SOURCE: Riehle, Wolfgang. “Names and their Meanings.” In Shakespeare, Plautus and the Humanist Tradition, pp. 173-84. Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer Ltd, D. S. Brewer, 1990.

[In the following essay, Riehle examines Shakespeare's practice of naming characters as a way of reflecting their inner natures in The Comedy of Errors.]

We have seen in the preceding chapters how closely Shakespeare studied his two Plautine sources before composing his own ‘classical’ comedy; now we shall return to our earlier suggestion that Errors [The Comedy of Errors] should at the same time be viewed as a text documenting Shakespeare's humanist interests. The current underrating of Errors, both in the theatre and in criticism, shows only too well that we are still inclined to underestimate the profundity of Shakespeare's education. We have to assume that Shakespeare acquired a fairly solid knowledge of the classics in the Grammar School. In many respects Elizabethan Grammar School teaching seems to have reflected the educational ideas of Erasmus.¹ Although Shakespeare did not study at a university, his intellectual background and thematic interests are in many respects comparable to the ‘University Wits’, from whom he may have learnt a great deal by way of conversation. It seems to me that Tillyard has given a vivid description of the ways in which Shakespeare may have acquired his intellectual background. He points out that ‘a man can be learned in more ways than one and that at least one of those ways fitted Shakespeare’.² He maintains that Shakespeare might have drawn an idea directly from a classical author, or he might have learnt it from a contemporary author who himself drew on the classical tradition, or he might have heard the idea discussed. Tillyard then concludes that Shakespeare was indeed learned, albeit not in a strictly academic or systematic way.³ To a considerable extent this is probably true; yet our examination has shown how intimate his knowledge of Plautine Comedy and of the New Comedy tradition behind it in fact was, and we have seen that, by reading Plautus in the original Latin, he must have acquired important information on Roman comedy and its reception by the humanists from the introductory essays of these editions. An interesting proof of this is the fact that many of these editions contain an explanatory essay on the meaning of the names of the characters appearing in the comedies, and this explanation of the ‘ratio nominum’ or ‘etymologiae’ was particularly stressed by the humanist editors.⁴ In this, they were obviously following a suggestion by Donatus, who laid down that the ‘ratio’ and the ‘etymologia’ of the names of the dramatis personae must be recognizable.⁵ Names and their meanings were also the subject of a detailed debate, which has been examined by J. L. Calderwood, so that there is no need to go into further detail here.⁶

Plautus usually takes over the names of his characters from his Greek sources; he is fully aware of their meanings and sometimes makes effective use of them, as in his Bacchides. In this comedy the cunning slave is appropriately called Chrysalus because the golden boy—this is the meaning of the Greek name—has to supply gold for a young master. He knows, however, that his plans may go wrong and that then the young man's father, thinking that he has been cheated by Chrysalus, will change his name from Chrysalus to Crucisalus, because he will in all probability take revenge and have him nailed to a cross (crux). In Menaechmi the seductive nature of the Courtesan is admirably suggested by her name Erotium. The cook Cylindrus, a stock character in New Comedy, derives his name from the ‘cylindrus’, a rolling pin. The proverbial voracity of the Parasite, who consumes even the leftovers from his Patron's table, is well brought out in the name Peniculus, a name not adopted from Greek but created by Plautus; its meaning is ‘table brush’, yet the sexual innuendo is, of course, an intentional side-effect.⁷

In his excellent guide to criticism on Shakespeare's reception of the classical tradition, John W. Velz rightly says that ‘much yet remains to be said about onomastics in Shakespeare’.⁸ The fact that Shakespeare was familiar with the traditional view going back to classical antiquity according to which the name of a person reflects and represents his very nature is most clearly documented by the conclusion of his Cymbeline. There Leonatus is made aware of the ‘fit and apt construction’ of his name: he is ‘the Lion's whelp’, ‘Being Leo-natus’. His daughter is truly called a woman, ‘mulier’, because by her virtue she has become a ‘piece of tender air’ = ‘mollis aer’ (V,v,443 - 49). This explanation of the meaning of the two names is given a special dramatic function: it suggests the final restitution of Posthumus's real nature, and, similarly, Imogen's true self is revealed when her disguise is no longer required. Shakespeare here quite deliberately employs etymologically appropriate, ‘telling’ names as a way of characterizing the dramatis personae.

