SOURCE: Christensen, Ann C. “‘Because Their Business Still Lies out a' Door’: Resisting the Separation of the Spheres in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors.” Literature and History 5, no. 1 (spring 1996): 19-37.

[In the following essay, Christensen approaches The Comedy of Errors as a mercantile comedy that dramatizes tensions between the gendered spheres of public/commercial and private/domestic.]

‘What is habitual and domestic is seldom recorded. Only in a time of crisis are the dispositions of the household likely to be described.’¹

I

The Comedy of Errors represents Shakespeare's first picture of a mercantile household—one troubled by identity confusion, lost parents, missing brothers, marital neglect, jealousy, and sour business deals. With its uncertainty about identity, and its debates about intimacy and distance in the household and the marketplace, and in its concerns for the permeable boundaries of exchange, Shakespeare's farce offers us a palimpsest of tensions emerging alongside urbanization and capitalist social formation. Set in the eastern Mediterranean port town of Ephesus, the action of Errors depends on the bustle of monetary trade, and thus Ephesus resembles Tudor London. The family reunion-cum-gossips' feast closing the play represents a momentary reconciliation between the commercial and the domestic spheres struggling for dominance throughout the five acts, and, more broadly, it conveys a stabilising moment in the uneven transition toward the spatial and ideological separation of the spheres engendered in part by the advent of capitalism. Yet, the ritual power of the communal meal is limited in the Shakespearean canon; able only to harmonize the exigencies of mercantile and domestic life in the ‘sixth-act’, the off-stage ritual meal balances rather than transfigures these differences.² Indeed, the hopeful gossips' feast gives way to such meals as the suppers full of horrors in Macbeth and Titus Andronicus, where hosts murder would-be guests and/or force them into cannibalism; the teasing banquets offered by Timon of Athens and Prospero, which lure their recipients with the promise of nurture only to produce empty or disappearing dishes; and the critically contested wedding banquet closing The Taming of the Shrew, where ‘jarring notes’ may disrupt the harmonious closure.

The Comedy of Errors illustrates the gendered competition regarding the functions of the domestic and the commercial spheres, which the play depicts as distinctly gendered and spatially separate, yet mutually constitutive. The husband-merchant of Ephesus appears divided between his home-life and his work, with his business associates and ‘the mart’ thematically and structurally opposing his wife and their home. C. L. Barber and Richard Wheeler suggest that Errors afforded Shakespeare a way to manage his own experience of division—between his roles as country husband, father, and son, on the one hand, and as a successful urban professional, on the other:

the young dramatist has split himself into a stay-at-home twin, married and carrying on in a commercial world … and into a wandering, searching twin for whom the world of Ephesus, including the situation of marriage, is strange.³

Setting to one side Wheeler and Barber's biographical approach, one infers that the sense of conflicting duties was probably common for the newly urbanized and increasingly mobile class of professional men in early modern London. Douglas Bruster, for example, argues that the propertied urban merchants gained in literary representation a ‘special reputation for anxiety’.⁴ In its double plots, and in its distinct discourses of home and trade, this early comedy dramatizes the competing demands within and between the commercial and domestic spheres—a conflict which playwrights continued to explore on the Jacobean stage.⁵

The dining table (metaphorically speaking), where the meaning of meals and mealtime is hotly debated, constitutes one crucial arena in which this competition plays itself out. Indeed the restoration of identity and the resolution of the plot devolves from Adriana's question, ‘Which of you did dine with me today’? (V.i.370).⁶ For Adriana, the neglected and disgruntled wife, a family that eats together stays together or, more pertinently, sleeps together. She therefore identifies meals at home with domestic harmony, even associating the physical structure of their dwelling with her body: private, enclosed, nurturing.⁷ But, because her husband conceptualizes time and space in commercial terms, Adriana must remind him to spend time and eat meals with her at home. On more than one occasion, she sends her servant Dromio to fetch him ‘from the mart, / Home’ (I.i.75; IV.ii.64), eventually pursuing him herself, accosting his brother by mistake (II.ii.110 ff), and finally defying both state and church in her quest to keep him at home in her care. Adriana so believes in the prophylactic nature of her household that she blames the day's madness on her husband's absence from home where, had he ‘remain'd until this time, / [he would be] Free from these slanders and this open shame’ (IV.iv.66-67).

But the modern bourgeois notion of home as safe haven was neither established in Elizabethan society nor uncontested on the Shakespearean stage. The play surges forward by Antipholus of Ephesus's (hereafter, following speech tags, Antipholus E.) refusal to identify himself with home, and by the comic clashes between household and mart, inside and outside, local and stranger. Dorothea Kehler attributes the husband's centrifugal movement to his experiences of claustrophobia and boredom at home.⁸ However, a more primary struggle for domestic power and authority—a struggle to define the meanings of home, food, and family—informs those feelings. Adriana's husband wants to use their domicile to entertain business associates; so when he is unintentionally denied entry, he spurns the home and meal altogether and uses a public tavern for both business and pleasure. For spite, Antipholus E. ‘eats out’ with a courtesan and ‘keep[s] not his hours’ (III.i.2). Delinquency from meals conveys his neglect of spousal duties. This conflict has as cultural ancillary the gradual shift in early modern England from manorial socio-economic organization to that of nascent capitalism.⁹ The differences between the masculine world of commerce and law and the feminine domestic environment articulate themselves over the contested cultural form of ‘dining’. The Comedy of Errors registers a historical moment of social transition and dislocation within the not-yet distinct public and private spheres. Forcing oppositions between desire and profit, leisure and work, women and men, Shakespeare explores contemporary anxieties attending the development of the separation of the spheres.

