and hid them under a mountain.”²⁰ In view of this it has surprised anthropologists that Poseidon does not figure among the progenitors of the centaurs. Although he does not, it is perhaps just worth remark that he, Aegaeon, and the centaur Chiron were closely related through Cronus (Kronos), and Aegaeon according to one tradition was the offspring of earth and sea.

There is, then, some still to be unraveled logic of myth behind the connection, but the logic of poetry does not wait upon anthropologists. Virgil had twice already adopted “centaur” as the name of a ship, and each time, in almost identical words, he pictures its long keel furrowing the deep salt sea (Aeneid 5.158; 10.197). On the first of these occasions, as we have already seen, the Centaur is in a race and its captain is rewarded with a maidservant Pholoe, who is nursing twins. In terms of topography, and also of imagery, Shakespeare makes his play a great waterscape or seascape in which the geographical poles—the “adverse towns” (antipoleis)—are the seaports of Syracuse and Ephesus, and the twins—the Syracusan and the Ephesian Antipholus—are the sons of Aegeon. In mythology Aegaeon is associated in his own right with the Aegean sea, and it has been noticed by others, and remarked above, that Shakespeare's mental route to the name was probably via Aegeus, from whom, according to a wellknown tradition, the Aegean sea actually received its name.²¹ Aegeus was son of Neptune, god of all the seas. The other principal sea between the western and eastern poles of this story is the Adrian or Adriatic, and it can hardly be accident that, while one of the twins lodges at the Centaur, the other is wedded to Adriana. This incidentally discredits Baldwin's idea, supported by a specious but invalid chain of reasoning, that Shakespeare imagined Epidamnum as lying close to Ephesus.²² Shakespeare's Epidamnum is the Plautine Epidamnus, and he left it where the latter was—on the Adriatic. It might be loosely described as on the Ionian Sea, the mare Ionium which lay between Magna Graecia and Greece proper, and perhaps extended to Crete, but it has nothing to do with Ionia, where Ephesus is, and to put it there robs Shakespeare of what is surely one of the romantic postulates of his story, that the original home, the break-up, and the reunion of the family should all be separated by wide stretches of sea.

The whole complex of water-imagery in the play, partly suggested by a phrase in Plautus, and used especially by and of the Antipholuses,—used in many ways but, above all, to image their loss of each other and of their identity—has been studied by others and need not be rehearsed at length again here. But how much more vividly apposite does it become when it is remembered that an antipholus is before all else a creature in whom two identities are confused and that the twins thus named are sons of an Aegeon who owes so much of his dramaturgical existence to the sea. A boast may be made of man, as a sex, that he is

Lord of the wide world and wild wat'ry seas,

(2.1.20)

but, part twin from twin, and he is anything but lord of the seas.

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.

(1.2.35-38)

Water separates. And water and water-spirits may flow contrary to the tenor and will of the individual soul:

O, train me not, sweet mermaid, with thy note
To drown me in thy sister's flood of tears;
Sing, siren, for thyself. …

(3.2.45-47)

They may seem to lend that soul a new identity—“for I am thee” (3.2.66)²³—though the agency of transformation may be mistrusted:

I'll stop my ears against the mermaid's song.

(3.2.163)

But water, as Adriana says, herein prefiguring the close of the play, can also unite beyond possibility of dissolution:

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.

(2.2.125-129)

When, from the end of the play, we look back, we see that an antipholus is something less than lord of the seas, something more than a negligible drop of water. Yet he is conformable to the seas' element, riding out the storm.

An instinct like Shakespeare's recurs, in a very different medium, in Maurice de Guérin, a young French writer of the nineteenth century whom Matthew Arnold singled out for his “truly interpretative faculty.” In his work Le Centaure de Guérin set his imagination to consider what account an aged centaur might give of himself to a human being. Here is part of his picture:

