SOURCE: Hennings, Thomas P. “The Anglican Doctrine of the Affectionate Marriage in The Comedy of Errors.” Modern Language Quarterly 47, no. 2 (June 1986): 91-107.

[In the following essay, Hennings studies the celebration of Christian ideals of marriage and family in The Comedy of Errors.]

At exactly what time in his career Shakespeare wrote The Comedy of Errors scholars do not agree, some dating its composition in the late 1580s, others in 1594.¹ Those who favor an early date tend to regard the play as a careless apprentice work, coarse in tone, lacking in intellectual substance, and too imitative of its Plautine source. On the other hand, scholars such as Harold Brooks who prefer a later date tend to admire the play for its sophisticated “harmonic structure” of verbal echoes, parallels, contrasts, and cross references.² According to their readings, Shakespeare cleverly explores such themes as rebirth, identity, and self-knowledge, as well as marriage, time, chance or Providence. For the most part these scholars agree with Leo Salingar that the low tone and scenes of physical humor in the comedy are due to its generic considerations as an Elizabethan adaptation of a classical farce. Not at all servile, it is an experimental and highly original play with a double plot that brings together the diverse conventions of Latin farce, exemplary romance, native and Italian comedy.³

Whether it be the earliest of Shakespeare's comedies—or plays—or whether it had its premiere in 1594 as part of the Christmas celebration at Gray's Inn, The Comedy of Errors is not so much an imitation of the Menaechmi as it is a deliberate Christian corrective of the Latin play and its Saturnalian themes. One of several examples of Plautus's delight in dramatizing opposing human tendencies in a set of twins, the Menaechmi revels in its Saturnalian occasion to ridicule the burdensome routines of Roman society. According to Erich Segal's well received study, it provides for its audience a brief cathartic release from the real strictures of their social order by encouraging their deepest fantasies about the happier time of an innocent, anarchic past—the Golden Age of Saturn. In the comic conflict between a somber gravitas and a pleasant licentia, Plautus ridicules Roman society by concentrating on the troubles of the citizen twin, who is ironically being victimized by the laws and customs of property and marriage. Meanwhile the traveling twin quickly establishes the comic ideal by symbolically leaping into the state of nature, the time before the societal regulations of meum and tuum when the sexual possession of women and the accumulation of wealth knew no legal barriers.⁴

While the Plautine natural world defines itself as the farcical inversion of social order, it has nothing really threatening in it, certainly nothing of the later Lucretian view of the state of nature as the horrible savagery of primitive men whose natural freedom means their ability to rob, rape, and murder with impunity (De rerum natura 5.925-81).⁵ The delightful humor of the Menaechmi does not even hint at condemning the amoral natural world. On the contrary, when the citizen husband is united to his twin, he discovers his ideal self and he too becomes a natural man. He gleefully repudiates social institutions by ridding himself of his nameless and shrewish wife and burdensome property, and he leaves the city and all its troublesome parasites.

Segal's interpretation of Plautus relies on the affective theory of farce, which has been neatly outlined by Eric Bentley. In “The Psychology of Farce,”⁶ Bentley explains how farce allows us to see our repressed desires acted out on stage. Its relationship to the real world is like that of dreaming and waking, and its improbabilities, like those of a dream, are symbolic of “the inner experience” (p. xv). Subconsciously, all of us have the desire to repudiate every tedious rule we must live by. At the heart of all restrictions on human behavior is the institution of marriage and the family, and farce provides an outlet for our deep yearnings to see that institution desecrated: “in farce, as in dreams, one is permitted the outrage but is spared the consequences” (p. xiii). In short, farce is not a moral genre—except in so far as it allows an audience to enjoy a vicarious release in a safe, healthy, and acceptable way.

As a frame of reference the affective theory of farce serves the Menaechmi well enough, but it cannot serve Elizabethan comedy in general or The Comedy of Errors in particular, whose ultimate affect, in its final celebration of marriage and the family, is patently moral. Investigating what he calls the “Saturnalian pattern” of Elizabethan comedy and its festive origins, C. L. Barber has ably observed that its comic structures deliberately generate great tensions between “poles of restraint and release,” yet there is always the final restoration of moral reality: “Holiday affirmations in praise of folly were limited by the underlying assumption that the natural in man is only one part of him, the part that will fade.”⁷