II

As if to domesticate the problems of Epidamnum for his London audience, Shakespeare reshaped his source, the Plautine comedy The Menaechmi, by highlighting market activities, which Plautus either omits or depicts incidentally. For example, in Plautus's play not until the last act do we learn the location of the twins' separation: at ‘Tarentum, at a great mart’.¹⁰ In contrast, Egeon's narrative on the loss of his family frames the subsequent action, is both protracted and repeated (by Emilia), and has everything to do with mercantile ventures. The Duke's opening speech concerns money, trade, and conflict: the regulation of ‘traffic’ between Syracusa and Ephesus, the ‘marts and fairs’, the confiscation of ‘goods’, and the ‘amount’ or ‘rate’ of the prisoner's ‘substance’ (I.i.15, 17, 20, 23). For his part, Egeon blames his commercial activities for the disaster of his family: with the death of his ‘factor’ or agent ‘[the] great care of goods at random left, / Drew me from the kind embracements of my spouse /’ (41-43). Further emphasizing the role of the market, directors often stage these speeches in the marketplace where Egeon is apprehended.¹¹ As Geoffrey Bullough notes, Elizabethan playgoers knew about mercantile disasters: ‘To a Tudor audience aware of the enmities between city states in Italy and elsewhere and the perils of sea-traders, Egeon's predicament was no romantic fancy. Shipwrecks were as common in life as in romances’.¹²

Furthermore, Shakespeare identifies both twins and their father (and a host of secondary characters) as merchants, whereas Plautus's local twin is a ‘Citizen’, detained from dining by his attendance at Session of Court, never appearing in the mart at all; and the traveling twin's only employment is to find his brother rather than to conduct business. But, in the Shakespearean play, Antipholus E. ceaselessly makes deals for chains, rings, ropes, and meals, while his brother takes advantage of the harbor to restock his ship. Shakespeare's relatively greater interest in economic transactions appears, too, in his dramatization of the buying and selling of gifts in the marketplace to account for Antipholus E.'s tardiness at meals, whereas the Roman husband procures his gifts to the courtesan from his wife's closet, thereby obscuring actual economic transactions. Shakespeare's alterations thus heighten the tensions working under nascent capitalism—tensions that inform the separation of business from home-life.

Errors dramatizes these tensions in part through the invitations to dine, and the service, avoidance, and consumption of meals which generate the action. At the heart of several exchanges, which incidentally help to give the play its slapstick effect, lies the charged question of who dined with whom over the course of the chaotic day. This enigma marks another departure from the source play in which Erotium, the concubine of the local twin, and not the unnamed wife, prepares the dinner and entertains the wrong guest. This difference, coupled with the fact that Shakespeare gives the wife (but not the courtesan) a name, a more rounded character, and a case against her husband establishes the domestic as well as the economic foundations of the conflict.

Each ‘side’ of the divide employs a different lexicon, the one primarily concerning domestic comfort and duty, the other concentrating on money and trade. Thus, Dromio E. summarizes the dialogue between himself and the Antipholus whom he believes late for dinner:

When I desir'd him to come home to dinner,
He asked me for a thousand marks in gold.
‘Tis dinner time’, quoth I. ‘My gold’! quoth he.
‘Your meat doth burn’, quoth I. ‘My gold’! quoth he.
‘Will you come’? quoth I. ‘My gold’! quoth he.
‘Where's the thousand marks I gave thee, villain’?
‘The pig’, quoth I, ‘is burn'd’. ‘My gold’! quoth he.
‘My mistress, sir—’ quoth I. ‘Hang up thy mistress!
I know not thy mistress. Out on thy mistress’!

(II.i.60-68)

Here, ‘dinner’ and ‘gold’ carry the conflict of the play, expressing what appear to be mutually exclusive perspectives. While Dromio, the spokesperson for the domestic enclave, talks concretely of the burnt roast and angry mistress, Antipholus S. can only repeat, ‘My gold’!

The play's central issues of dining, time, and money punctuate the first meeting between the visiting Antipholus and his servant's twin. This encounter also shows how the ‘private’ life of home impinges upon and is affected by the ‘public’ life of commerce—how the two spheres, like the brothers and the states they trade for, are inextricably linked. Dromio E. describes the impact on the family of the master's absence:

The capon burns, the pig falls from the spit;
The clock hath strucken twelve upon the bell—
My mistress made it one upon my cheek;
She is so hot, because the meat is cold,
The meat is cold because you come not home:
You come not home, because you have no stomach:

(I.ii.44-49)

Along with marking the confusion over lost gold and cold meat, Dromio E. delineates the ideological and spatial opposition beneath the scene: ‘My charge was but to fetch you from the mart / Home to your house … to dinner’ (74-75).

While the play sets up such opposition between husbands and wives, the worlds of trade and home, it ultimately insists upon their ever-shifting interrelations. No definite hierarchy emerges; instead the demands of business and family alternately and farcically interfere with each other. So as we might expect, the Antipholi and their male associates—merchants, the goldsmith, and city magistrates—appear in public scenes and talk in terms of economic exchange and legal sanctions, while women converse inside, their talk focusing on ‘private’ topics such as marriage and family, as in Act two, scene one, when Adriana and Luciana discuss ‘troubles of the marriage bed’ (27), and in the beginning of Act five, when the Abbess catechizes Adriana about wifely duty.¹³

However, these discourses are not discrete: the men's business in the mart sustains the household economy, while the household, through both consumption and (re)production, fuels the mart. Similarly, the opposing settings—borrowed from Plautus: the mart or public square and ‘the house of Antipholus of Ephesus’, where Adriana frets as the spit turns—coexist in a mutually constituting relation. For example, Adriana delivers her most moving speech about the sanctity of marriage at this public thoroughfare (II.ii.109-145), while their home, the Phoenix, apparently ordinarily entertains merchants, its threshold the site of a ‘public scene’. Nor is the family dwelling totally distinct from the shop, but sits ‘above’ the business (II.ii.206)—an arrangement resembling the situations of sixteenth-century urban tradesmen.¹⁴ The two other loci, the Porpentine, where the courtesan serves her clients, and the Abbey, where the action is resolved in Act five, provide symbolic syntheses of public and private, being both private residences and crossroads of community.