I had my birth in the caves of these mountains. Like the stream of this valley, whose first drops trickle from some weeping rock in a deep cavern, the first moment of my life fell in the darkness of a remote abode, and without breaking the silence … Sometimes, too, my mother came back to me, having about her the odours of the valleys, or streaming from the waters which were her haunt. Her returning thus, without a word said of the valleys or rivers, but with the emanation of them hanging about her, troubled my spirit, and I moved up and down restlessly in my darkness … Wandering along at my own will like the rivers, feeling wherever I went the presence of Cybele, … I bounded whither I would … But when Night overtook me on the slopes of the mountains, she guided me to the mouth of the caverns, and there tranquilized me as she tranquilizes the billows of the sea … The sea-gods, it is said, quit during the hours of darkness their palaces under the deep; they seat themselves on the promontories, and their eyes wander over the expanse of the waves. Even so I kept watch, having at my feet an expanse of life like the hushed sea … I have sometimes believed that I was about to surprise the thought of the sleeping Cybele … but I have never made out more than sounds which faded away … or words inarticulate as the bubbling of the rivers … ‘O Macareus,’ one day said the Great Chiron to me, ‘… Seekest thou to know the gods … and from what source men, animals, and the elements of the universal fire have their origin? But the aged Ocean, the father of all things, keeps locked within his breast these secrets; and the nymphs … sing as they weave their eternal dance before him, to cover any sound’ … For me, … I decline into my last days … I linger … to see come up from the horizon the rainy Hyades, the Pleiades, or the great Orion; I feel myself perishing and passing quickly away, like a snow-wreath floating on the stream; and soon I shall be mingled with the waters which flow in the vast bosom of Earth.²⁴

That is how de Guérin's instinct sees a centaur. He sees him on land, but in a kind of poetic waterscape, and destined to be received at length into “the waters which flow in the vast bosom of Earth”—to be received, in fact, by Poseidon, lord of river, sea, and ocean, under the hill. And when, in our own day, Pablo Picasso sketched his idea of a how a centaur should look, he portrayed him armed, not with boulder and not with a bough, but with a trident.²⁵

Notes

1. T. W. Baldwin, On the Compositional Genetics of The Comedy of Errors (Urbana 1965) vii.

2. As noted by R. A. Foakes, ed.: Arden Edition of Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors⁵ (Cambridge, Mass. 1962) 2. All quotations from the play will be made from this edition.

3. Baldwin (above, note 1) 100-102, cf. the same writer's William Shakespere's Five-Act Structure (Urbana 1963) 695-697.

4. Foakes (above, note 2) 2.

5. Strabo 3.5.3.

6. Apollodorus 2.5.4. Diodorus 4.12.3-8 goes into more detail.

7. Apollodorus 2.5.4; Diodorus 4.12.8.

8. G. S. Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures (Cambridge, Berkeley, and Los Angeles 1970) 157-158, and see whole context.

9. Baldwin, Five-Act Structure (above, note 3) 685-686 points out the relevance of Aegeus/Aegean to the play. For the Aegaeon/Aegean connection see Stat. Ach. 1.207-210, Theb. 5.288-289.

10. Another passage where twins and a centaur are found closely together (though the meaning is different) is Lucan 9.536-537, where Geminis, Chiron, and Aegoceros occur within the space of two lines.

11. Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York 1965) 78. Cf. Eleanor Winsor Leach, “Meam Quom Forman Noscito: Language and Characterization in the Menaechmi,” Arethusa 2 (1969) 30-45, esp. 43 n. 1.

12. As by Frye: see reference in previous note.

13. Cf. Kirk (above, note 8) 152-162, esp. 157-158.

14. Iliad 2.743.

15. Cf. Kirk (above, note 8) 160.

16. Ovid, Met. 12.210-535.

17. Foakes wrongly places a comma after “look.” There is none in the Folio, and “look when” is, as often, equivalent to “whenever.”

18. H. J. Rose and C. M. Robertson in OCD² s.v. Poseidon.

19. M. P. Nilsson, A History of Greek Religion,² tr. F. J. Fielden (New York 1964) 121.

20. Apollodorus 2.5.4.

21. See note 9 above for both Aegeus and Aegaeon. Juv. 13.81 summarily makes Neptune father of the Aegean sea.

22. Baldwin, Compositional Genetics (above, note 1) 147-158, 361; cf. Five-Act Structure (above, note 3) 687.

23. Foakes (above, note 2) 3.2.66 n. and Introduction xliii.

24. Maurice de Guérin, Le Centaure (1840). The translation given is that of M. Arnold in his essay on de Guérin originally published in 1865. It is here cited from his Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor 1962) 36-39. For de Guérin's “truly interpretative faculty,” see p. 15.

25. The Picasso picture is now at the Musée Grimaldi, Antibes. A copy of it may be seen on the book-jacket of Kirk (above, note 8), who, however, passes over the trident in silence.