[In the following excerpt, Maguire presents an overview of The Comedy of Errors that elucidates the drama's structural use of pairing and opposition in relation to its theme of marriage and its depiction of the female characters Adriana and Luciana.]

In adapting Roman source material (Plautus' Amphitryo and Menaechmi) for The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare made two particularly significant changes: he doubled the number of twins, and he changed the setting from Epidamnus to Ephesus. Critics frequently observe the effects of these changes. The first increases “the incidents of error in the play from seventeen to fifty”¹ for, although the resident twin in Menaechmi can be mistaken, there is no one whom he can mistake; and the second introduces the occult, Ephesian deception, sorcery, “emphasizing witchcraft instead of Plautine thievery.”² Both changes seem to me to be linked, relating to Shakespeare's investigation of duplicity (in both its literal sense of doubleness and its metaphoric sense of deceit), and his analysis of marriage, that institution in which “two become one flesh” (Ephesians 5:31).

Although my departure point is source material (Shakespeare's decision to change location and double the twins), my destination is women and marriage in The Comedy of Errors, for Ephesus is associated with a pair of models for female conduct (one independent, one submissive) whose polarity resonates throughout the play in the characters of Adriana and Luciana. I want to approach this subject through a survey of binaries in Errors in order to accentuate a critical mode (thinking and seeing with double vision) which may prove useful in my subsequent discussion of Ephesian women. In considering the conditions of Adriana's marriage, and the thematic double to which they lead—the “double standard,” which Adriana protests against in her rhetorical question, “Why should their liberty than ours be more?”—this essay will also focus on twentieth-century stage treatments of Adriana and her society. My subject, then, is not “the boy(s) from Syracuse” (although the play is presented from the viewpoint of the Syracusans)³ but “the girls from Ephesus.”

I. DOUBLE VISION

It is impossible to talk about The Comedy of Errors without invoking duality, polarity, antithesis, symbiosis, fusion, binary oppositions. Shakespeare combines Pauline and Plautine sources, mixing one of antiquity's most spiritual writers with one of its most salacious. He gives us two kinds of supernatural power, the prestigidatory exorcisms of Dr. Pinch and the holistic religion of the Abbess. He explores two kinds of personality loss, the negative in the fragmentation caused by grief, the positive in the sublimation of love.⁴ Lodgings are characterised by division and duality: the Centaur (half man, half beast) and the Phoenix (death and rebirth). There are two lock-out scenes, one each for husband (Antipholus of Ephesus) and wife. Emendations by Hanmer and Johnson notwithstanding, the play ends most fittingly, as it began, with a double birth:

And you, the calendars of their nativity,
Go to a gossips' feast, and go with me—
After so long grief, such nativity!

(5.1.405-07; my italics)⁵

“Who deciphers them?” asks the Duke of the two Antipholi (5.1.335), adopting a verb from reading practice, the compare-and-contrast exercise of the interpretive critic, the collation work of the editor. The characters come only belatedly to a critical mode forced upon the audience from the beginning.

Egeon's romance narrative frames the central scenes of farce, prompting Charles Whitworth to describe the generic hybrid as “two works living under one title.”⁶ The Antipholus twins (also, we note, two works living under one title⁷) have antimeric experiences: Antipholus of Syracuse has a “delightful dream,” Antipholus of Ephesus a “nightmare”;⁸ Antipholus of Syracuse is afraid of foreigners, Antipholus of Ephesus is disoriented by a domestic threat; Antipholus of Syracuse is welcomed and recognized, Antipholus of Ephesus is rejected and denied. These inverse parallels also find expression within individual characters. Thus, Adriana catalogues her husband's faults but concedes, “I think him better than I say” (4.2.25); Luciana has two speeches on marital relations, the first of which offers a text-book defence of female subservience, the second “a picture less of cosmic determinism than circumstantial pragmatism.”⁹

Appropriately, the linguistic medium of this play is paradox and the pun (those figures wherein two opposites co-exist) and duplication. Antipholus of Syracuse decides to entertain “sure uncertainty” (2.2.185) and employs, as Karen Newman points out, antithesis, anaphora, chiasmus.¹⁰ Adriana finds conceit to be both her “comfort and [her] injury” (4.2.66). Egeon is asked to “speak … griefs unspeakable,” and gives a narrative filled with paradox: pregnancy is a “pleasing punishment,”¹¹ marine disaster separates the family leaving husband and wife “what to delight in, what to sorrow for” (1.1.32, 46, 106). Dromio of Syracuse offers the sage tautology “every why hath a wherefore” (2.2.43-4), only to find his master responding in kind: he beats Dromio twice, “first—for flouting me, and then … / For urging it the second time” (2.2.44-6). The puns, so often dismissed as the rhetorical embellishments of a youthful Shakespeare, are, as Grennan points out, the linguistic equivalents of the play's dual subjects; thus, when identity is reestablished and family reunited in Act 5, the puns all but disappear and language is “restored to a happy singularity.”¹²

It is fitting, if only serendipitously so, that the textual cruces, such as they are, in this single-text play (the only authority for which is the Folio) relate to duplicity (see note 5) and division. Adriana's sister is given two names (Iuliana in stage direction [speech prefix: Iulia.] on her appearance in 3.2 (TLN 786-7), Luciana elsewhere). The first is possibly a compositor's misreading of the second, or an authorial change of mind; whatever the cause, the Folio text preserves a divided identity for Luciana, as for her sister, brother-in-law, and future husband. Adriana's kitchen-maid has also made division of herself. Introduced as “Luce” on her first appearance at 3.1.47 (TLN 670), she is elsewhere rechristened “Nell,” apparently for the sake of a pun at 3.2.109-10 (TLN 900-901); this, like the later “Dowsabel” (4.1.110), is most plausibly a local improvisation of Dromio's and, appearing only in dialogue, does not confuse.¹³

Following McKerrow's “Suggestion,” textual critics have long confidently believed that the manuscript copy underlying the printed text of Errors is authorial “foul papers.”¹⁴ The titles which distinguish the Antipholi vary (and are easily confused with the consistent titles which distinguish the Dromios) before settling into consistency in Act 3; furthermore stage directions provide narrative information unnecessary for a prompter (e.g. “Enter … a Schoole / master, call'd Pinch”; TLN 1321-2) and hence assumed to be the literary explanations of an author. Paul Werstine has recently disputed this assumption, showing that when “one addresses the stage directions of Comedy of Errors with questions about whether their origin is authorial or theatrical, one finds that they offer divided testimony.”¹⁵ “Foul papers” and “promptbooks,” it seems, like the Antipholi, may be mistaken for each other. Confusion and duplication are inherent in all aspects of this play.

Needless to say, productions capitalize on such doubling, underlining the thematic with the visual. In the Regent's Park production in 1981 (directed by Ian Talbot), Dr. Pinch was cast against the text¹⁶: a stocky actor, described as a “lean-fac'd villain,” a “mere anatomy,” a “needy hollow-ey'd, sharp-looking wretch,” a “living dead man” (5.1.238-42) served as a reminder that, as in the case of Antipholus of Syracuse, verbal identification may be at odds with reality. The Luce of the Folio became two maids in Trevor Nunn's 1976 RSC production, a spherical kitchen-maid (Nell), affianced to Dromio of Ephesus, and a tall, slim maid (Luce), servant to Adriana, who was subsequently paired off with Dromio of Syracuse. In the 1990 RSC production (directed by Ian Judge), the First Merchant (1.2) was not one but two, dressed identically, sharing lines and speaking in unison. In the same production the Antipholi and the Dromios became one, “each pair … played … by one actor in two minds about the whole thing” (Daily Express, 30 April 1990), although a double was necessary for the reunion of the last scene.¹⁷ This production presented Dr. Pinch as a fairground performer who encased the “possessed” Ephesian master and man in wooden boxes and sawed them in half. Thus, in demonstrating his showmanship, Dr. Pinch inadvertently symbolised the twins' divided states.