Domestic space in Errors open up possibilities for community. While the more centripetal, domestic values espoused by the wives seem large enough to accommodate commercial interest in the name of the family romance, the husbands' business ‘errors’ or wanderings cause the division of families.¹⁵ Both parents and married children are separated directly or indirectly because of business trips. Egeon reports that his ‘prosperous voyages’ ‘drew me from the kind embracements of my spouse’, while she, though pregnant, joins him abroad, ‘daily’ urging their return home (I.i.40, 43, 59). Because of Egeon's mercantile obligations, the family has been separated once; whence wife and children too had left their home initially. Moreover, on the return voyage, which Egeon ‘unwillingly’ undertook, as he himself admits, a shipwreck separates them again. Like his grandfather from whom Egeon inherited the family business, and like Egeon before him, Antipholus E. seems to find embarking on ‘prosperous voyages’ to the mart more compelling than home-cooked meals. In certain instances, then, business forges a wedge within families: the ‘“husband's office” [is] neglected in pursuit of his prospering business’.¹⁶

Despite the seeming incompatibility of loyalties to work and home, duplicate ‘errors’ in fact reunite the family, resolving confusion and clearing debts. The play constitutes economic, public, and civic bonds in relation to private, affective ties; and the interdependence of the ‘separate spheres’ everywhere inflects the action. For example, Adriana and Antipholus E.'s marriage is apparently a state project: not only in as much as marriage is a public institution, but also because the Duke's ‘important letters’ (V.i.138) had arranged the match.¹⁷ Out of a sense of both civic and personal debt, the Duke had recommended Antipholus:

Long since thy husband serv'd me in my wars,
And I to thee engag'd a prince's word,
When thou didst make him master of thy bed,
To do him all the grace and good I could.

(V.i.160-164)

In a similar recognition of the personal investment in and exchange value of ‘service’, Antipholus E. invokes his military career:

Even for the service that I long since did thee,
When I bestrid thee in the wars, and took
Deep scars to save thy life; even for the blood
That I then lost for thee, now grant me justice.

(V.i.190-94)

All sorts of quids pro quo entangle personal and impersonal identifications: the merchants are all friends who employ credit and exchange money for goods; the courtesan does not give her man a gift token, but rather trades her ring for a gold chain of equal value; Adriana expects some recompense for her ‘housewifery’; the right amount of money can buy Egeon out of legal trouble. Thus, personal and ‘official’ business operate on similar terms.¹⁸

Nonetheless, Shakespeare portrays affective bonds more favorably than economic bonds because the former allow greater flexibility and humanity than the latter. By granting some foundation to Adriana's mistrust of her husband, Shakespeare portrays her far more sympathetically than Plautus's ‘Mulier’, who is simply an unreasonable shrew. Furthermore, Adriana's plight contrasts the profit-minded paranoia which drives the merchants. It is not an invisible hand that guides macro-economy, but the long arm of the law. The enmity between the state and Syracusa frames the action and provides the model for civilian interaction: in Ephesus men do not enjoy each other's trust for long; rather, they are bound by contracts, the inflexibility of which creates mutual suspicion among partners and a hasty reliance upon public officers to settle disputes.¹⁹ The legal code in Ephesus is firm: it requires the Duke to ‘exclude all pity’ in the execution of Syracusans; it ensures that the responsibility for unpaid debt devolve upon the officers in charge of debtors (IV.iv.114-15); and it makes former friends enemies when contracts seem to be dishonored. The fact that the ‘chain’ which binds Balthazar, Angelo, the goldsmith, and Antipholus is credit not trust, when measured against Adriana's loyalty, compromises the humanity of mercantile associations. In a telling pun, Antipholus E. queries Angelo: ‘Belike you thought our love would last too long / If it were chained together’ (IV.i.25-6). As a catalyst to the recognition scene, the merchant exacts his due from Angelo, warning, ‘Or I'll attach you by this officer’. In turn, Angelo remarks: ‘just the sum I do owe to you / Is growing to me by Antipholus’ (IV.i.6,7-8). As he hires the officers to arrest (the wrong) Antipholus, the goldsmith vows, ‘I would not spare my brother in this case’ (IV.i.77)—a hyperbole especially suited to this play abounding in brothers. Similarly, master turns on servant when he ‘greatly fear[s his] money is not safe’ (I.ii.105).

In contrast to the litigious sphere of trade, the domestic sphere in Ephesus generally keeps problems inside, as if respectful of the private nature of its commitments. For example, from the local Dromio's first speech, we imagine Adriana pacing at home, in ‘fast[ing] and prayer’ while awaiting her husband's return. Driven outside only reluctantly by the accretion of impatience, uncertainty, and jealousy, she initially eschews the public sphere and prefers to bypass the law and the Abbess in administering punishment, justice, or a cure for her husband's putative madness. When she snares her dinner companion in Act two, scene two, Adriana locks him in tightly: ‘Dromio, keep the gate. / … Sirrah, if any ask you for your master, / Say he dines forth, and let no creature enter. / … Dromio, play the porter well’ (205, 208-10). Similarly, both the Abbess and Luce, the kitchen wench of Adriana's house, stand as sentinels to defend their respective households from intrusion. Even the courtesan, that ‘public woman’, shows discretion in stating her grievance: when she perceives herself cheated by Antipholus, she consults his wife in the matter rather than an officer (IV.iii.87-91).

Adriana clearly exemplifies the home/body. Some critics identify her as the play's spokesperson for Protestant companionate marriage.²⁰ The private family meal she offers, according to Joseph Candido, ‘serves as a convenient social vehicle for the larger issue of forgiveness, and her insistence on privacy metaphorically links confidential family matters with the … regenerative power of the confessional’.²¹ This spiritual dimension of housewifery is nonetheless underpinned by its material basis—the furnishing of nourishment and safety, which Adriana feels uniquely qualified to provide. At first, rather than invoke the impersonal and dehumanizing legal system to ‘cure’ her spouse, Adriana orders him ‘safe convey'd / Home to my house’ (IV.iv.122-23), a wish repeated in her confrontation with the creditors and the Abbess (V.i.35, 92). But later, when physically threatened by him she hires an exorcist and then concedes to law, begging the Duke to intercede in the matter of her husband's return home. Of course, as a woman, she would lack recourse in the law within ‘the late Elizabethan “sex/gender system”’ that Ephesus replicates.²² Nor does Shakespeare provide a family outlet for Adriana's redress: unlike Plautus's ‘Mulier’, who calls in her father to arbitrate, Adriana relies on her own resources and hired help. Her conception of the nuclear family—a haven safe from creditors as well as from the interventions of church and state—reflects the transition toward the separate spheres ideology. That the play elsewhere undermines this idealization of the bourgeois domicile further underlines the uneasy coexistence of ideologies and social practices. The relationship between home and marketplace is continually renegotiated in the play, as it was in Elizabethan society.