True to his native conventions of comedy, Shakespeare will gladly exploit the farcical mode of Saturnalian inversion, but he will refuse to indulge in its psychological escapism. In The Comedy of Errors the world of natural freedom or licentia involving the traveling twin, which Shakespeare deliberately associates with dreams (II.ii.182-83, V.i.377), is not the ingenuous Saturnalian ideal. That comic ideal, as well as its mode of inversion, is continually rebuked by the didactic mode, by serious discussions of moral values, and it is continually mocked by satiric ridicule precisely because its atmosphere is governed by the frightening Lucretian view of nature, which by Shakespeare's day had evolved into the celebrated Renaissance doctrine of the decay of nature. Consequently, the corruption of licentious release cannot be a desirable alternative to a severe gravitas, and as the action shuttles between the comic poles of release and restraint, Shakespeare concentrates on the problems of both twins, not just the citizen, and he associates both with physically and morally decaying “Time” itself. In The Comedy of Errors the tensions generated between the contrastive poles resolve themselves in the completion of the comic movement toward a just society founded on the institution of marriage and the family. And establishing the normative pattern of the marital roles is the Anglican doctrine of the affectionate marriage.

Recent essays by Richard Henze⁸ and Vincent F. Petronella⁹ have demonstrated how the confused Ephesian society of the play is continually depicted in powerful stage and verbal images of tedious and/or oppressive restriction: Draconian legalism and its concomitant legalese; financial obligations; punctuality; beatings reinforcing hierarchy; innocent men bound in chains, imprisoned, and threatened with execution—not a pretty picture of social bonding, to say the least. Opening the play is the initial stage image of severe gravitas, old Egeon bound in chains and sentenced to death. Unhappily separated from his wife and family, he is a sympathetic figure and the paradigmatic symbol of frustrated love and affection, and his yearning for familial harmony, the perfection or completion of the social self, becomes the play's immediate moral and psychological aspiration. The scene is diametrically opposed to the opening of the Menaechmi where the husband wants to get away from his wife but, when he tries to leave, is subjected to her grueling questioning. He calls her a “custom-house officer” and moans in metaphor that leaving his own home is more difficult than entering a foreign country.¹⁰ Aspiring to opposite goals, the opening scenes of the two plays generate antithetical movements toward them, and each is finally fulfilled: the exasperated Plautine husband will offer to sell his wife and property and leave the city while Egeon will be united to his wife and children and admitted to the civis.

In the opening scene of the next act of The Comedy of Errors, the moral value of marriage and the family begins to be studied in depth. The initial scene of restraint, as well as the isolation of spouses (“this unjust divorce of us” [I.i.104], to cite Egeon's phrase), extends itself into the parallel scene of Luciana's advice to the wife, advice from the rule of nature that upholds among other things a paradigm of animal behavior as the model of human conduct (II.i.15-25). Here Luciana mistakenly maintains a half truth, for like everyone else, with the exception of Aemelia, she too is confused, partly right and partly wrong. When I say this I realize how far I depart from the generally accepted interpretation of Luciana's role. Scholars of the highest rank, Anne Barton¹¹ and Harry Levin¹² among others, regard her as the play's spokesperson on the theme of marriage. But their interpretation does not explain the further development of Luciana's character, her charactonymic link and structural parallelism to the erotic Luce, or why before the presence of Aemelia, Adriana rebukes the contentious Luciana and sides with the Abbess.¹³

Because Luciana speaks to the Elizabethan commonplace of wifely obedience, scholars have held her moral voice in high esteem and have claimed that it appeals to the deeply rooted prejudices of the original audience. That wives must obey their husbands is, after all, a commonplace more than Elizabethan. Until the most recent decades, almost every wife at her wedding took a solemn vow to obey, yet no one would insist that every generation has precisely the same understanding of the marital roles. While in this scene Adriana represents partly the burdensome routine of social bonding—punctuality at the main meal and the like—she is no Plautine shrew. She also represents a wife wanting the loving attention of her husband, and her voice defends the Anglican ideal of conjugal affection. In this respect she would have appealed to the sympathy of the original audience, for her dispute with Luciana is not nearly so one-sided as most critics would lead us to suspect.

Because we have not met Adriana's husband we have no sympathy for him. In the Menaechmi we immediately see the citizen quarreling with his wife, and we sympathize with him because he is married to a nasty shrew who makes his life miserable. In The Comedy of Errors we first see the wife complaining about an indifferent husband, and her complaint parallels Egeon's yearning for conjugal love. She is then submitted to a little lecture which informs her that “A man is master of his liberty” (II.i.7) and that men “Are masters to their females, and their lords” (24), and we hear the wife complaining about the old double standard: men can come and go when they want and do what they want; women must be patient and stay home.