Productions also draw attention to the similarities between Errors and the late plays. The Manchester Royal Exchange production in 1993 had the enthroned Duke descend from on high to hear Egeon and pronounce sentence: one felt as if one were hearing an early Shakespearean comedy but watching a late Shakespearean romance. Romance is, as often observed, a narrative genre, and in Pericles, for example, the characters themselves frequently resort to story-telling as if narration will alleviate their woes. Thus Cleon asks his wife

My Dionyza, shall we rest us here,
And by relating tales of others' griefs,
See if 'twill teach us to forget our own?

(1.4.1-3)

The Comedy of Errors has several narrative high-spots—the woes of Egeon, Adriana, and Antipholus of Ephesus, for example (1.1.31-139; 5.1.136-160; 5.1.214-54). In most productions it is clearly the power of Egeon's narrative which motivates the Duke's (relative) leniency in 1.1.¹⁸ Dromio of Ephesus also has an opportunity to relate his griefs (4.4.29-39). In Clifford Williams' 1962 production for the RSC, Dromio addressed his complaint to the officer, who sat down leisurely to hear this latest narrative.

Williams' production also showed itself most fully aware of the conventions of the romance dénouement with its reliance on an item of personal jewellery to clear up confusions. Antipholus of Ephesus seized gratefully on the Courtesan's introduction of the ring: “'Tis true, my liege, this ring I had of her” (5.1.278). The action was halted for relieved exclamations, examination of the ring, and attendant stage business, all of which clearly had the status of conclusion for Antipholus. Only when the Courtesan introduced the new complication—that she had seen Antipholus enter the Abbey—did the tone change, the happy ending vanishing as Antipholus fainted.

Thus, productions, sources, text, language, genre, and theme combine to make sure that we view Errors with double vision, that we look both back and ahead, that we think in duplicate, seeing Pericles as we watch Errors, hearing St. Paul as we see Plautus, observing language, identity, families, and genres fragment and unite. Although confusion is inherent in Shakespeare's Plautine sources, duplication on this scale is not.

Nowhere are the duplications and polarities more evident than in the play's discussion of marriage, an institution which is both spiritual and social, sometimes both romantic and farcical; an institution which cruelly reverses the rhetoric and power of courtship, transforming the worshipping male servant into household master and the female mistress into obedient conjugal servant; an institution in which personalities may struggle for individuality or unity (or both); an institution in which one's most intimate companion can sometimes seem a stranger. Adriana inhabits a society which does not permit her the wry bluntness of the twentieth century (“Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution?”), but she anticipates this image of restraint in her dialogue with Luciana:

LUCIANA.
[H]e [Antipholus] is the bridle of your will.
ADRIANA.
There's none but asses will be bridled so.

(2.1.13-14)

Adriana's marital predicament, in which “bridal” doubles with “bridle,” is clearly another of the play's dominant binaries, but it has received less attention than it deserves. Wells dismisses it in a generalisation (“the wife is brought to an understanding of flaws in her relationship with her husband”) and Ralph Berry makes it but an introduction to another subject: “There is domestic drama, certainly, in the tensions between Adriana and her husband. … More interesting, perhaps, is the master and servant relationship.”¹⁹ C. L. Barber and Germaine Greer are in a critical minority in articulating the complex dualities in the topic: marriage's “irritations and its strong holding power” (Barber), the difficulty of “creating a durable social institution out of volatile material of lovers' fantasies” (Greer).²⁰ …

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III. MARRIAGE

Given the thematic emphasis on twinning, doubling, fusion, it is appropriate that Paul's letter to the Ephesians contains advice about marriage, that state in which “two become one flesh” (Ephesians 5:31). Identical twins, separate but the same, provide an ideal metaphor for the theme of division and reconciliation, not just of two pairs of siblings but of two pairs of marriage partners. One marriage (that of Egeon-Emilia) is disrupted by external hostility (shipwreck), the other by internal (domestic) strife; both marriages are characterised by separation (Egeon is a Renaissance commercial traveller, Antipholus a straying husband), and both wives object to their husbands' absence (Emilia makes provision to follow her spouse [1.1.47-8], Adriana protests).

Marriage is a difficult business to negotiate (I use both noun and verb advisedly). Both Adriana and Antipholus refer to their marriage as an arranged marriage. Antipholus describes Adriana as the woman “whom thou [the Duke] gav'st to me to be my wife” (5.1.198), a reference made independently by Adriana: “Antipholus my husband, / Who I made lord of me and all I had, / At your [the Duke's] important letters” (5.1.136-8). Adriana, it is implied at 5.1.161-4, was the Duke's reward to Antipholus for military service.

Marriage may be a transaction, the woman an object traded by men, but it also, paradoxically, as far removed from transaction as is possible: a holy union, characterised by mutual spiritual giving. Thus St. Paul: “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Ephesians 4:21). The commercial and the spiritual seem strange bedfellows (as it were) but they are no more paradoxical than the dramatic hybrid which results from Shakespeare's Pauline and Plautine sources. Shakespeare negotiates the thematic and generic tensions in his disparate source material to create a successful partnership.²¹ Adriana has more trouble synthesising polarities.

Adriana's difficulty derives in part from a duality in Renaissance attitudes to women. Viewed as both divine and dangerous, women and their beauty could lead men to an appreciation of higher things (the spiritually beautiful, the celestial) or to physical temptation (lust, gratification, damnation). Both extremes of these female stereotypes are represented in Errors. The love-stricken Antipholus of Syracuse employs the vocabulary of the worshipping Petrarchan wooer: “your grace,” “more than earth divine,” “Are you a god?” are the terms he uses for the resisting Luciana in 3.2. In the contrasting episode, which follows immediately, Dromio of Syracuse describes his pursuit by the sexual Luce in the language of demonology: Luce “haunts” him, she is a “diviner” [witch], she knows “what privy marks” he has, so that he “amaz'd, ran from her as a witch” (3.2.144). The common root of these two women's names (Luce and Luciana) shows that the demonic female (the diviner who would possess the male) and the divine female (the goddess whom the male wishes to possess) are but two sides of the same female stereotype.

This duality is pushed further in Errors with the representation of the demonic and divine two female stereotypes by the professional extremes: by the Courtesan (whom Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse characterize as “Sathan,” “Mistress Sathan,” “the devil,” “the devil's dam”: 4.3.48-51)²² and by the Abbess (characterized in dialogue as “a virtuous and a reverend lady”: 5.1.134). Emilia's dual role as procreative mother and chaste Abbess (during a surely significant period of thirty-three years, the number of years Christ lived on earth²³) links her even more obviously with that other chaste mother, the Virgin Mary. Adriana attempts to unite both extremes, attending to her husband's body and soul: she offers dinner/sex and confession (“Husband, I'll dine above with you to-day, / And shrive you of a thousand idle pranks”; 2.2.207-08).