At times the household Adriana supervises nearly spoils Antipholus's mercantile ventures rather than supporting them. Although she possesses intimate knowledge of her husband's book-keeping, as when she admits surprise, ‘That he, unknown to me, should be in debt’ (IV.ii.48), Adriana recognizes that the marketplace poses threats to marital relations. And her husband recognizes the cost of his domestic responsibilities. Notions of family-as-obstacle unfold in Act three, scene one, where a spatial and ideological stand-off transpires concerning the function and government of the household. Antipholus E. and his cronies appear outside his home awaiting hospitable entertainment, while Adriana and her guest (the twin she mistakes for her husband) ‘dine above’ and forbid intrusion. A kind of Lysistradian battle of the sexes with the women and their spoils inside and the men outside trying to get in, the scene forms the climax of the play.²³ The ‘heroine’, that operative symbol of domestic authority, is Luce, the enormous kitchen wench betrothed to Dromio E. and feared by his visiting twin (‘She is too big, I hope, for me to compass’ [IV.i.111]). In a long exchange of rhyming threats and retorts, formally extending yet undercutting the content of the men's Ephesian dialogue on ‘welcome’ and ‘cheer’ preceding it, Luce jeopardizes the foundation of her master's identity. She threatens to have him thrown into the stocks (III.i.59-60), and forces the men to ‘part with neither [the cheer nor welcome]’ that the householder had promised (67). Such domestic conduct is decidedly bad for business.

That this disappointed meal gets tangled up in the confusion about mercantile debts shows the deep and materially efficacious connection between men's home-lives and their public estimation in the marketplace. Discussing Adriana's behavior in terms of Antipholus's ‘reputation’, Balthazar reveals the dependence of commercial credit on domestic harmony, warning that ‘[a] vulgar comment … / [a]gainst [Antipholus's] yet ungalled estimation’ would compromise his standing in the community (III.i.100, 102). For his part, Antipholus E. perceives the women's insubordination as a consolidated assault on his power and authority as master of the house, since he promises to punish ‘my wife and her confederates’ for the incident (IV.i.17). Furthermore, the men perceive female unruliness as an affront to domestic order; and they sexually encode this unruliness and associate women with feeding in the play. The husband becomes increasingly convinced that Adriana had feasted and made love to the only man she's seen with—Pinch, the schoolmaster (IV.iv.57-61). Meanwhile Luce's association with the kitchen is inseparable from her massive and threatening body, and the courtesan invites Antipholus S. to ‘mend [his] dinner’ at her place (IV.iii.54).²⁴ His frantic, moralistic refusal of her offer: ‘Avoid, then, fiend! What tell'st thou me of supping’? (IV.iii.60) makes explicit the sexual nature of dining at a woman's table, especially when compared with his earlier quest for male dinner companions (I.ii.23).²⁵ Thus, it seems that men fear women's domestic control and their sexuality, both of which are related to food-provision.²⁶ As we shall see, however, these fears are unfounded: Adriana wants nothing more (or less) than to administer to her husband's needs, fully accepting her proper sphere of the home, while insisting simultaneously on its sanctity and its correspondence with his business life.

The Roman source play offers some insight into this localized fear of ‘feeding and dependency’.²⁷The Menaechmi opens with a statement about the binding effects of hospitality. As the longest speech in the play, its subject becomes a major theme. Peniculus, a Parasite on the table of Erotium (subsidized by Menaechmus, her married lover), conjectures that the way to a man's loyalty is through his stomach. He envisions a prison system based on the provision of meals:²⁸

If then ye would keep a man without all suspicion of running away from ye, the surest way is to tie him with meate, drinke, and ease: Let him ever be idle, eate his belly full, and carouse while his skin will hold, and he shall never, I warrant ye, stir a foote. These strings to tie one by the teeth, passe all the bands of iron, steele, or what metal so ever …²⁹

Having cut this character from his version, Shakespeare disperses his sentiment among the male characters who flee rather than enter the bondage of feeding at women's tables. So Antipholus E. refuses to come home to dinner, while the Syracusan men renounce the women who cook and invite them to meals, calling them variously ‘beastly creature’, witch, devil (III.ii.88, 154; IV.iii.58).

Women as well as men recognize the contractual nature of meals—the ‘strings to tie one’ to the domestic sphere; and this recognition becomes the vehicle for reconciliation in the play. So Luce and the courtesan as well as Adriana and Emilia express desire, power, and protection through dining and food imagery. Adriana's lament for her neglect ranges fully through connotations of feeding, and suggests how crucially food-service defined the domestic on the Shakespearean stage and in early modern society. In language which collapses her self with her home, she complains:

His company must do his minions grace
Whilst I at home starve for a merry look …
But, too unruly deer, he breaks the pale
And feeds from home. Poor I am but his stale.