The name Solinus directly refers to one of the literary authorities favoured by Renaissance humanists. In the third century a.d., Julius Solinus compiled a compendium of knowledge about the ancient world.⁹ It became widely known, and in 1587 was translated into English by Arthur Golding. Foakes wrongly minimizes the importance of this work by calling it a ‘description of the Mediterranean countries’ written by a ‘geographer’.¹⁰ Nor is it correct to claim that there is nothing to suggest Shakespeare's direct use of this book. Not only does Solinus in his book mention Epidaurus (referred to by Egeon in I, i) and give a succinct description of Ephesus,¹¹ yet, to the Elizabethans, he was more than a ‘geographer’, as is usually maintained, he was the author of a book of ‘res mirabiliae’, of the wonders of the world, as its title suggested. We find an interest in the strange, the marvellous and miraculous in Shakespeare too. Thus, the legendary ‘anthropophagi’, mentioned by Othello in his famous narration of his past adventures, are to be found in Solinus's book.¹² Of course, Shakespeare may have read about them in Mandeville, Raleigh, or Holland's Pliny, but the parallels between Shakespeare and Solinus are so numerous that, since the latter's name occurs in Errors, we are almost compelled to believe that Solinus served Shakespeare as a mine of information. The name Lysander, one of the male lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream, occurs not only in Plutarch but also in Solinus's Collectanea.¹³ Shakespeare is said to have taken the name Hermione from Plutarch, Homer or The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune; however, her life as told in these sources does not bear any resemblance to the Shakespearean character, whereas Solinus mentions that she gives birth to a child, albeit a boy.¹⁴ Considering the interest in the miraculous and strange, which Shakespeare shares with Solinus, we must recognize a subtle irony in the fact that Shakespeare has Solinus open his comedy.

Far more important than these connections is the fact that Solinus is deeply concerned with decidedly humanist values such as pietas and clementia, and this may account for the special interest Shakespeare took in his work. In the dedication of his book to a certain Adventus, Solinus praises the clementia and benevolentia of his addressee.¹⁵ And in the book itself, even when describing certain animals, Solinus stresses their capacity for this same clementia. He finds it in lions and also in elephants, who are further credited with an almost human intellect.¹⁶ And so there is an extra irony in Shakespeare's Errors: his Solinus, rather than being merciful by nature, has first to learn the superiority of clementia over justice. The fact that in his own Solinus Shakespeare dramatizes a ruler's conflict between justice and mercy provides this play, as Tillyard has pointed out, with an additional political dimension: ‘The Duke […] is not just the conventional ruler […] he is a human being, in a great office, subjected, as all such people must be, to the conflict between personal feelings and political duty’.¹⁷ Although the general audience do not, of course, notice these subtle interrelations, their existence cannot be denied; they point clearly to the humanist background to this play.

It has been suggested that the name Egeon may have been developed from that of the Aegean Sea, mentioned in Solinus.¹⁸ However, it is probably no mere coincidence that in the Folio the name is spelled ‘Egeon’. If the Folio spelling is correct, then the name is not just a reminiscence of the Aegean Sea. Would the fact that Egeon has travelled and suffered on the Aegean Sea be sufficient reason for naming him after the Sea? This seems doubtful, if not absurd, especially if we recall the fact that names in the classical comedy tradition often refer to a major quality of the character who bears the name. I prefer to think that Shakespeare here makes use of a further and more subtle linguistic association. The name, which is mentioned on five occasions, may be understood as a derivative of the Latin verb ‘egeo’ = ‘I am poor, in need of, wanting, in search of someone or something’. Only the ending ‘-on’ would then have to be accounted for. If we take it as the common Greek noun ending, as in the name ‘Apoll-on’, we have in ‘Ege-on’ a name made up of two hybrid elements, a Latin and a Greek one, which is not unusual. Understood in this way, the name describes admirably Egeon's role in the romance subplot which frames the play: he is the poor one because he wants ransom money and misses his relatives; he goes in search of them and, as a result, runs into extreme danger. It is interesting and most fitting that he is named ‘Egeon’ for the first time just after he has told us of his unfortunate losses.