Here Shakespeare reverses once again the comic effect of Plautus's opening scene by making the wife the victim of a repressive gravitas. That he would do so would not have surprised at least some of the intellectuals in his audience. That women are the victims of a repressive social order is one of the major themes of Montaigne's long and witty essay on human sexuality, “Upon some verses of Virgil,” and virtually nothing Adriana says in reply to Luciana cannot be paralleled in Montaigne. “For women are not altogeather in the wrong,” writes Montaigne, “when they refuse the rules of life prescribed to the World, forsomuch as onely men have established them without their consent.”¹⁴ More importantly, the general tenor of Luciana's remarks 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,” which during the reign of Elizabeth was required by law to be read each year from the pulpit of every church in England. It is an authoritative Elizabethan document on these matters.¹⁵

The official sermon contends that the double standard is wrong and the source of most discord in unhappy marriages. It challenges the older Catholic claim that procreation is the primary purpose of marriage with the Protestant view of its true and original purpose: “It is instituted of GOD … that man and woman should liue lawfully in a perpetuall friendship” (p. 239). The “one concord of heart and minde” (p. 247) to be found in a proper marriage, the sermon explains, is hateful to Satan, whose “principall craft” is to bring in “most bitter & unpleasant discord” by playing upon the foolish confusion intrinsic in lapsarian human nature (p. 240). Explicitly contradicting Luciana's defense of the double standard, the homily defines the grand folly of human nature:

For this folly is euer from our tender age growne up with us, to haue a desire to rule, to thinke highly of our selfe, so that none thinketh it meet to giue place to another. That wicked vice of stubborne will and selfe loue, is more meet to breake and to disseuer the loue of heart, then to preserue concord.

(p. 240)

Unhappily married men, the sermon contends, “in their folly turne all upside downe, while they will neuer giue ouer their right as they esteeme it, yea, while many times they will not giue ouer the wrong part in deed” (p. 240).

Because of the supposed greater capacity of their minds, husbands are to be the moral guides and teachers of their wives and children. Since the capacity to be rational is the criterion of the husband's superiority, his model of how to teach and guide cannot come from the animal kingdom. It is the divine analogy—husbands are to be like God. We are, the sermon claims, “commanded to resemble angels, or rather GOD himselfe through meekenesse” (p. 247). Guided by Christ's love for the Church, his wife, as Paul explains the analogy in the Epistle to the Ephesians (5:21-33), husbands must strive to be of one will with their wives, and therefore they must become humble. They must be understanding, attentive, and compassionate, and they must instruct by edifying example. To be sure, wives too must be meek and humble, and they must willingly obey their husbands as Sarah did Abraham—yet the exemplary pattern of a husband is not Abraham. In one of the most remarkable instances of the influence of Renaissance humanism on Christian thought, the official Anglican sermon declares that the ideal husband of all history is the pagan “Socrates,” who meekly endured the “euill manners” of his shrewish wife so that he might “bee the more quiet with others, being thus dayly exercised and taught in the forbearing of her” (p. 247).

It is precisely because the sermon wants to change the older thinking about marital roles that it instructs the husband in meekness and patience and humility. An indifferent, uncaring, or domineering husband is not a good Christian. As evidence of this belief, John Harington in a note to his translation of Orlando Furioso (1591) goes so far as to contend that an indifferent husband cannot be said to possess any moral virtue (sig. D3^r). Proceeding from the doctrine of the wife's natural inferiority, Luciana moves on to a misunderstanding of the roles of husband and wife, seeking to impose upon them the merely natural order of male dominance, an order, according to “An Homilie of the state of Matrimonie,” that almost always results in “chidings, brawlings, tauntings, repentings, bitter cursings, and fightings” (p. 240).

Furthermore, Luciana's own confession of why she is not married undercuts her pose as a moral advisor. Her claim that she fears the “trouble of the marriage-bed” (II.i.27) points to a reluctance about sexuality and the consequences of childbirth, referred to in the homily as “griefe and paines,” the “paine of their trauailing,” “great perils,” and “great afflictions” (p. 243), accurate enough when one considers the medical risks of the time and the number of women who died in childbirth. But overcoming this natural fear—that is, of being married—is the chief nobility of women, advises the sermon, which thereby counters the Catholic claims for celibacy:

… this is the chiefe ornament of holy matrons, in that they set their hope and trust in GOD, that is to say, in that they refused not from marriage for the businesse thereof, for the gifts and perils thereof. … O woman, doe thou the like, and so shalt thou be most excellently beautified before GOD and all his Angels & Saints, and thou needest not to seeke further for doing any better workes.