(II.i.87-88, 100-1)

Adriana uses the metaphor of feeding as loving.³⁰ Punning on ‘grace’ as the prayer before meals and the ‘gracious’ presence Antipholus denies her, Adriana emphasizes both the ritualized nature of meals and the enclosedness of their marriage vows which he ‘breaks’ by dining out. She further acknowledges the reciprocal nature of ‘feeding’ (the verb, like ‘nurse’ and ‘suck’, itself admits both transitive and intransitive definitions): he ‘feeds’ himself and his ego (and perhaps his sexual appetites) abroad, where his largess also ‘feeds’ the company. Meanwhile, he does not ‘feed’ her the recognition (‘merry look’) she needs, nor does he ‘feed’ with her. The first two lines contrast the pub(lic) ‘company’ with ‘I at home’, and construct one version of mart/house, public/private opposition at work in Errors. Finally, punning on ‘stale’ as both whore and unappetizing food, Adriana's metaphor encapsulates the problem: the love/food she offers is no longer appetizing to her husband.³¹ By breaking the pale herself to fetch her husband, Adriana—unknowingly mirroring her mother-in-law—performs not so much an act of ‘transgression’ as an attempt to construct a home to contain the family.³² Her flight is at once remarkable and understood in the context of the play's farcical action.

The action of the play, which depends on deferring the meeting of characters crossing the same stage at different times, progresses via the presence of real or symbolic boundaries, and a sense of proper place. So, as we have seen, Syracusan merchants are out of bounds in Ephesus, and one's home ought to be off limits to strangers. Throughout her disquisition with Adriana, Luciana appears resigned to the ‘bounds’ that circumscribe each species and sex, and endorses the hierarchy at the top of which reigns ‘Man, more divine, the master of all these’ (II.i.20). Luciana's metaphysics assumes the fixed boundary between men's public roles and women's domestic duties, as she consoles her sister about Antipholus's absence from the meal: ‘Perhaps’, Luciana offers, ‘some merchant hath invited him, / And from the mart he's somewhere gone to dinner’ (II.i.4-5). She continues to argue, ‘Because their [men's] business lies out o' door’, they may enjoy greater ‘liberty’ than their stay-at-home counterparts (11). This line of argument, challenged elsewhere in the play, depends on the separation between inside and outside, home and business—fissures not yet formed, and arguably never fixed in Elizabethan society.³³

Angered by the double standard Luciana embraces, Adriana nonetheless endorses a type of gendered separation of the spheres, as her own identity is bound up with domestic issues. Her language borrows heavily from close-to-home imagery: taste, ‘service’, and eating. At one point, she accosts Antipholus S., administering a dose of marriage-tract logic that moves even the wrong audience. She first accuses her ‘husband’ of feeding his ‘sweet aspects’ to another woman. Next, she recalls a past time when they ‘ate’ together:

The time was once when thou unurg'd wouldst vow
That never words were music to thine ear,
That never object pleasing in thine eye,
That never touch well welcome to thy hand,
That never meat sweet-savour'd in thy taste,
Unless I spake or look'd or touch'd or carv'd to thee.

(II.ii.113-18)

This speech depicts a wife's willing service to a man who is home to appreciate it. The scenario illustrates what Karen Newman calls the ‘special nearness of wives’ in early modern England, their importance in the household economy and their proximity to husbands' affairs which might threaten patriarchal control.³⁴ In medieval and renaissance noble households, the meat carver was not properly a ‘servant’, but, possibly a function of his being entrusted with knives, he held the highest position among servers, and the privilege was often reserved for esteemed friends of the lord. Moreover, because of the nature both of the game to be served and the high occasion, the role demanded great skill and finesse.³⁵ Wives fulfilled this function in middle- and upper-class households of the seventeenth century. ‘When great personages shall visit’ wives were expected to ‘sit at an end of a table and carve handsomely’, as the ninth Earl of Northumberland instructed his son in 1609.³⁶ ‘Let huswife be carver’, Thomas Tusser charges with his characteristic and terse pragmatism.³⁷ In pointing to her own carving duties, then, Adriana aligns herself with this special brand of service, skill, and trust newly designated to middle-class wives. Adriana calls for nothing radically new in their relations but rather aims to reinstate herself as Antipholus' cook, confidante, and server.

III

The only other married woman in Errors, Emilia endorses this domestic and meal-centred value system. Although she holds a small part in the playtext, materializing only—and at first anonymously—in the last act and discussed in Egeon's deposition (I.i), this matriarchal presence—mother, wife, abbess—looms large on stage. Like her daughter-in-law, Emilia stands firmly on the side of ‘home’, and, like the young wife, fights for her family's togetherness. Both she and Adriana make a religion out of their ‘service’ in reclaiming or sustaining their menfolk and seem prototypes of the ‘domestic woman’ emerging in eighteenth-century Europe described by Nancy Armstrong.³⁸ Emilia is a sacrificial figure: it is she who ‘(almost fainting under / The pleasing punishment that women bear) / Had made provision’ to follow her traveling salesman to Epidamnum; she who importunes the family's return home.³⁹ Her ‘incessant weepings’ aboard the ship ‘[f]orc'd’ Egeon to arrange for another voyage. Emilia, like Thaisa in Pericles, betakes herself to a religious retreat until such time (in her case, 33 years) as she may be restored to her role as wife and mother. When her own husband wanders, Adriana waits in fasting and prayer—the metaphor suggesting her almost religious devotion to the marriage we see her enact throughout the play.

Both Emilia and Adriana spin out practical theories of marital roles, both employing eating and consuming imagery to establish nurture as vital to the household economy and to the satisfaction of men. We have already examined Adriana's manifesto in her reminiscence of carving; in hers, Emilia acknowledges her skill in simples and medicines—knowledge she ascribes to her religious vocation, but which also fell under the auspices of ‘housewifery’ in the period.⁴⁰ Their doctrines, along with Luciana's view of marriage, reflect the emergent notion of the separation of the spheres. Luciana, who understands that commercial engagements and world affairs distract men from the hearth, accepts as ‘natural’ the gendered division of labor and leisure, whereas the experienced wives lament this division, blaming ‘other women’ and scolding partners for men's distance from home. In all we note an uneasy recognition that domestic life may not satisfy men, that family matters may be incompatible with the contingencies of mercantile experience.