The name Antipholus has always been a puzzle to critics. In his New Arden edition Foakes writes that ‘Antipholus appears to stem from the Greek “Antiphilos”, listed as a proper name for a lover in H. Estienne (Stephanus), Thesaurus Graecae Linguae (1572)’,¹⁹ and Baldwin refers to the verb ‘αντιφιλεω’ and the Latin definition as ‘Redamo, vicissim amo, amore prosequar’;²⁰ according to Foakes, it is uncertain where Shakespeare found the name.²¹ Indeed, the name not only suggests ‘a lover’, but with the prefix ‘anti-’ it signifies reciprocity—loving and being loved in return. No doubt Shakespeare was fully aware of the implied meaning of this name. It has been pointed out that there is an Antiphilus in Sidney's Arcadia and an Antiphila in the Heautontimoroumenos of Terence.²² In the comedy Chrysis by Enea Silvio Piccolomini a Courtesan bears the name Antiphila. We do not know why Shakespeare changed Antiphilos to Antipholus. Perhaps it is a case of partial assimilation, or it was done for reasons of euphony. A possible explanation is the fact that in the Plautine Stichus as well as in Eunuchus and Phormio by Terence there is a character called ‘Antipho’. If we add to this the Latin masculine ending ‘-us’, and an intermediate ‘l’ to make the pronunciation easier, we get the name Antipho-l-us.²³ Thus the name may be explained as a contamination of ‘Antiphila’ and ‘Antipho’, both frequently found in Roman comedy. Shakespeare's ‘Antipholus’ is unique, yet its Greek meaning is only slightly blurred. The name suggests that love is the motive of his quest for his brother, that love rescues the brother from the dangerous situation in which he finds himself, and that love brings about their reunion. The name also suggests the idea which Erasmus discusses, and to which we shall have to return, that love is inspired primarily by a partner whose nature is similar to the lover.²⁴

In the Folio text of Errors we find the speech headings ‘Antipholus Sereptus’, ‘Antipholis [sic] Erotes’ and ‘A Errotis’. Obviously these additions to the names stem from Shakespeare's own hand. The first has been correctly interpreted as a reminiscence of the Prologue to Menaechmi, where the denizen twin is called ‘surreptus’, and it is assumed that Shakespeare adopted this addition on the analogy of the speech heading ‘Menaechmus Surreptus’ which occurs in a number of Renaissance editions. In these editions the other twin is often called Menaechmus ‘Sosicles’ (or ‘Sosides’ or even ‘Advena’).²⁵

The Folio word ‘Erotes’, or ‘Errotis’, as the cognomen of the traveller twin, is more difficult to account for. It has been unconvincingly explained as an indirect reference to Erotium in Menaechmi; it is argued that Shakespeare may have ‘thought initially of the Antipholus who was to be entertained in mistake for his brother by Adriana as identified with Erotium's Menaechmus; or, alternatively […] the name of the Courtesan prompted Shakespeare to think of Eros, and to mark off Antipholus of Syracuse as the one who falls in love.’²⁶ The interpretation generally accepted today is still less plausible: ‘Erotes’ is taken to have been derived from ‘erraticus’ or ‘errans’, meaning the traveller, ‘errant’ twin, who is thus contrasted with the stolen twin (‘surreptus’). However, Foakes correctly notes that it is hard to explain how ‘Erotes’ could be derived from ‘Erraticus’.²⁷ On the other hand, the name Erotes really does make sense if it is derived from the Greek word ‘ερωταω’ ‘to ask’, ‘to try to find out’. The proper form of the name would then be ‘Erotetes’, but the contraction may be explained as a case of haplology. Thus the Greek name ‘Sosicles’ for the Plautine twin is here replaced by another Greek word, a defining attribute, which characterizes him as a Quester and distinguishes him from the other twin on account of his specific function in the play. This cognomen has to be seen in the light of other Shakespearean names of Greek origin, such as, for example, Ophelia and Sycorax.²⁸ In any case, it is an astonishing instance of Shakespeare's erudition.

As far as the name ‘Dromio’ is concerned, most critics hold the view that it is formed from the slave name ‘Dromo’, which occurs in Terence. However, the Dromos in Terence are particularly insignificant figures, being almost supernumeraries who have nothing to do with the servus currens or servus callidus types. Indeed, to Erasmus the name simply suggests a dull character, for he speaks of the ‘Dromonem stupidum atque hebetem’,²⁹ and he frequently uses it in his Colloquia Familiaria. There can be no doubt, however, that, as we have seen, the immediate source of the name is Lyly's Mother Bombie, since Lyly's Dromio bears a considerable resemblance to Shakespeare's twin servants. Whereas the original meaning of the name Dromo is ‘a runner’, Lyly and Shakespeare, by introducing an extra ‘i’, slightly modify it so that it acquires a lively rhythm; it thus nicely suggests the nervous activity of these servants. The minor character of the goldsmith is given the name Angelo, an appropriate tag name in Elizabethan times, because an ‘angel’ was a gold coin with the figure of Saint Michael stamped upon it.³⁰