(p. 243)

In advising her sister, Luciana does not uphold those ideals about marriage and the perfection of women that the original audience had been taught to cherish.

In a play that puts stress on symbolic tags (the traveler, for instance, cannot leave on “the bark Expedition” but must await “the hoy Delay” [IV.iii.38-40]), it would be unwise to overlook the charactonymic link between Luce and Luciana. In making the commonplace observation that the scenes of Luce and Dromio burlesque those of Luciana and Antipholus, we may note that as the drab Luce represents the physical level of love, the supposed natural sexual lightness of women, so Luciana is thematically linked to her as her higher self, a secular, a social or psychological restraint upon human sexuality which proves ultimately ineffective in trying to control the sexual appetites. Of course, the bodily impulses of Luce and the psychological restraints of Luciana keep decorum and have their appropriate social roles.

Luciana's next prominent scene, her encounter with the man she thinks is the husband (III.ii), is linked thematically to her first scene and to Luce's narrated scene with the Syracusan Dromio that follows immediately. Her advice to the husband clearly indicates how mistaken her position can become. What she says to the husband is most hostile to the spirit of “An Homilie of the state of Matrimonie” and all the marriage manuals of the time. Luciana reluctantly accepts the fact of a husband's extramarital affairs, and in the name of maintaining domestic quiet she urges the husband to be deceptive: “Teach sin the carriage of a holy saint; / Be secret-false” (III.ii.14-15). What is wrong with Luciana is that she here exists solely on a superficial and secular level. She speaks to the appearances of things and sounds like Lady Macbeth: “Apparel vice like virtue's harbinger; / Bear a fair presence, though your heart be tainted” (12-13). Where Luce will almost physically mount her partner, Luciana's approach to sexuality more subtly reflects the deep and troubled forces of the concupiscible appetites. As Kenneth Muir has observed, she is attracted to Antipholus;¹⁶ and Antipholus—suspecting as much, believing that she has taken her own advice and is dressing her vice as the herald of virtue—mistakenly comes to regard her as a clever temptress pretending to be his sister-in-law inviting him to have an affair with her.

The comic exuberance of this scene brings to the conscious level an “unknown field” of human sexuality, the turbulent passions lurking beneath the superficial calm of things. At first Antipholus is bewildered and thinks Luciana is opposing his “soul's pure truth”:

Lay open to my earthy, gross conceit,
Smoth'red in errors, feeble, shallow, weak,
The folded meaning of your words' deceit.
Against my soul's pure truth why labor you,
To make it wander in an unknown field?

(34-38)

Amidst the erotic tensions and confusion of this encounter, Shakespeare releases the powerful forces beneath the conscious level, “Smoth'red in errors,” so that they might be ridiculed, overcome, and corrected. In short, as Michel Grivelet has explained,¹⁷ Antipholus takes Luciana's “folded meaning” as an invitation to vent his and her sexual inclinations for incest, and the play enhances the farcical progress from the threat of adultery in the Amphitruo banquet scene to the realm of the profounder taboo: “Call thyself sister, sweet, for I am thee” (66). Existing on a natural plane, the powerful forces of sexuality run deep and may explode in sexual and social chaos. And they almost do so when Dromio meets Luce.

As Dromio, off stage, regards Luce as some kind of witch, so here Antipholus of Syracuse speaks of Luciana as an enchanting mermaid or siren. He releases his erotic puns on “lie,” “light,” “hairs,” and “die” in response to Luciana's unintentional penchant for double-entendre (III.ii.47-52). His ocean imagery picks up the original metaphor he had used to describe his quest for self-fulfillment (I.ii.35-40). As most critics have insisted, his fears that he “confounds” himself or that he will “lose” himself are crucial to the theme of self-knowledge, especially since he had used the key phrase about losing himself when he had said he would wander about the city, thus linking the city with the ocean (I.ii.30-31). In his encounter now with Luciana he momentarily admits to forsaking his quest, and he is willing to drown in the ocean of sexual appetites. It was the stormy ocean, we ought to remember, a symbol of the unruly forces of nature, that had split the family in the first place. However, when Dromio enters to tell what has happened to him, to describe the physical consequences of giving vent to the natural cathexis of erotic energies, the Syracusan Antipholus checks his impulse to lose himself.