Whether Adriana offers Antipholus of Syracuse dinner or sex is, in fact, a moot point. Stanley Wells views the rendezvous as innocent: “Shakespeare raises the moral tone by substituting the dinner party of Menaechmi for the bedroom setting of Amphitruo.”²⁴ However, there is an association between food and sex (the former a metaphor for the latter) in the brothel scene in Pericles,²⁵ and Ralph Berry suggests that the “audience would … receive the impression of sexual congress behind locked doors.”²⁶

“Your cake here is warm within: you stand here in the cold” says Dromio of Ephesus to his master (3.1.71), where “cake” euphemistically indicates “woman,” and the scene concludes with “standard slang for sexual entry,” Antipholus' decision to “knock elsewhere” since his “own doors refuse to entertain [him].”²⁷

Certainly, the argument from stage symbolism is persuasive: “the house [was] perceived from earliest times as the coding for woman, and the knocking at the gates, the male attempts at entry.”²⁸ This is the symbolism in plays as diverse as Lysistrata (where the women deny their husbands sex, and lock themselves in the Acropolis only to be threatened by phallic weapons) and Henry 5 where Henry's invasion of France is analogous to his conquest of Catherine. “Enter our gates, dispose of us and ours, / For we no longer are defensible” says the yielding Governor on the walls of Harfleur (3.3.49-50) in a line no less appropriate to the Princess. However, practical considerations may support the notion of culinary rather than sexual offerings. Luciana chaperones the meeting; given Antipholus of Syracuse's fear of Adriana and love of her sister, it seems unlikely that he would engage in sexual intimacies with his hostess; and in the Shakespeare canon adultery is not the comic matter that fornication is.²⁹ What is clear is that Adriana's attempt to unite female physicality and divinity involves ministering to her supposed husband's body and soul: she provides dinner (or its less euphemistic equivalent) and confession. For Adriana, wifehood is a fusion of two opposing female stereotypes.

“Why should their liberty than ours be more?” Adriana protests in 2.1, the noun subtly hinting at the kind of freedom men enjoy, that in which they visit the Liberties.³⁰ Elizabethan marriage may be a mixture of otium (the social niceties of leisurely dinners) and negotium (“If thou didst wed her for her wealth”), but Antipholus looks elsewhere for Erotium. I choose the word deliberately, for Shakespeare elects not to: Erotium is the name of the Courtesan whom the resident twin visits in Menaechmi. In The Comedy of Errors the Courtesan is “pretty and witty; wild” (3.1.110), a provider of hospitality (“thanks for my good cheer”: 5.1.393), a woman “of excellent discourse” (3.1.109). Critics remind us that discourse is not what courtesans were renowned for; but in Greek society hetairai certainly were. High-class escorts (“hetaira” literally means “companion”), distinct from concubines, prostitutes in brothels, or streetwalkers, hetairai provided intellectual conversation as equals, socialising with men at dinner and drinking parties.³¹ By turning Antipholus' sexual and social needs into a business, the Courtesan in Errors achieves outside marriage what Adriana has not managed within: the fusion of otium, negotium, erotium.

Lest we be in danger of admiring her for this, Shakespeare qualifies the Courtesan's triumph in two ways: he makes her the only deliberate deceiver in a play of chance; and he denies her a name. The play concludes with baptism, that act of naming which bestows identity, strengthens family, celebrates society. For as long as she is nameless, the Courtesan is kept outside that society.

Onomastics in The Comedy of Errors are not without thematic or character relevance. “Egeon” recalls the father of Theseus who gave his name to the Aegean Sea, drowning himself from grief at the (supposed) loss of his son. Luciana is associated with light (from the Latin lux) and Lucian, that exposer of follies (cf. the role of Lucian in Titus Andronicus). Angelo is an apt name for a goldsmith, angels being gold coins. Adriana, as indicated above, is the female form of Hadrian, the Roman ruler from whom the Adriatic Sea takes its name; Adriana also appears in Chaucer and Gower as a variant of Ariadne, the princess whom Theseus abandoned on Naxos and Dionysus subsequently wed.³² Ariadne thus has a dual aspect—the mourner and the joyful bride—a duality inherent in another etymology of Adriana as the female form of Janus, the two-faced god.

The kitchen-maid Luce, as we have seen, is also referred to as “Nell.”³³ Although Shakespeare uses “Nell” as an abbreviation for Eleanor in 2 Henry 6, he also views it as an abbreviation for Helen: Paris twice calls Helen of Troy by this homely diminutive in Troilus and Cressida. There are more Helens in Shakespeare than there are Eleanors, and they may provide a clue as to how to view the kitchen-maid in Errors. One dominant pattern stands out, that of the sexually assertive female who pursues her chosen mate. Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream trails Demetrius through the wood outside Athens, a role reversal of which she is only too aware: “Your wrongs do set a scandal on my sex. / We cannot fight for love, as men may do. / We should be woo'd, and were not made to woo.” (MND 2.1.240-2). This generalisation, in which she moves from the impropriety of her own behaviour to that of all women, illustrates her awareness of society's automatic reaction in which her weakness “will be taken as female weakness rather than as an individual weakness.”³⁴

The link between individual transgression and female transgression was, in fact, already implicit in the Renaissance in the name Helen, by association with Menelaus' Helen, who accompanied Paris to Troy (whether by force or choice is open to doubt, but the Renaissance assumed her willing compliance). In Troilus and Cressida Thersites presents Helen in unflattering terms (a “whore,” a “placket”) and Shakespeare continually associates the name with female sexual eagerness. Critics note that Helena in All's Well That Ends Well seems more eager to lose her virginity than is deemed proper for a heroine. In conversation with Parolles she defends the female right to have and enjoy sex, and subsequently engages in a marathon cross-country pursuit of a man who does nothing to encourage her: she follows Bertram to Paris (a destination with classical overtones), before conveniently arriving in Florence (where Bertram is) despite her intention of travelling to the shrine of St. Jacques le Grand in Spain. To this sexually assertive trio—the Helens of Midsummer Night's Dream, Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well—we must add another Helen, Mistress Quickly (“Nell”) of Henry 4 and 5, whose vocabulary is full of unintentional sexual innuendo. Shakespeare's Helens/Nells are cast in the same mould. To Shakespeare, it seems, all Nells are loose; in The Comedy of Errors Nell is both loose and Luce.

The dramatis personae in Errors are aware of the way in which name confers identity. Dromio of Syracuse reacts noticeably to his finding out the name of the kitchen-maid; he comments on her name and uses it immediately in apostrophe: “if thy name be called Luce—Luce, thou hast answer'd him well” (3.1.52-3). Dromio's master, Antipholus of Syracuse, reacts similarly to not finding out the name of Luciana. His opening apostrophe and ensuing comment (“Sweet mistress—what your name is else, I know not”; 3.2.29) implies that he would use her Christian name if he could. The fact that Adriana identifies the Syracusans by their names is taken as proof that she does recognize and know them (“How can she thus then call us by our names, / Unless it be by inspiration?”: 2.2.166-7) although, as confusions escalate, both Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse grow more hesitant in assuming that name and identity are synonymous. “Do you know me, sir? Am I Dromio? Am I your man? Am I myself?” asks Dromio in anguish at 3.2.73-4. His master reassures him “Thou art Dromio, thou art my man, thou art thyself” (75) but just 100 lines later he is unable to apply the same confidence to his own situation. “Master Antipholus,” hails the goldsmith at 3.2.165; “Ay, that's my name” is Antipholus' guarded response.³⁵ In a play which is sensitive to names—their meanings and their confusions—the anonymity of a courtesan who is named in the source is conspicuous.