These problems generate further inquiry by the chief representatives of domestic life, Emilia and Adriana, who share a commitment to providing nurturing homes for their families. As the matriarch interrogates Adriana, each speaker uses the circumstances of Antipholus's dining as an indication of the state of his health and sanity, and as an index of the domestic situation itself. For example, Adriana confesses to ‘urging’ the subject of his fidelity ‘[a]t board’ as well as in bed.⁴¹ Emilia chastens this harping habit of Adriana's with proverbial wisdom:

Thou say'st his meat was sauc'd with thy upbraidings:
Unquiet meals make ill digestions;
Thereof the raging fire of fever bred,
And what's a fever, but a fit of madness? …
In food, in sport, in life-preserving rest
To be disturb'd would mad or man or beast.

(V.i.73-76, 83-84)

The repeated emphasis on meals reveals both the mother's concern for her son's well-being and her familiarity with affairs of the hearth, while also reinforcing the centrality of nurture in the domestic economy.

Antipholus' wife and mother compete for the authorship of his cure, each invoking her feminine ‘office’ as justification, demonstrating a struggle for domestic authority between women in different relationships to the man of the house. Perhaps because she knows that Antipholus S. is neither mad nor married, and perhaps because of reawakened maternal duty, the abbess defends her house, her son, and her right to care for him—‘a branch and parcel of mine oath, / a charitable duty of my order’ (106-107). But Adriana voices equal devotion:

I will attend my husband, be his nurse,
Diet his sickness, for it is my office,
And I will have no attorney but myself;
And therefore let me have him home with me.

(98-101)

Adriana again asserts the sanctity of the home in her desire to get him out of the hands of what seem to be strangers. Thus thwarted by the abbess, only at this point does Adriana resort to state aid in the person of the Duke. As we have seen, she has before opted to handle domestic strife privately (‘And I will have no attorney but myself’), while in the commercial world contracts are enforced through officials and surrogates. Her calling upon ‘official’ intervention here to settle the problem heralds the final feast which celebrates the resolution; both unite private and public experience.

The only festive meal hosted by a woman in Shakespeare's canon, Emilia's gossips' feast symbolically celebrates, inter alia, childbirth—an achievement uniquely within the province of women. Not, as in other festive comedies, a wedding feast for the presumably espoused Luciana and Antipholus S., nor a marital reunion banquet, as in the romances, ‘a gossips' feast’ celebrates the delayed delivery of ‘[her] heavy burden’ (406, 403).⁴² The Duke promises, ‘With all my heart I'll gossip at this feast’ (408). This communal supper not only achieves official endorsement, it also promises that Adriana and Antipholus will at last eat together, and likewise transforms the vexed interrelationship of ‘public’ and ‘private’ haunting the play all along. Not exactly the romantic dinner for two that Adriana had planned, and a far cry from her husband's pub-crawls, the gossips' feast offers the via media between private and public dining. Here, the immediate and extended family, along with city magistrates and merchants, will feast together. With the confusion cleared up, a measure of reconciliation is possible between the young couple, augmented by Emilia's motherly (if bossy) advice to the wife.⁴³

A ‘broken christening’, similar to the ‘broken nuptials’ Carol Neely ascribes to the romances, Emilia's feast consummates the woman's part in all forms of family: her restoration to wifehood, the reunion with her children—now expanded to include Adriana and Luciana—and the rejoining of siblings, including the Dromios for whom she serves as a kind of godmother.⁴⁴ Emilia feels re-born (‘such Nativity’!) into the family romance, and her feast places wifehood, as well as motherhood and nurture, in the limelight. As social histories of childbirth indicate, from advising their kinswomen and neighbors about aphrodisiacs, to procuring their ‘longings’ during pregnancy, and assisting during and after childbirth, early modern women played principal roles in their community's ‘reproductive rituals’.⁴⁵ ‘There were … aspects of birth celebrations that were essentially female rituals, in which participants were drawn from a wide social spectrum and united by gender and biological experience’.⁴⁶ Women's protracted activities culminated in this ritual meeting. Held after and serving as a secular counterpart to the ‘churching’ of the young mother, the gossips' feast ritually acknowledged and ‘socialized’ women's reproductive power as well as their aid along the way.

Emilia's gossips' feast celebrates the newly restored community—its domestic, mercantile, and political components—at the same time as it confirms the unique achievements of women in that community. The feast is centered in private space—the abbey hitherto having been cordoned off from the town—opened up through a ritual which crosses boundaries between public and private, church and state. In the early modern period, the church publicly sanctified marriages, christened babies in baptism, and blessed women in churching—the symbolic reestablishment of the new mother into the public community.⁴⁷ That the hostess-gossip pointedly invites men—husbands, father, brothers, Duke, merchants—to what was traditionally a private and an exclusively female affair suggests rapprochement between the otherwise gendered and separate spheres, home and commerce. The conclusion recognizes the necessary function of the domestic sphere to regenerate and ritually acknowledge the public life of a community. The meal is associated with the domestic sphere and with women: an elder woman sponsors it; presumably Luce and company will prepare and serve it; and it celebrates women's ‘labor’. In accepting the invitation, the male mercantile community grants that this domestic intervention is as compelling as the ‘intestine jars’ which confront them in their ports, fairs, and marts.

IV

Shakespeare develops in his later plays the conflicts and crossings over between domestic and commercial identities, protocols, and relations so concentrated in The Comedy of Errors. Domestic and erotic ties are perceived as threats to masculine (political and military) campaigns, most notably in the classical tragedies, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Troilus and Cressida in which women's dreams and demands are seen as potent or potential distractions from heroic enterprises. Communal eating retains its symbolic ability to foster and represent harmony elsewhere in the drama, but this promise is usually aborted altogether or otherwise compromised as in Macbeth's haunted banquet, the competitive final wedding feast of Shrew, and the picnic in Arden interrupted by Orlando (As You Like It). Instead, meals show historically specific and ideologically charged forms of conflict and contestation. In Errors Shakespeare comically dramatizes women's sexual, maternal, and social power through their roles in feeding—both in the domestic and in the ‘public’ spheres, which their nurture reveals as inseparable. Here questions about household management and the relative power of men and women—the role of business, the supervision of servants, and the orchestration of meals—are debated and resolved through a restorative meal which resists the separation of the spheres.