Of course Luciana does not consciously offer incest. Like every major character in the play, she too has a good heart. She has only the best of intentions, but a main point of the play, brought out in the many ironic situations, is that human nature works on more than the surface level of appearances and intentions. Luciana is not consciously aware of the folded meaning of her words' deceit, although Adriana momentarily suspects that her sister's deeper motives are not the least bit noble (IV.ii.16).

After hearing of Dromio's encounter with Luce, the traveler returns to his soul's pure truth, understanding that Luciana had “almost made me traitor to myself” (III.ii.162). What causes Antipholus to change his mind is Dromio's depiction of the very sorry state of nature in his description of Luce. Here Shakespeare comically unfolds another layer of reality—the decay of nature in historical time. Continuing the emphasis on the word light, Dromio draws attention to the Latin pun on the sexually loose woman. In her amorousness Luce becomes the satiric parody of the ideal woman, radiantly “all grease” (pronounced grace) so that Dromio does not know “what use to put her to but to make a lamp of her and run from her by her own light” (III.ii.96-98). According to the imagery of the comic language, this greasy, loose, and light woman, is a microcosm of time, encompassing all of history from “Noah's flood” (106) to “doomsday” (99), and she also spatially proves to be a microcosm, the comical inversion of the natural world, “a very beastly creature” (88), turned bottom up, as it were, to expose itself “spherical, like the globe” (114), with the boggy buttocks of Ireland and with the carbuncular pimples of America about her nose, “declining their rich aspect to the hot breath of Spain” (135-36). The subsequent disgusting imagery elaborates on the notion of venereal infection so that according to the spatial and moral associations France is represented by the baldness of the French disease (122-24) and it is no wonder Dromio will not look on Luce's “Netherlands” (138-89)—bawdy jokes on England's rivals that fit well enough into the thematic context of the play where they cleverly parody the ideal woman and the ideal macrocosm, the Christian world of true grace and light.

Much frightened by the possible decay in love-making, Antipholus takes an extreme view of sexuality and will have no more to do with women. To him the world of natural appearances is but an illusion, the wiles of witches and sorcerers. His initial fears of the Ephesian power of deception, it seems, have come true. It is a land of “Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind” (I.ii.99), “Disguised cheaters” (101), “And many such-like liberties of sin” (103). Quite conveniently, the next woman he meets is the nameless “Courtezan” (enchantingly called Erotium in Plautus), and he immediately claims to see beneath her appearance to the devil himself (IV.iii.49-50). Echoing Antipholus's biblical “Sathan, avoid” (48), Dromio, with logical tenacity, couples the cause of moral decay to the physical effect of venereal disease, and the devil and disease images fuse as before with the imagery of illusion, of light and fire (51-57).

The movement of the play from the light of nature and the natural order of things to the moral and physical corruption of nature is nothing new. The progress from the world to the flesh to the devil is so orthodox the original audience would not have thought it the least bit strange or unusual. In Bishop John Bale's morality play The Three Laws (1531?),¹⁸ for instance, the first and puniest of laws, lex naturalis, is personified as a country bumpkin overly confident of his abilities. He proves no match at all for the demons of lust and greed who distort and destroy everything that is beautiful in nature. After leaving to encounter them, lex naturalis returns to the stage defeated, having himself become a syphilitic degenerate (pp. 26-27). One probably cannot underestimate the traumatic effect the discovery of the new venereal diseases had on the moralists of the Renaissance. It is as if the diseases themselves are irrefutable proof of the decay of nature. Like lex naturalis in The Three Laws, the state of nature in The Comedy of Errors is full of decay, and we are reminded of the real and present need for “old Adam” (IV.iii.13), the first man of nature and, according to Elizabethan slang, any officer of the law to dress in leather buff and guard the night. “Time” himself is the victim of decaying nature; he too, as well as all his followers, grows senescently and syphilitically bald, the point of a long joke which delays the plot to explore and advance the theme (II.ii.69-109).