In the reunion of Act 5 Antipholus of Syracuse immediately identifies his father as Egeon, and Egeon and Emilia exchange first names five times in their first six lines of dialogue (5.1.342-7). Antipholus of Ephesus and Adriana have no opportunity to use Christian names in the last scene, as Shakespeare does not provide them with a dialogue opportunity for reconciliation. Their marriage is, as Leggatt observes, “quietly placed in the background and no great hopes are pinned on it.”³⁶

The only grounds for optimism lie in the Courtesan's anonymity in a play whose conclusion stresses rebirth and baptism, a gossips' feast, and in the fact that the Courtesan is not included in the final pairing-off (although the BBC production does match her with the Duke). Any optimism is necessarily limited, however, by the fact that Antipholus of Ephesus has more to say to the Courtesan than he does to his wife: he addresses the Courtesan in ten words (“There take it [the ring], and much thanks for my good cheer”), of which the last six may be a termination of a relationship, a salacious reminiscence, or a genuine expression of gratitude. The husband-wife reunion must be realised on stage wordlessly, if at all.

Directors rise to this interpretive challenge. A happy ending is most easily suggested by the simple expedient of Antipholus giving his wife the promised chain so that objects, as identities, are restored to their rightful owners. (Although the BBC Antipholus does give his wife the chain—a large, heart-shaped pendant—his emotional discomfort at the family reunion is made clear by the uncertain looks which pass between himself and Adriana.) Adriana's question, “And are not you my husband?” (5.1.371) is addressed not to her husband but to her dinner companion, Antipholus of Syracuse. She posed the question in resigned sadness in Clifford Williams' production, already aware of the negative answer she would receive, and in urgent desperation in the 1983 RSC production, willing the answer to be positive. This latter production gave Antipholus of Ephesus and Adriana an embrace into which Adriana drew Dromio of Ephesus, showing the importance of servants to the family unit in early modern England. Adriana then moved to exit with her sister; Antipholus pulled his wife back to him but she slowly propelled her husband in the direction of his twin. Deliberately eschewing or postponing a marital reunion, this Adriana showed (as does Shakespeare's dialogue) that the reestablishment of the family unit—parents/children, sibling/sibling—was to take precedence over conjugal communion. Her actions with servant and husband left her firmly, if a trifle regretfully, in control of tone.

This Adriana's inclusion of Dromio in the embrace reminded us, albeit in an affectionately twentieth-century way, that the Elizabethan household was an extended family unit. The master-husband held sway over a group of social subordinates: wife, children, servants. The link between the treatment of wives and servants is seen in the linguistic instruction offered by a husband and a ruler in an early comedy and a late romance, respectively. In The Taming of the Shrew 4.5 Petruchio “teaches” his wife the difference between the sun and the moon.³⁷ In The Tempest Prospero gives his slave Caliban the same lesson. He teaches Caliban “how / To name the bigger light, and how the less, / That burn by day and night”; as a result, Caliban tells him, “I lov'd thee” (1.2.335-6).

Marriage may be a spiritual world-without-end bargain, a selfless service; but it may also be little better than slavery. As More's Raphael reminds us, the difference between service and servitude “is only a matter of one syllable.”³⁸ In The Tempest, Ferdinand, in service to Prospero, takes pleasure in a “mean task” which would be as “heavy … as odious” were it not for Miranda's sympathy and love (3.1.1-15); his heart is a willing “slave” to Miranda (3.1.66). This love leads Ferdinand to enter Miranda's service in marriage, paradoxically “with a heart as willing / As bondage e'er of freedom” (3.1.88-9). Miranda, reciprocating Ferdinand's feelings, mirrors his vocabulary: “I'll be your servant” (3.1.85). In contrast, Helen in All's Well That Ends Well does not enjoy reciprocal love, and the consequences are voiced by Diana: “'Tis a hard bondage to become the wife / Of a detesting lord” (3.5.64-5). Thus, marriage may be a pleasurable bondage or a hard bondage, service or servitude.

In Errors Luciana counsels her sister in obedience, patience, and the domestic hierarchy which makes men “masters to their females” (2.1.24); Adriana responds with sisterly sarcasm, “This servitude makes you to keep unwed.” Servitude, asses, bridled: these are the terms Adriana associates with married life. Renaissance matrimony can indeed be “hard bondage” for the female because Renaissance culture associates wives with servants. In the letter in which Paul counsels wives to be obedient to husbands, he also advises servants to be obedient to their masters (Ephesians 6:5-9). Claudius Hollyband links the two social inferiors in a succinct aphorism: “he is happie which hath a good servant, and a good wife.”³⁹ Before continuing with Adriana we need to consider servants and service.

IV. SERVANTS

The Elizabethan household, like Elizabethan life, was hierarchical. Husbands ruled over wives who ruled over children; at the bottom of this pecking order came servants. However, my generalisation distorts, flattening as it does the permutations possible. Thus in many instances servants were viewed as a variant of children, not inferior beings but dependents. In Claudius Hollyband's dialogue, The Citizen at Home, the Father's admonition to his servant William reminds one more of parental frustration than employer's dissatisfaction: “William, give here some bread … you will never learn to serve; why do you not lead it with a trencher plate, and not with the hand? I have told it to you above an hundred times.”⁴⁰ At the other extreme is the treatment which William Gouge describes: “Sometimes Masters offend in the quality of that foode which thay give to their servants, as when it is kept too long, and grone musty, mouldy, or otherwise unsavory: or when the worst kind of foode, for cheapnesse sake, is bought, evene such as is scarce fit for mans meat.”⁴¹ Given an inferior diet, servants were thus daily reminded that they “did not belong to their employer's family.”⁴² Although masters were expected to care for their servants, attending to their physical and spiritual needs and caring for them when ill, Thomas Becon's admonition makes it clear that many masters did not behave in this way. Becon corrects those who “curse, and lame them [servants], cast dishes and pots at their heads, beat them, put them in danger of their life.”⁴³ Compare Vives, whose discussion of the treatment of wives by husbands illuminates the treatment of servants by masters: “some [husbands] there be, that through evyll and rough handelynge and in threatenynge of their wives, have them not as wives, but as servauntes.”⁴⁴

The Elizabethans understood the term “family” more in the sense of domestic household than sentimental attachments. The components of this household are made clear in Gouge's Treatises on Domestical Duties (an exegesis on Ephesians) which outlines the duties of three sets of people: Wives-Husbands, Children-Parents, Servants-Masters. Treatise 7, “Duties of Servants,” stresses the importance of obedience, referring the reader to the previous treatises on wives and children for the reasons why obedience is desirable: “The reasons alleged to move wives and children to obey, ought much more to move servants” (p. 613). In section 36 (p. 645), “Of servants endeavour to make their judgement agree with their masters,” the reader is referred to Gouge's precepts for other inferiors since the same principle applies. Antipholus of Syracuse corrects his man's behaviour, reminding Dromio that the servant should “fashion [his] demeanor to my looks” (2.2.33), a classic textbook rule for wives: “it beseemes an honest wife to frame her selfe to her husbands affect, and not to be merry, when he is melancholy, not iocund when he is sad, much less fliere when hee is angry.”⁴⁵

Although social historians are unsure about the extent of the similarity between the roles of servant and wife in the early modern period, in one startling criminal category servants and wives were yoked together. Husband-killing and master-killing were both classified as petty treason. Masters feared betrayal from within, insubordination by servant or wife, those whom Frances E. Dolan characterises as “dangerous familiars.” Petty treason embodies the fear “that the other and the enemy might be the person who makes your fire, prepares your food and lodges in your own cell.”⁴⁶

Antipholus of Ephesus perceives himself as betrayed by both wife and servant. His wife bars him from the house, his house. His servant purloins a bag of gold, his gold. And both servant and wife compound the villainy by denial. Adriana: “I did not, gentle husband, lock thee forth”; Dromio of Ephesus: “And, gentle master, I receiv'd no gold” (4.4.98-9). Adriana transgresses, albeit unknowingly, by inviting a lover and a strange servant into the marital home; she commits infractions of mensa and possibly of thoro, welcoming the ersatz husband to her table and, perhaps, her bed. Alice Arden did as much and was burned at the stake for her sins.