In his book on Shakespeare's names, Levith claims that ‘Adriana’ contains an implication of ‘darkness’,³¹ but to me it is not clear how this meaning should suggest itself by way of a Latin etymology. One could argue that, since it recalls the male name Hadrian, it implies a certain ‘maleness’, and therefore ‘Adriana’ seems just the right name for the shrewish wife of Antipholus. However, the key to the significance of this most unusual name lies elsewhere. No one has noticed that the name Adriane occurs several times in Chaucer as well as in Gower—as a variant of the classical Ariadne. Wherever we look in medieval vernacular literature, be it the poetry of Machaut, Boccaccio, or the Italian translation of Ovid's Heroides³² which contain Ariadne's letter to Theseus, we find the name Adriana which may go back to a medieval Latin form ‘Adriagne’.³³ That Shakespeare knew Ovid's retelling of Ariadne in the original Latin of his Heroides is confirmed by the fact that in III Henry VI (I, iii, 48) as well as in The Taming of the Shrew (III, i, 42) he quotes lines from this Ovidian text. He will then also have consulted Chaucer's Legend of Good Women which is based on Ovid. In Chaucer's version, as we have already seen, Ariadne is always mentioned as Adryane.³⁴ He shows how Ariadne/Adryane and her sister at first feel pity for Theseus, who is to be killed by the Minotaur. By using her famous thread, Ariadne shows him the way out of the labyrinth. He swears that he will ever be faithful to her, and they become husband and wife. Having entered the labyrinth with the gaoler, they secretly make their escape. Suddenly, however, Theseus becomes enamoured of Ariadne's sister because, in the words of Chaucer, she ‘fayrer was than she’ (Legend of Good Women, 2172);³⁵ he steals away from Ariadne while she is asleep. Then she complains about having been ‘betrayed’ (Legend of Good Women, 2188), and this is where her Letter to Theseus starts in Ovid's Heroides. Ariadne's complaint culminates in the following lines:

quid faciam? quo sola ferar? …
Cum mihi dicebas 'per ego ipsa pericula iuro
Te fore, dum nostrum vivet uterque, meam.’
Vivimus, et non sum, Theseu, tua; si modo vivis,
Femina periuri fraude sepulta vivi …

59ff

What am I to do? Whither shall I take myself? […] you said to me: ‘By these very perils of mine, I swear that, so long as both of us shall live, thou shalt be mine!’ We both live, Theseus, and I am not yours!—if indeed a woman lives who is buried by the treason of a perjured maid …

Morsque minus poenae quam mora mortis habet.

82³⁶

and death holds less of dole for me than the delay of death.

In Shakespeare's Errors, the name Adriana, being a vernacular form of Ariadne, opens up an interesting mythological parallel and is at the same time an inversion of the classical Ariadne. In both Ovid and Chaucer Ariadne is the victim of Theseus's infidelity;³⁷ in some dramatic moments of the play, Shakespeare's Adriana, too, complains about her husband's suspected betrayal:

The time was once when thou unurg'd wouldst vow
That never words were music to thine ear …

II, ii, 113ff

I'll weep what's left away, and weeping die.

II, i, 115

Whereas, however, in the classical myth and in Chaucer's retelling of it, the faithful and ‘good’ woman helps Theseus out of the labyrinth in which death awaits him, Adriana involuntarily contributes towards entangling her husband deeper and deeper in a maze of confusions which makes him afraid of losing his life (IV, iv, 107). Yet like her mythological prototype, Adriana is compelled to think that her husband wants to make love with her sister, a suspicion that is, however, unwarranted because she takes the twin for Antipholus E. Whereas in Chaucer, Theseus by his infidelity, becomes a real ‘traitour’ (Legend of Good Women, 2174), Adriana's husband merely intends to become unfaithful as an act of revenge, while the other Antipholus realizes that, by falling in love with Luciana, he had almost become a ‘traitor’, yet not to her, but to himself (III, ii, 161).