The themes of marriage, decaying time, disease, and diabolical possession link the scenes of the double plot. Adriana first introduces the disease imagery in her remarks to the husband about the intimacy of marriage (II.ii.110-46), remarks which fall between Luciana's advice to the wife and Luciana's advice to the husband. So situated, Adriana's imperatives serve as the corrective of Luciana's opinions. Adriana upholds the supernatural ideal of holy matrimony—the unity of mutual love—in opposition to the possible decay of natural sexuality. Much unlike the Plautine wife, and in direct contrast to Erasmian Catholic advice on the subject,¹⁹ she does not bring her complaint before the patriarch of the family, a father or father-in-law. The 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. Since the Anglican emphasis is on the special oneness of the married couple, who must share the things of the spirit as well as those of the body, husbands and wives must become of one mind and body to fulfill the demands of living in perpetual friendship. “She is thy body, and made one flesh with thee,” explains “An Homilie” to the husband, who is instructed to think of his wife as himself and to love her as he loves himself (p. 246). Adriana's claim that husband and wife are “undividable incorporate” and that the husband must regard the wife as “better than thy self's better part” (II.ii.122-23) is entirely orthodox and not, as Rolf Soellner contends,²⁰ a sign of Adriana's female vanity. A short while later, Antipholus will echo Adriana's description when he proposes marriage to Luciana, calling her “mine own self's better part: / Mine eye's clear eye, my dear heart's dearer heart” (III.ii.61-62). Meanwhile, Adriana echoes Antipholus's (and the play's) original image of intrinsic familial unity—the drop of water in the ocean (II.ii.125-29). In contrast to Luciana's later advice, Adriana can call attention to the husband's infidelity, explaining that if he sin, the wife is stained, and if he contract a venereal disease, he will give it to her (142-45).

Dismissing Luciana's appeal to a double moral standard, Adriana upholds the Anglican standard of conjugal unity, intimacy, and affection, but she does not and never did seek social or political equality with her husband. Rather, she is content to rely on him, and she echoes and wittily elaborates on the important imagery of Psalm 128 poignantly quoted in “An Homilie of the state of Matrimonie” to express the happiness of married life. “Thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine,” says Adriana, taking Antipholus's arm in hers, “Whose weakness, married to thy state, / Makes me with thy strength to communicate” (II.ii.174-76). The official Anglican sermon promises the husband who loves his wife as he loves himself that “GOD shall follow thee with his benediction … as the Psalme saith: Blesseth is the man which feareth GOD, and walketh in his wayes, thou shalt haue the fruit of thine owne hands, happy shalt thou be, and well it shall goe with thee. The wife shal be as a vine …” (p. 243).

Because the audience knows that Adriana is not talking to her husband, it does not wonder if the husband will take her advice. Rather, the situational irony gives the audience the distanced objectivity to approve of the moral excellence of her idealism. The true standard of value is didactically brought to a conscious level in the language of orthodoxy and biblical allusion and placed in tension with the characters' confusion. The characters are never victims of their own malice or the malicious deception of others. The situational irony of the twins leads the characters to think they see a potential for malice actualizing itself in another when in fact it is not. They are “Smoth'red in errors” of their own dark suspicions of lapsarian nature.

Like every major character in the play, Adriana is a static character with a good and loving heart. Unlike the Plautine wife, she owns a genuine concern for her husband's happiness, but nevertheless she is jealous, and jealousy in a wife, according to “An Homilie of the state of Matrimonie” and the Elizabethan marriage manuals,²¹ is anathema. In fact the sermon contends that a jealous wife is almost as bad as a wife-beating husband (p. 245). Actually aspiring to the high ideals of a Christian marriage, Adriana finds persuasive and edifying the comments of Aemelia about the deleterious effects of a jealous wife. Luciana may have spoken to the doctrine of the double standard, but the Abbess, proceeding from the ideal of physical and spiritual unity in an affectionate marriage, uses the same imagery of disease and infection Adriana had earlier used to describe the faults of the erring husband: “The venom clamors of a jealous woman / Poisons” (V.i.69-70), “the raging fire of fever” (75), “a huge infectuous troop” (81). According to Aemelia's imagery of disease, a jealous wife is like a violent and syphilitic husband, a cause of, certainly not a cure for, the cancer of marital despondency. While Luciana remains confused by Aemelia's comments, Adriana is stung into recognition and significantly confesses that the holy woman “did betray me to my own reproof” (90).