But Shakespeare is not interested in petty treason—this is a comedy of errors, not of murders⁴⁷—so much as he is in the parallels between two sets of relationships: master-servant and husband-wife. We see more of the former relationship than we do of the latter; this is perhaps why Ralph Berry views the master-servant relationship as of more interest (see note 19). Berry fails to realize, however, that we are invited to consider Antipholus-Adriana by analogy with Antipholus-Dromio. Which Antipholus-Dromio? Both. The two Antipholus-Dromio relationships, very different, provide us with two possible paradigms of marriage.

If the literature of the period associates wives with servants, the language of Errors links Adriana with Dromio (either and both). Both Dromios are called “ass.” Luciana insults Dromio of Syracuse so, and he agrees: “'Tis true she [Adriana, or possibly Luciana] rides me and I long for grass. 'Tis so, I am an ass” (2.2.200-01). In the next scene Antipholus of Ephesus, applies the insult to Dromio of Ephesus who also agrees: “Marry, so it doth appear / By the wrongs I suffer, and the blows I bear. / I should kick, being kick'd, and being at that pass, / You would keep from my heels, and beware of an ass” (3.1.15-18). In 4.4 Dromio of Ephesus expands on the motif, summarising his sufferings at the hands of his master: “I am an ass indeed; you may prove it by my long ears. I have serv'd him from the hour of my nativity to this instant, and have nothing at his hands for my service but blows” (4.4.29-32). Although in all three cases the insult from master/mistress to man could be left as a one-line criticism, on each occasion the analogy is expanded. It is difficult, then, not to be reminded of the earlier dialogue between Luciana and Adriana:

LUCIANA.
O, know he is the bridle of your will.
ADRIANA.
There's none but asses will be bridled so.

(2.1.13-14)

Wives, like servants, like asses, endure wrongs and blows from the master whom they serve.

It is noticeable in reading, and particularly marked in production, that the Antipholi enjoy different relationships with their respective Dromios. The Syracusans are friendlier, less hierarchical, more supportive of each other. In one sense this equality is the result of the circumstances in which they find themselves, strangers in a strange land; as the BBC production showed, they “cling to each other for support.”⁴⁸ The affectionate relationship between Antipholus of Syracuse and Dromio of Syracuse was established from the first in the Clifford Williams production, to the evident perplexity of the Merchant. Thus, Antipholus' “A trusty villain, sir, that very oft, / When I am dull with care and melancholy, / Lightens my humour” (1.2.199-201) was delivered as a half-apologetic explanation. The Merchant's refusal of the dinner invitation was due to his desire to get away from the strange duo, his “I commend you to your own content” (1.2.32) emphatic, terminative, relieved at his success in extricating himself.

In this production Dromio's concern for his master was tellingly shown. To Antipholus' reprise of Dromio's alleged misdemeanours—“thou didst deny the gold's receipt, / And tolds't me of a mistress, and a dinner” (2.2.17-18)—Dromio looked (understandably) uncomprehending, before reacting in delight at this evident example of his master's recovery from depression: “I am glad to see you in this merry vein” (2.2.20). Later Dromio anxiously felt his master's forehead when Antipholus of Syracuse asked him about the bark. “Why, sir, I brought you word an hour since” replied Dromio (4.3.37-8), concerned that his master might be running a fever. In the 1983 RSC production Antipholus' “As you love strokes, so jest with me again” was a genuine invitation to his man to replay his earlier absurd answers, each question followed by a pause for Dromio's anticipated (but not forthcoming) music-hall reply (2.2.8-10). I reline:

You know no Centaur? (Pause)
You receiv'd no gold? (Pause)
Your mistress sent to have me home to dinner? (Pause)

In contrast to his Ephesian brother, Antipholus of Syracuse describes his man as a “heedful slave” (2.2.2) who acts “in care” of him (2.2.3), and he acknowledges his “love” for the servant (2.2.28). As Alexander Leggatt points out,⁴⁹ both Antipholus of Syracuse and Dromio of Syracuse are willing to sacrifice their own happiness and safety for the sake of the other (3.2.145-9; 4.4.151-3), an example of mutual selfless love, the kind that ideally characterises marriage.

Very different is the relationship between Antipholus of Ephesus and his Dromio, who are never alone on stage together and are thus denied the intimate friendly chats of their respective siblings. In production, as in the text, Antipholus of Ephesus is clearly a more violent man than his brother. Although both masters beat their servants, productions differentiate the types of beatings. In Trevor Nunn's production, Antipholus of Syracuse used only a rolled-up newspaper to hit his man; the BBC Antipholus of Syracuse employed a soft Tudor bonnet; in both productions Antipholus of Ephesus hit his man with the flat of his hand or with the property rope. This distinction motivated a moment of amazement in the BBC production when Syracusan Dromio's news of the bark in port, delivered to the wrong Antipholus, met with a slap across the face; the close-up of the servant showed his emotional, rather than his physical, pain at this uncharacteristic behaviour, a betrayal of unwritten rules. It is, appropriately, Dromio of Ephesus who is given the comic-poignant testimony about his life history of beatings.⁵⁰ In Menaechmi Plautus also differentiates the two master-servant relationships. The resident twin, astonished by the magnanimity of the unknown slave who saves him, rejects the servant's explanation that he is Menaechmus' man: “I had never yet anie servant would do so much for me.”⁵¹

It is tempting to argue that Adriana seeks in marriage the symbiotic friendly “service” of the Syracusans, but finds that Antipholus of Ephesus offers her only servitude. However, the play does not permit such simple thematic bifurcation. Before deciding what kind of marriage Adriana wants to have, we must first consider what kind of woman Adriana wants to be.

V. “TWO PARTS IN ONE”

Historically, as we have seen, Ephesus offers two female role models: the independent pagan Amazon and the submissive Christian servant. At the beginning of the play Adriana is clearly equated with the former, Luciana with the latter. Adriana chafes at the restrictions marriage imposes on women; she questions the male right to have geographic freedom, desiring equal liberty for husbands and wives. Critical and resentful of her husband's greater freedom, she expresses herself in actions as well as words, granting herself permission to circulate out of doors. Her quid pro quo independence has not been well received: “Look when I serve him so, he takes it ill” (2.1.12). Desiring “the sweetnesse of liberty,” viewing marriage as rather a “servitude than wedlock,” Adriana is exactly the kind of woman who so alarmed Heywood and appalled the Renaissance male. Playing “two parts in one”—the male and the female—she is in the tradition of the Ephesian Amazon.

It is because of Ephesus' tradition of non-submissive women that St. Paul directs his letter about wifely submission not to the Galatians, Corinthians, or Colossians, not to the Philippians, the Hebrews, or the Romans, but to the Ephesians. It is the Ephesians who are most in need of Paul's advice:

Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives should be subject to their husbands as to the Lord, since, as Christ is head of the Church and saves the whole body, so is a husband the head of his wife; and as the Church is subject to Christ, so should wives be to their husbands in everything. Husbands should love their wives, just as Christ loved the Church and sacrificed for her to make her holy … ; and let every wife respect her husband.