Notes

1. Mary Prior, ‘Women and the Urban Economy: Oxford 1500-1800’ in Mary Prior (ed.), Women in English Society 1500-1800, (New York, 1985), p. 97.

2. Frances Teague argues that feasts in the comedies do not serve conventional festive functions: ‘feasting is rarely comedic but almost always comic’. Shakespeare's Speaking Properties (Lewisburg, 1991), pp. 64, 67.

3. The Whole Journey: Shakespeare's Power of Development (Berkeley, 1986), p. 77.

4. Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1992), p. 67.

5. Lena Cowen Orlin discusses the conflicts and contradictions between personal and professional obligations in the drama, particularly ‘domestic tragedy’. Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca, 1994).

6. All subsequent quotations from The Comedy of Errors are taken from the Pelican edition, Alfred Harbage, ed. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, (New York, 1969). Quotations from other Shakespearean plays are taken from G. Blakemore Evans (ed.), The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, 1974). Act, scene, and line numbers will follow in brackets.

7. The feminization of the bourgeois domicile here is somewhat different from that of the aristocratic lady's chamber on the Shakespearean stage. On the latter see Georgianna Zeigler, ‘My lady's chamber: female space, female chastity in Shakespeare’, Textual Practice 4 (1990), 73-90.

8. ‘The Comedy of Errors as Problem Comedy,’ Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, 41 (1987), 332.

9. I work from the notion of a mutual ‘shaping power’ between drama and society as expressed by Louis Montrose in ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form’, in Margaret Ferguson et al. (eds), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, (Chicago, 1986), pp. 65-87. For discussions of early modern capitalism, see Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought 1550-1750 (New York, 1986) and Ira Katsnelson, Marxism and the City (Oxford, 1992).

10. Rpt. in Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London, 1966), vol. 1, p. 38.

11. For example, the BBC production directed by James Cellan-Jones (designed by Don Homfray) opens in a piazza, the ground of which is a splendid map of the eastern Mediterranean, where the locals reenact Egeon's story as he tells it (originally transmitted in U.S., 20 February 1984).

12. Bullough, vol. 1, p. 10.

13. Thomas P. Hennings has made a similar observation about the men's language. He identifies ‘powerful stage and verbal images and/or oppressive restriction’, including imprisonment, beatings, bindings, strict legality ‘and its concomitant legalese’, financial obligations, and reinforced hierarchy. ‘The Anglican Doctrine of the Affectionate Marriage in The Comedy of Errors’, Modern Language Quarterly, 47 (1986), 94.

14. See Frank E. Brown, ‘Continuity and Change in the Urban House: Developments in Domestic Space Organization in Seventeenth Century London’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 28 (1986), 558-590.

15. In her engaging study of ‘The Providential Tempest and the Shakespearean Family’ Coppelia Kahn attributes the play's dominant metaphors for division and loss to the sea and the storm. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn (eds), Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays (Baltimore, 1980), p. 222. In my reading, overseas trade necessitates the fateful voyage, though of course it does not cause the tempest.

16. Barber and Wheeler, Whole Journey, p. 82.

17. The matter of the last speeches is a little confusing, but it implies that Adriana had been the Duke's ward, and he had arranged the marriage as a father might, since she has no father in the play.

18. Barbara Freedman establishes the affinity between the transgressions in the main and frame plots in similar terms. Both Egeon's violation of Ephesian law and the ‘sons’ run-ins with domestic law' are encoded as debts related to women or marriage. ‘Errors in Comedy: A Psychoanalytic Theory of Farce’, in Maurice Charney (ed.), Shakespearean Comedy (New York, 1980), p. 239.

19. The contentious aspects of the Ephesian marketplace closely resemble those of early modern England, as Jean Christophe Agnew describes them, particularly in the dilemmas about representing emergent social relations:

    The practical problem of how individuals were to represent themselves to one another in the protocontractual relationships of parliamentary politics, mercantile trade, capitalist agriculture, and Protestant orthodoxy brought with it the less immediate but certainly no less obdurate problem of how they were to represent these relationships to themselves.

    Some of the questions early modern merchants faced, and which Errors also poses, surround the construction of the self in trade: ‘What rhetorical devices or forms of address could accommodate the new and unsettling confusion over personal distance and intimacy that perplexed those brought together in commodity transactions?’ Worlds, p. 10.

20. Hennings places Adriana's stance on privacy solidly within Anglican practice, noting that ‘[t]he intimacy of the Anglican marriage calls for the wife as well as the husband to be a source of spiritual counsel and solace and thereby help replace the Catholic confessor’. ‘Anglican’, pp. 102-103.

21. ‘Dining Out in Ephesus: Food in The Comedy of Errors’, SEL 30 (1990), 227.

22. Karen Newman, ‘Renaissance Family Politics and Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew’, ELR, 16 (1986), 89.

23. I see significance in Dromio E's hailing only women's names in demanding entry: ‘Maud, Bridget, Marian, Cicely, Gillian, Ginn’ (III.i.31). His brother teases him for ‘conjur[ing] for wenches’ (34).

24. In Dromio S.'s account of his meeting with Luce (III.ii), he reveals his fears that association with this domestic servant would emasculate him in one way or another: by yielding to Luce's enormous desires, he would become ‘a woman's man’ (I.77), or he'd be put to work in the kitchen himself (I. 144-45). He later tells his brother: ‘There is a fat friend at your master's house, / That kitchened me for you today at dinner’ (V.i.416-17).

25. Candido rightly observes in the wandering brother an attraction ‘to the security and solidity implied by the shared meal’, yet Candido fails to note the revulsion with which Antipholus S. spurns the courtesan's invitation. ‘He is … an earnest seeker of dining companions, oddly receptive, for example, to the sudden feast thrust upon him by total strangers later in the play, and eager to make a dinner engagement with the first native Ephesian he meets’, ‘Dining’, p. 222.