As historical time in decaying nature is mirrored in the sexual fears of the Syracusan Antipholus, so present time in Ephesus seems to endure the same moral and financial bankruptcy that is the citizen's great anxiety. Enjoying the vantage of irony, the audience knows no one in the play is suffering venereal decay, no one is a witch in disguise or a devil, and no one is a thief or swindler. Ironically, at least according to the comic imagery, the only thief is “Time,” who also happens to be the only syphilitic degenerate. In Act IV Shakespeare boldly defies the laws of probability and merrily turns the clock back one hour (IV.ii.54-55). As playwright, he deliberately intrudes upon the action to remind the audience that an hour earlier, in order to describe decayed and decaying nature, Dromio had delivered a long joke on bald “Time” (II.ii.69-109). Shakespeare is linking that scene with the present one as Dromio now describes the confusion in Ephesian commercial society by claiming to see the devil once again, this time disguised as an officer of the law carrying souls off to hell (IV.ii.32-40), and by depicting present “Time” as a thief suffering from bankruptcy as well as whoredom (56-62). In the comic world of inverted justice, where loyal servants are beaten precisely because they are faithful and obedient (IV.iv.24-39), it accords with the comic truth that time should run backward to chase a whore (“hour” [IV.ii.62]). When glossing the language of Dromio's punning, editors are quick to perceive that emerging from the typological level of meaning is the powerful Christian reminder of the ideal and immutable justice of Judgment Day, which this scene burlesques.

“The whole city was filled with confusion” is Luke's description of Ephesus (Acts 19:29), the biblical source of the “merrygreek” tradition. The confusion of social bonding in this play is marked by great violence and by the human capacity for greater violence. The citizen-husband, unlike his Plautine counterpart, wants to give his wife a token of his affection, yet like his Plautine counterpart he thinks the world has gone crazy. With his frustrations grows his great capacity for violence. He calls Adriana a “Dissembling harlot” (IV.iv.101), and he threatens that “with these nails I'll pluck out these false eyes / That would behold in me this shameful sport” (104-5). The threat more than answers Adriana's earlier prediction of what the husband would do should he suspect her of harlotry: “Wouldst thou spit at me, and spurn at me … And tear the stain'd skin [off] my harlot brow” (II.ii.134-36). Wanting to be an affectionate husband, the citizen ironically finds himself threatening to be the worst of all possible husbands, according to “An Homilie of the state of Matrimonie,” the wife-beater and public brawler (pp. 244-45), the great scandal of which he must be reminded of by the merchant (III.i.85-106).

Although Adriana receives the message that her husband vows “To scorch your face, and to disfigure you” (V.i.183), his violent aggression toward her is narrowly averted and turned on him who becomes the comic villain of the play. The situational irony of the twins in the Menaechmi allows for the comic study of the classical art-nature antithesis and a resolution favoring the freedom of nature over the restrictive artifices of society. In The Comedy of Errors it frustrates the desire for family love and affection while it encourages the characters to give vent to their deep fears of lapsarian nature, to mistake good persons for bad, and to think they see lurking behind and within all the motives of mankind the demons of lust and greed. Coming to embody this confusion is the cocksure quack and pedant, Dr. Pinch, who knows when one is natural, when one is diabolically possessed: “both man and master is possess'd: / I know it by their pale and deadly looks” (IV.iv.92-93). Comic justice is initially well served when the vain pretender to learning, a most ignorant force of darkness and restriction (“They must be bound and laid in some dark room” [94]), is given his comic beating in that same dark room and threatened with death (V.i.169-77). He is also beaten with words that expose his folly (238-42).

Pinch, as his name might suggest, is the diametric opposite of Luce, and both are unwise extremes; more importantly he is the secular foil of the Christian Aemelia, perhaps inspired as much by the sons of Sceva, the false Ephesian exorcists of Acts 19:12-16, as he is by his Plautine counterpart. Out of “charitable duty” (V.i.107), Aemelia wants to cure men and ultimately reunite them to their wives, while Pinch remains an ignorant force of separation and isolation. The Abbess takes cures to the high plateau of scientific aid and supernatural guidance: “With wholesome syrups, drugs, and holy prayers, / To make of him [the husband] a formal man again” (V.i.104-5). It is appropriate then that the reunion of the formal man, the familial completion of the self, should be symbolized by the stage image of the living embrace of brothers, husbands and wives, parents and children, and that it should be described in terms of Christian rebirth and baptism (V.i.401-7).