(Ephesians 5: 21-33)⁵²

Concerned to establish domestic harmony through domestic hierarchy, Paul is explicit in his message: husbands must love their wives, but wives must be subject to their husbands.

Luciana knows Paul's lesson by heart:

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

(2.1.16-25, 29)

The lines are Luciana's but the sentiments are Paul's: Luciana is merely paraphrasing Ephesians 5:21ff.⁵³

Having introduced this opposition between the Amazon and the Pauline female, the play immediately begins to deconstruct it. Adriana can hardly be an independent woman since, as a wife, she has technically espoused submission, while Luciana, who preaches submission, can do so only because (as Adriana points out), she is independent:

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

(2.1.38-41)

The identities of Adriana and Luciana, like those of the twins, begin to merge, become confused. Despite her rhetorical question, “Why should their liberty than ours be more?”, Adriana seems to want not liberty but the right to love and be loved as a wife. No Moll Cutpurse, she. When next we meet the women it is Adriana who has the long Pauline speech on marriage as she lyrically, passionately tells Antipholus that husband and wife are “undividable incorporate” (2.2.122). Luciana's subsequent speech on marriage is strangely unspiritual, full of knowing advice to her (supposed) brother-in-law about how to conduct an extramarital affair:

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.

(3.2.11-15)

Instead of husband and wife being one, as Paul counsels, the wife is to be kept ignorant of the husband's infidelity: “what need she be acquainted?” Paul's letter to the Ephesians was about breaking down the wall of division; Luciana's advice here is about how to paper over that wall.

The contradictions and cross-overs in female identity become increasingly obvious. Despite the feminist vigour of her conversation with Luciana, Adriana plays a more (al)luring role with her husband, while Luciana the good (wearing, in the BBC version, a necklace with a large crucifix) is involved in a disturbing dialogue with her supposed brother-in-law (3.2). One wonders if Luciana's behaviour is not slightly flirtatious. Despite some valiant attempts to redirect Antipholus' attentions (“Why call you me love? Call my sister so”: 3.2.59; and cf.57, 60, 65), Luciana concludes the dialogue with an ambiguous line: “hold you still; / I'll fetch my sister to get her good will” (70).

The line may be a desperate excuse to exit (after all, the situation is now dangerously physical, Antipholus having asked to hold Luciana's hand; and his love talk is clearly out of control since he has just proposed marriage). Both the BBC production and the 1983 RSC version played the line as an impetus to exit. In the 1962 RSC version, however, Luciana succumbed to Antipholus, giving him her right hand in a waltz gesture (repeated in more legitimate circumstances at 5.1.375-7) while her left hand caressed his hair. Although she quickly removed her hand, aghast at herself, her exit line was a helplessly loving acceptance of the situation. In Ian Judge's 1990 RSC production Luciana's acceptance of Antipholus was less passive. “I'll fetch my sister to get her good will” was a spirited decision to face the music, Luciana having agreed to love Antipholus. Her later recounting of the conversation to Adriana was triumphant, not apologetic:

That love I begg'd for you [gleeful laugh], he begged of me. First he did praise my beauty [gleeful laugh], then my speech.

(4.2.12; 15)

In Act 5 the Abbess touches a sore spot when she questions Adriana about the possibility of her husband's “unlawful love.” The BBC close-up of the Courtesan at this moment showed the rival suspected by Adriana. However, in Adrian Noble's production (1983) Adriana's admission that “some love … drew him oft from home” (5.1.56) was accompanied by a glare at Luciana. In Adriana's eyes the submissive sister was not as innocent as she appeared.

By Act 5, then, the identities of Adriana and Luciana are as confused as those of the Antipholi. Adriana the independent meekly submits to the Abbess's rebukes, even though the Abbess's claim (that Adriana's jealousy has caused her husband's madness) is unfounded, as Acts 1 through 4 show. Luciana the submissive objects vociferously on behalf of her sister (5.1.87-8) and encourages Adriana to resist: “Why bear you these rebukes and answer not?” (5.1.89). In the play's conclusion the Antipholi are distinguished, returned to their separate identities, but their partners are not.

This duality seems to be deliberate. Throughout Errors we see Adriana and Luciana trying to work out which type of Ephesian woman to be (pagan or Christian, independent or submissive), and experimenting with whether it is possible to be both. Can women play “two parts in one,” being both divine (goddess) and “diviner” (witch)? Shakespeare juxtaposes this adjective and nouns in the play's structural centre, Act 3, scene 2, where Antipholus' romantic approaches to Luciana are followed by Dromio's narrative about her onomastic relative, Luce. Luciana the goddess, “more than earth divine,” is followed by Luce the “diviner” (140); the advocate of wifely submission in marriage, the woman who will be subservient to her husband, is followed by a more assertive type of servant. But the scene begins with the goddess sanctioning sin and ends with the witch seeking holy marriage. This is hot ice and wondrous strange snow.

Opposites can co-exist, however, as the name Luce/Luciana implies and as Adriana's attentions to her “husband”'s body and soul at 2.2.207-08 specifically show. And if in Errors Shakespeare can combine the pagan and the Christian in Ephesus, why can not the women do so too?

In this duality Adriana resembles Lysistrata, that other independent heroine who staged a lock-out scene. Lysistrata's lock-out tactic was deliberate, Adriana's unwitting, but the motive was the same: domestic harmony. The women in Lysistrata do not want peace qua peace but as a guarantor of normal domestic life: uninterrupted market shopping, regular sexual relations. Adriana similarly regrets the demise of domestic activities: carving, speaking, looking, touching (2.2.113-18). Like Adriana, although for a different reason, Lysistrata has no reconciliation with a partner.⁵⁴ Instead, in a dénouement unusual in Greek drama, the divided chorus of old men and old women come together, celebrating the resumption of interrupted relations. In Lysistrata as in Errors it is the older couple(s) who are depicted most harmoniously. Adriana is left dramatically in the cold by Shakespeare, and perhaps by Antipholus; she and her husband have some voyaging still to do.

If the ending seems inconclusive, the marital future uncertain, it is not because of Adriana but because of her husband. Three of the four main protagonists in Errors not only experience mistakes of identity but initiate their own experiments with opposing and complementary personalities, doubles, binaries, paradoxes. Antipholus of Syracuse seeks his twin in order to make himself whole again, but, before achieving this goal, he finds himself by losing himself to Luciana. Adriana and Luciana synthesise two extremes of female behaviour. Only Antipholus of Ephesus clings tenaciously to his original identity (5.1.214-54). Act 5 provides the end of a journey for all but him; it is now his turn to explore personality. Ephesian Antipholus must now embark on a quest for self- and family-identity just as Syracusan Antipholus embarked in Act 1.⁵⁵

The straying husband, the errant Antipholus of Ephesus, thus becomes errant in a different way: like his twin at the beginning of the play, he is erraticus.⁵⁶ He too may eventually unite opposites, telling his wife “I am thee” (3.2.64). In the spirit of doubling and repetition which is this play's dominant mode, we may hope that Adriana's marriage, like that of her mother-in-law, will be a remarriage. But that is for the future. Adriana inhabits a world where the thaumaturge is Pinch not Prospero, and the one magician—the dramatist—who could give her (and us) a happy ending, declines to do so. Although the play ends, as comedies should, with marriage, Shakespeare leaves us with but the appearance of a happy ending. Not all illusions are dispelled: Ephesus' reputation for duplicity is still in evidence.⁵⁷

Notes

1. Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Comedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 22.