26. This fear has been fruitfully explored by psychoanalytic critics who identify the mother with provision and withholding of nurture. See Coppelia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley, 1981), and Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, ‘Hamlet’ to ‘The Tempest’ (New York, 1992). I submit that a version of this fear of dependency operates at the level of culture.

27. These are Janet Adelman's terms. ‘“Anger's my meat”: Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus’, in Representing Shakespeare, pp. 129-149.

28. Candido provides a related, but different reading of this speech, noting that it implies ‘the centrality of food and dining in helping to define social relationships in the play’. Peniculus is fettered to Menaechmus via the ‘male umbilical cord’ of meals. ‘Dining’, p. 218.

29. Rptd. in Bullough, vol. 1, p. 13.

30. When she later accosts her husband's twin, Adriana again uses eating imagery to describe the marriage union: ‘For, if we two be one, and thou play false, / I do digest the poison of thy flesh’ (II.ii.142-143).

31. Shakespeare uses ‘stale’ often with this spoiled food pun implied. The OED shows entries denoting something close to our modern usage of the term relating to liquor, mead, and wine (1386, 1586), and regarding food ‘that has lost its freshness; altered by keeping’ (1530, 1550, 1580). Elsewhere, he puns on the two meanings as in Katherina's first line in Shrew; she asks her father, ‘is it your will / To make a stale of me to these mates?’ Karen Newman explores Kate's polysemic ‘linguistic willfulness’, noting her multiple punning on ‘stale’ as laughing stock and prostitute, ‘stalemate’, and mate as husband. ‘Renaissance Family’, p. 90. In another exchange about female sexuality and marriageability, Claudio and Don Pedro present their joint judgment that Hero is a ‘rotten orange’ and ‘a common stale’ (Much Ado IV.i.30, 63).

32. Kehler anticipates my conclusion: ‘[Adriana] revolts not against her place but against her lack of love’. ‘Problem’, p. 233.

33. Hennings doubts the critical commonplace which accepts Luciana's manifesto as mainstream for the period. Although she toes the Elizabethan line on ‘wifely obedience’, Hennings finds that the general tenor of her remarks on marriage ‘is inconsistent with the description of a happily married couple found in the current marriage literature, especially with that of the officially sanctioned “Homilie of the state of Matrimonie”’, an institution in its own right (96). As I note in the text, Hennings considers Emilia and Adriana the spokespersons for the Anglican ideal of conjugal affection; the primacy of their views is documented by the fact that Adriana sides with the Abbess and ‘rebukes the contentious Luciana’ in Act five (95).

34. Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago, 1991), p. 17.

35. Norbert Elias notes that the master himself or a distinguished guest carved the meat at noble tables. Edmund Jephcott (trans.), The History of Manners, vol. 1 of The Civilizing Process (New York, 1978), p. 97.

36. Qtd. in Alice Friedman, House and Household in Elizabethan England: Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby Family (Chicago, 1989), p. 50, n. 44.

37. The Points of Huswiferie in Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry ([1573] rpt. London, 1931), p. 164.

38. Desire and Domestic Fiction, A Political History of the Novel (New York, 1987).

39. Bullough and others have noted the significance of Shakespeare's altering the setting from Epidamnum in Plautus' play to Ephesus, where Paul spoke his marriage sermon on wives' submissiveness (vol. 1, pp. 9-10).

40. See Gervase Markham's chapter on physicke in Michael R. Best (ed.), The English House-wife, (Kingston, 1986). Thomas Tusser includes a separate poem on ‘physicke’ in his Points of Huswiferie, p. 179. Candido makes a similar point about domestic responsibilities in the period. ‘Dining’, pp. 233-237.

41. Although her jealousy aligns her with Othello, Adriana's association of mealtimes with the reconciliation of domestic discord anticipates Desdemona who urges the conciliatory meeting between her husband and Cassio ‘tonight at supper … To-morrow dinner then?’ (III.iii.57-58). Kehler similarly observes: ‘In her company are Othello, Posthumus, and Leontes, who respond to suspected cuckoldry with privileged male fury’. Meanwhile, Adriana's only recourse is her nagging. ‘Problem’, p. 232.

42. The festive comedies do typically close with fifth-act or looked-to celebrations; however, only in Errors and Merry Wives is the feasting authorized by a woman's voice. None of these endings is altogether conciliatory. After the Pages' mutual tricks backfire, and after they forgive their daughter for her own trick, Mistress Page invites all to ‘sport o'er by a country fire / Sir John and all’ (V.v.229-30). In Shrew, Lucentio calls the couples to their ‘dessert’:

    Feast with the best, and welcome to my house.
    My banquet is to close our stomachs up
    After our great good cheer. Pray you sit down
    For now we sit to chat as well as eat.

    (V.ii.8-11)

    At the end of Two Gentlemen of Verona, Valentine bespeaks ‘One feast, one house, one mutual happiness’ for two couples whose union was engineered by the women (V.iv.174). Theseus foregoes hunting in order to plan ‘a feast in great solemnity’ (Midsummer Night's Dream IV.i.185). Benedict calls for a dance, at the close of Much Ado, and the Duke hosts the ‘rites’ in As You Like It. The object of Emilia's gossips' feast is clearly unique. For a different view of the meaning of festive eating in Shakespeare, see John Mahon, “For now we sit to chat as well as eat’: Conviviality and Conflict in Shakespeare's Meals’, in John W. Mahon and Thomas A. Pendleton (eds), ‘Fanned and Winnowed Opinions’: Shakespearean Essays Presented to Harold Jenkins (New York, 1987), pp. 231-248. See also Palmer, Hospitable, and Teague, Speaking.

43. I grant that this optimistic reading depends upon the imagination of a ‘sixth act’. Kehler emphasizes the ‘problem play’ aspects of Comedy and the open-endedness of the ending, since both Adriana and E. Antipholus remain silent. ‘Problem’, pp. 235-236. See also Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London, 1974), pp. 9, 18.

44. Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven, 1985).

45. See Angus McLaren, Reproductive Rituals: The perception of fertility in England from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century (New York, 1984).

46. Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1990), p. 81.

47. McLaren, Reproductive, p. 55.