It is appropriate also that Aemelia, whose voice has supported the Anglican doctrine of conjugal affection, should “loose” the “bonds, / And gain a husband” (V.i.340-41) by being Egeon's lost wife and the mother of the twins. Like his sons, separated and bound in chains, Egeon had been associated with decaying time, a sad victim of “time's deformed hand” (V.i.299) and “time's extremity” (V.i.308), whom only Aemelia can recognize and save (and thereby resolve the initial plot question). As Barton shrewdly notes in her introduction to the play (p. 82), the surprise resolution is a pleasant lesson in intellectual humility for the audience who, like the characters of the play, think they have enough knowledge to be correct judges when in fact their knowledge, too, is temporal and therefore limited, not eternal and omniscient. In the last moments of the play, Shakespeare reminds us that there is yet a higher reality of truth we must attain before we can escape from the imperfect world of time and mutability, appearance and illusion. It is a point brought out by the Duke's confusing the twins (V.i.365) and confirmed once again by the Syracusan Dromio's same error soon thereafter (410-12). Knowing there are two sets of twins may lessen but it does not eliminate the chance of error. Indeed, that the error is made twice in the space of a few minutes leaves the distinct impression that it will continue to be made—and often.

For the time being, however, the confusion is brought under control and the characters' fears allayed. The citizen, no longer violent, can now give his wife the token of his affection; Adriana, no longer jealous, joins hands with her husband; the questing brother, no longer frightened by the possibility of venereal decay, looks forward to marrying Luciana, who it seems no longer fears the troubles of marriage. Husbands and wives, parents and children, subjects and ruler unite in a final comic dance of harmony. Christian marriage, family, and society are celebrated, and we have the promise of more marriages to come.

Notes

1. Arguments trying to date the composition of the play on the evidence of presumably topical allusions have been made since 1733 when Lewis Theobald offered a “Conjecture” on behalf of 1591 (The Works of Shakespeare, 7 vols. [1733; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1968], 3: 22). In 1956 Sidney Thomas, relying on external evidence, argued for a 1594 date (“The Date of The Comedy of Errors,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], 7 [1956]: 377-84). R. A. Foakes surveys differing modern opinions about the date in his introduction to the New Arden edition of the play ([Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962], pp. xvi-xxiii). The earliest recorded reference to The Comedy of Errors, from Gesta Grayorum (1594-95), is reprinted in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), pp. 1838-39. Evans leans toward Thomas's dating (pp. 48-49). All quotations of Shakespeare are taken from the Riverside edition.

2. “Themes and Structure in ‘The Comedy of Errors,’” Early Shakespeare, Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies 3 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1961), p. 56.

3. Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 17-18, 59-67, 253-56, et passim.

4. Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 7-14, et passim.

5. For the evolution of these contrastive views of life in the state of nature in both classical and patristic literature, see Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935); and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in the Middle Ages (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1948).

6. Let's Get a Divorce! and Other Plays (New York: Wang and Hill, 1958), pp. xii-xx.

7. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 8, 10.

8. “The Comedy of Errors: A Freely Binding Chain,” SQ, 22 (1971): 35-41.

9. “Structure and Theme through Separation and Union in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors,” MLR, 69 (1974): 481-88.

10. Plautus, trans. Paul Nixon, Loeb Classical Library, 5 vols. (1917; rpt. London: William Heinemann, 1932), 2: 375.

11. Introduction to The Comedy of Errors, The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 81.

12. Introduction to The Comedy of Errors, The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p. 74.

13. Blaze Bonazza has accused Shakespeare of sloppy artistry on this last point, contending that Aemelia is little more than a redundant Luciana (Shakespeare's Early Comedies [London: Mouton, 1966], p. 39).

14. The Essays of Montaigne Done into English by John Florio, 3 vols. (London, 1603), 3: 512.

15. Certaine Sermons or Homilies Appointed to Be Read in Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth I (1623; rpt. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1968). Alfred Hart, Shakespeare and the Homilies: And Other Pieces of Research into the Elizabethan Drama (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1934), calls attention to the importance of the official Anglican sermons, but because he is interested exclusively in the history plays, he ignores the moral and theological sermons to concentrate on the political homilies as expressive of political orthodoxy.

16. Shakespeare's Comic Sequence (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1979), p. 21.

17. “Shakespeare, Molière, and the Comedy of Ambiguity,” Shakespeare Survey, 22 (1969): 15-26.

18. The Dramatic Writings of John Bale (London: Early English Drama Society, 1966).

19. “Marriage,” The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 114-27.

20. Shakespeare's Patterns of Self-Knowledge (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972), pp. 73-75.

21. E.g., Edmund Tilney, A Brief and Pleasant Discourse of Duties in Marriage, Called the Flower of Friendshippe (London, 1568), sig. E4^v-E7^r.