2. Ibid., p. 26.

3. Menaechmi, by contrast, is told from the resident twin's point of view.

4. Stanley Wells, ed. The Comedy of Errors (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 30.

5. Unhappy with the repetition of nativity in line 407 (TLN 1896), which they viewed as compositorial eyeskip from line 405 (TLN 1894), Hanmer and Johnson emended to felicity and festivity, respectively. The duplication of nativity may indeed be an error. George Walton Williams (personal communication) points out two other textual cruces that involve repetition: “To seek thy helpe by beneficiall helpe” (1.1.151; TLN 154; Dover Wilson emends the first help to helth, Rowe to life, Cunningham (Arden) to pelf), and “Besides her vrging of her wrecke at sea” (5.1.360; TLN 1835; the New Oxford Complete Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), following Collier, emends the first her to his). Compositorial anticipation, in which the second item (which is correct) drives out the first, may well explain the double nativity of 5.1. All quotations from Shakespeare's plays come from the Riverside edition, edited by G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974) and are included parenthetically in my text; T[through] L[ine] N[umbers] come from Charlton Hinman's facsimile of the First Folio (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968).

6. Whitworth, “Rectifying Shakespeare's Errors: Romance and Farce in Bardeditry” in The Theory and Practice of Text-Editing, ed. Ian Small and Marcus Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991): 107-41 (p. 114).

7. Egeon describes his offspring as being so alike that they could not be distinguished “but by names” (1.1.53), yet when we meet them they are onomastically identical. Plautus, aware that the farcical confusions of Menaechmi require a set of identical twins with identical names, gives elaborate background reasons for such double nomenclature: “He changed the name of the surviving brother / (Because, in fact, he much preferred the other) / And Sosicles, the one at home, became / Menaechmus—which had been his brother's name.” (The Brothers Menaechmus, in Plautus, The Pot of Gold and Other Plays, trans E. F. Watling (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 104). William Warner's translation (1595), which may have been available to Shakespeare, is more succinct: “The first his Father lost a little Lad, / The Grandsire namde the latter like his brother” (I quote from the version printed in Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 1 [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957], p. 13). Shakespeare, as Alexander Leggatt notes, “provides two sets of twins with the same name and not a word of explanation” (Shakespeare's Comedy of Love [London: Methuen, 1974], p. 3).

8. A. C. Hamilton, The Early Shakespeare (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1967), p. 96.

9. Eamon Grennan, “Arm and Sleeve: Nature and Custom in Comedy of Errors,” Philological Quarterly 59 (1980): 150-64 (p. 151).

10. Karen Newman, Shakespeare's Rhetoric of Comic Character (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), p. 81.

11. The raised eyebrows and rolled eyes of the listening prostitutes in Trevor Nunn's 1976 RSC production showed that these women questioned the paradox, agreeing with the noun more than the adjective.

12. Grennan, “Arm and Sleeve,” p. 162.

13. See Paul Werstine, “‘Foul Papers’ and ‘Prompt-Books’: Printer's Copy for Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors,” Studies in Bibliography 41 (1988): 232-46 (p. 240). The Oxford Complete Works (gen. eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986]) over-helpfully reduces this protean character to the singular consistency of “Nell,” an emendation based on the belief that “Nell” represents an imperfect revision by Shakespeare to avoid confusion of Luciana/Luce. For arguments in favour of retaining “Luce” see Whitworth (“Rectifying Shakespeare's Errors,” p. 124) and Werstine (“‘Foul Papers’”). R. A. Foakes (ed., The Comedy of Errors [London: Methuen, 1963]) suggests that Shakespeare may initially have “thought of taking over into his play [from Plautus' Menaechmi] both the maid and a figure corresponding to the cook, Cylindrus” (p. xxv, n.1).

14. See Werstine, “‘Foul Papers’” for analysis of the unsatisfactory use of this term.

15. Werstine, “‘Foul Papers,’” p. 233, my italics.

16. The role may originally have been played by John Sincler (Sincklo), an actor in Strange's or Admiral's Men c. 1590-1, and later in the Chamberlain's Men, whose thinness was commemorated in the Induction to The Malcontent (1604).

17. As Robert Smallwood rightly objected, the introduction of a Doppelgänger reduced “the audience's participation in the joy of recognition and reconciliation … to simple curiosity about how the trick was done” (“Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, 1990,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly] 42 (1991): 34-59 [p. 35]). Carlo Goldoni's I Due Gemelli Veneziani (1748) shows the very different dramatic effects which result when Menaechmi is adapted with the aim of one actor playing two twins.

18. In the BBC production the Duke's invitation for a brief synopsis is a response to the audible pity of the crowd; his two subsequent invitations to Egeon to continue are due to his increasing involvement with the tale. The on-stage crowd in the 1983 RSC production emulated and so reinforced the gestures with which Adriana accompanied her narrative (5.1.136-60), aware of the performance pressure in her tale. In the 1976 RSC version Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus presented their material (5.1.214-54) as if in a court of law, conferring, consulting notes, and taking exhibits (such as the rope) from a briefcase.

19. Wells, ed., The Comedy of Errors, p. 28; Berry, Shakespeare and Social Class (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1988) p. 22 (my italics). Elsewhere Berry is more astute: “Certainly Adriana has overdone her complaints. … But this is not the same thing as saying she has no grounds for complaint” (Shakespeare's Comedies [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972], p. 32).

20. C. L. Barber, “Shakespearian Comedy in The Comedy of Errors,” College English 25 (1964): 493-7 (p. 497); Germaine Greer, Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 119.

21. Lock-out scenes are not the prerogative of Plautus alone; one also appears in a Pauline epistle, describing an event that took place in Ephesus. In Acts some itinerant exorcists “planned to experiment by using the name of the Lord Jesus.” The incantation they chose was “I adjure you by Jesus, whom Paul preaches, to come out!” They tried this on a possessed Ephesian, but the demon replied “I know Jesus and I know Paul, but who are you?” The possessed man then pounced on two of his exorcists and drove them out of his house into the street (19:13-16).

    Similarly, Plautus does not have the monopoly on disguise and mistaken identity. In his sermon on Ephesus Common Pleas [Edward Chaloner, Ephesus Common Pleas (a sermon preached in 1618, published 1623] Edward Chaloner compares the devil's theatrical use of disguise to a scene from Plautus' Amphitryo, invoking Acts 14:12 in which the crowd compares Barnabas to Jupiter and Paul to Mercury. Chaloner's marginal reference further stresses the Pauline/Plautine connection. (A divine at Oxford, Chaloner had presumably seen college productions of Plautus.)

22. The Courtesan in the 1983 RSC production ascended from beneath the stage, clad in red. To the typical (physical) stereotypes of the buxom, callipygian prostitute was thus added another (more ethereal) stereotype: the scarlet woman, the Whore of Babylon, rising through the stage trapdoor, the area associated on the Elizabethan stage with Hell.

23. The text is inconsistent in the ages of the Antipholi who are presented as twenty-five (1.1.125; 5.1.321) and thirty-three (5.1.401).

24. Wells, ed., The Comedy of Errors, p. 17.

25. See Anthony J. Lewis, “‘I Feed on Mother's Flesh’: Incest and Eating in Pericles,” Essays in Literature 15 (1988): 147-63.

26. Berry, Shakespeare and the Awareness of the Audience (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 39. This was indeed the impression in Trevor Nunn's production where Adriana's naked arm and shoulder emerged to close the shutters, and her red espadrille dropped from the balcony (the shoe was later presented by Antipholus of Ephesus as “evidence” in his deposition of 5.1: see above, n.18). Antipholus of Syracuse subsequently departed shoeless, a red carnation between his teeth, clearly sexually exhausted. In the 1983 RSC production Adrian Noble made the “dinner” arrangements equally clear by concluding Adriana's invitation to the wrong husband in 2.2. with a clinch which Antipholus increasingly enjoyed: Dromio functioned as a chair for the embracing couple but such was Antipholus' ardour that he and Adriana collapsed in passion on the ground. The offstage intention was unambiguous.

27. Berry, Shakespeare and the Awareness of the Audience, pp. 39-40. (Desmond Barritt's Antipholus in the 1990 RSC production made the double entendre clear in his slightly self-conscious announcement “I'll—ahem, ‘knock’—elsewhere”: 3.1.121.) Joseph Candido contrasts the Courtesan's “sexually symbolic open door” with the “shut house of the nameless wife” in Menaechmi. See “Dining Out in Ephesus: Food in The Comedy of Errors,” Studies in English Literature 30 (1990): 217-41 (p. 219).

28. Berry, ibid., p. 40.

29. I am grateful to George Walton Williams for these caveats.

30. Antipholus of Syracuse concludes his list of Ephesian iniquities with the summation “many such-like liberties” (1.2.102). Productions often illustrate this phrase with stage business that links it with sex, and hence with Adriana's rhetorical question. In the 1962 production Antipholus accompanied the phrase with hand gestures which indicated a female bosom; in 1976 Antipholus rotated his Blue Guide to admire what was obviously a centre-fold pin-up. Ephesus in the first century a.d. was renowned for self-indulgent leisure: “bordellos, singers, actors, playboys, whores” (Trell, “The Temple of Artemis,” p. 86). [Bluma L. Trell, “The Temple of Artemis at Ephesos” in The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, ed. Peter A Clayton and Martin J. Price (London: Routledge, 1988).]

31. See Roger Just, Women in Athenian Law and Life (London: Routledge, 1989) and Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves (New York: Schocken Press, 1975).

32. For Ariadne in Chaucer and Gower see Wolfgang Riehle, Shakespeare, Plautus, and the Humanist Tradition (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990), p. 179.

33. Nell is also the name of a kitchen-maid in Romeo and Juliet, who is requested to enter with Susan Grindstone (1.5.9).

34. Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 55.

35. Onomastic identity and malleability are very much to the fore in Menaechmi, Amphitryo, and the Tudor adaptation of Amphitryo, Jack Juggler. “And what's your name?”—“Any name that suits you” (Amphitryo, p. 243). “You can be Sossia as much as you like when I don't want to be. At the moment I am Sossia.” “[D]id ye never heare why the Grecians termed Hecuba to be a bitch? … Because … she railed, and therefore well deserved that dogged name” (Menaechmi in Bullough [Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957], p. 29). “For ought I se yet, betwene erneste and game, / I must go sike me an other name” (Jack Juggler, p. 79). Such flexibility extends even to geography, where the same stage represents different locations at different times. The prologue to Menaechmi (not included in Warner's translation) explains that the play's location is Epidamnus but when another play is performed on the same stage the location will be some other city (ed. Watling, p. 104). I cite Amphitryo from the translation by E. F. Watling (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964, reprinted 1972), and Jack Juggler from Three Classical Interludes, ed. Marie Axton (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1982).

36. Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love, p. 18.

37. Whether his attitude is playful or imperative is not relevant to this discussion; but if playful he is parodying by exaggeration conventional imperious behaviour.

38. He refers to the Latin servias/inservias. See Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Robert M. Adams (1989) in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, sixth edition (New York: Norton, 1993), vol. 1, p. 418.

39. The French Schoolmaster in The Elizabethan Home Discovered in Two Dialogues by Claudius Hollyband and Peter Erondell, ed. Muriel St. Clare Byrne (London: Etchells and Macdonald, 1925), p. 24.

40. Ibid., p. 28.

41. William Gouge, Treatises on Domestical Duties, Treatise 8, para.23, p. 680. I quote from the edition of 1634; the first edition is 1622 (SR 1620).

42. Ralph A. Houlbrooke, The English Family 1450-1700 (London: Longman, 1974), p. 176.

43. Thomas Becon, The Catechism … with other pieces written by him in the Reign of Edward the sixth, ed. John Ayre. Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844), p. 362.

44. Juan Luis Vives, The Office and Duetie of an Husband (1550), sigs. Kviiiv-Li.

45. R. S. [Robert Snowse], A Looking-Glass for Married Folkes (1610), p. 54.

46. Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 67.

47. Arden of Faversham combines both, creating a hybrid genre even more marked than that of Errors.

48. BBC TV Comedy of Errors (London: BBC Books, 1984), p. 25.

49. Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love, p. 13.

50. Robert S. Miola demonstrates the classical, comic antecedents of this testimony (Shakespeare and Classical Comedy, p. 23); but traditions of classical comedy have not stopped the narrative from being delivered seriously in production.

51. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vol. 1, p. 35.

52. The New Jerusalem Bible (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1985).

53. Trevor Nunn's production had Luciana read the speech from a book in which she showed her sister the relevant passage, indicating that the subject is non-negotiable.

54. It is unclear whether Lysistrata is married or not; some translations have her refer to her husband, others to her “man” (the original Greek is clearly ambiguous). Peter Hall's production for the Old Vic (1993) paired her off with the Magistrate. Critics who view Lysistrata as married cite the improbability of the Athenian women agreeing to a sex-strike if the initiator were not imposing similar deprivation upon herself; those who view Lysistrata as single find a thematic parallel between Lysistrata, the guardian of Athens, and Athens' mythological protectress, the chaste, unmarried Athena.

55. This point was made most intriguingly in the BBC production in the reassignment of a line which is marked for alteration but not reassignment in the published text; nor indeed can its reassignment be justified. In the Folio text Antipholus of Ephesus explains his origins: he was, he tells Duke Solinus, brought to Ephesus by “that most famous warrior, / Duke Menaphon, your most renowned uncle” (5.1.368-9). In the BBC film Solinus is given the line “Menaphon your most renowned uncle” (the deleted “Duke” showing that the reassignment is not accidental, although, perplexingly, the BBC text still assigns the line (minus the “Duke”) to Antipholus). On screen Solinus delivers the line with epiphanic fervour as if realising that one more member of the family still remains to complete the reunion. Antipholus of Ephesus' roll of the eyes at the mention of Menaphon suggests that family (whether uncle/nephew, father/son, husband/wife) is not a concept with which he is at ease: he has deliberately ignored the ties that his brother has been so anxious to seek. (This at least is the only explanation I can give for a moment which has no authoritative textual basis. George Walton Williams astutely suggests that the reassignment is an error: in preparing the filmscript from the Alexander text someone interpreted the “Duke” of line 369 as a speech prefix and reassigned the ensuing words accordingly.)

56. In the stage directions to 1.2 and 2.2 the Folio presents Antipholus of Syracuse as Erotes and Errotis, which editors take to be misreadings of Erraticus (wandering).

57. I am grateful to David R. Carlson and to Robert S. Miola for generously sharing with me their classical and Shakespearean expertise, and to George Walton Williams for his careful scrutiny of textual details.