Shakespeare's early plays in particular show that the Ariadne myth must have left a deep impression on Shakespeare. While in 1 Henry VI the married Suffolk, who has fallen in love with Margeret, refers to the Minotaur and his labyrinth (V, iii, 189), in The Two Gentlemen of Verona a direct analogy is established between Julia's diappointment about her philandering Proteus and Ariadne's complaint; being confronted with her rival Silvia, Julia claims that she ‘did play a lamentable part. / Madam, 'twas Ariadne passioning / For Theseus' perjury and unjust flight’ (IV, iv, 167ff.). We also remember the fact that in A Midsummer Night's Dream Theseus' proneness to infidelity is expressly commented on by Oberon who refers to his betrayal of Ariadne (II, i, 79f.). If Shakespeare in Errors preferred the variant ‘Adriana’ to ‘Ariadne’, he wanted to achieve the effect of subtle allusion so that the educated members of his audience could discover for themselves both the paralleling and inverting of the Ariadne myth. Shakespeare is, then, indeed doing much to provide his comedy with intellectual depth: he first adds a mythological perspective to the confusions of identity by transforming the Amphitruo myth, and then he combines the confusions with the mythological motif of the labyrinth, with the effect that Adriana's behaviour, which is the opposite of that of Ariadne, is indirectly criticized. Moreover, the reminiscences of the classical myth of Ariadne and the labyrinth serve as a beautiful symbolic suggestion of the mysteries of human life. And Shakespeare adds a further mythological perspective by choosing the Phoenix image as a name for Adriana's house; Foakes comments on it as follows: ‘The image of this mythical bird, rising out of its own ashes to renewed youth, is appropriate to the story of Antipholus and Adriana, whose love is finally renewed out of the break-up of their marital relationship.’³⁸ This comment hits the nail on the head and should not be omitted in any future edition of the play.

As regards the sign of the house of the Courtesan, Foakes is less convincing because he only quotes Sisson: ‘there was an inn called the Porpentine “on Bankside … Shakespeare's audience probably knew it well”’.³⁹ The point is, of course, that the Porpentine is not just an inn but a brothel. As no one would associate a courtesan with a porcupine, the sign functions, as it were, e contrario and bears an ironical implication. The name of the inn where Antipholus S stays bears the name (and sign) of the Centaur, which the editions do not comment on. It is true that this tavern is not directly present or visible in the play, nevertheless its role is not unimportant, for Antipholus S arrives there between Acts I and II in search of his Dromio. Like the motif of the Phoenix, the Centaur could be interpreted in Christian terms and said to signify Man's twofold nature, his animal instinct and his human intellect; it is used in this way in Titus Andronicus (V, ii, 203) and King Lear (IV, vi, 124). Seen in this light, the image well suits Antipholus S, who in search of his own identity has to undergo a process of transformation. Likewise, the fact that the Centaur is half man and half animal links Antipholus with this same thematic strand of transformation, which culminates in the reference to Circe in the final Act of the play.⁴⁰

The sinister person whose task it is to turn a human being transformed by the devil back into his original condition is the exorcist Dr Pinch. We could not easily think of a name more suitable for an exorcist than ‘Pinch’. First, it perfectly ‘depicts the character's physical appearance’,⁴¹ as described in the last Act (V, i, 238-242). Then, it is well known that the Elizabethans liked to think that elves and spirits ‘pinched’ human beings, an idea which we find in Shakespeare, too.⁴² This is what Dromio fears when he says that if he and his master do not obey the spirits which they believe surround them, ‘they'll […] pinch us black and blue’ (II, ii, 192). ‘Pinching’ thus amounts almost to ‘a spirit taking possession of somebody’. If an exorcist wants to expel evil spirits from the human being in whom they dwell, he has to ‘pinch’ them in return, and therefore Dr Pinch's name suggests part of his activity as an exorcist. The name further implies violence, and his appearance on stage should indeed have a menacing effect.

It appears, then, that in the naming of his characters Shakespeare pursues a threefold aim. He takes great care that the sound effect of a proper name suitably evokes the character of the bearer. Levin has already observed this suggestive quality in some of Shakespeare's names, such as that of Shylock, of which he remarks: ‘Shakespeare makes the sound convey a meaning of its own, compounded of sharpness and harshness, so that the name evokes the character by a kind of psychological onomatopoeia.’⁴³ The second function of names in Shakespeare is then, as we have seen, the direct indication of the nature of a character. Names in Errors such as Antipholus, Dromio, Egeon, Pinch and Angelo can be best described as ‘characteronyms’. However, Levin, who discusses this term, is unaware of the fact that the tradition of New Comedy, which contributed greatly to the frequency of such names in Shakespeare's works, is nowhere clearer than in the Latin names Fidele, Perdita, Marina and Miranda in his last plays. Levin merely makes the general remark that the device goes back at least as far as Homer, and then he turns to the morality tradition and to Restoration Comedy.⁴⁴ The third function of Shakespeare's name-giving in Errors is to open up a mythological or classical-humanist perspective in a most subtle way.

If the name Solinus contains specifically humanist implications, then the same is true of Luciana, perhaps the most interesting name in the whole play. I find Levith's attempt to derive ‘Luciana’ from ‘lux’ and to define its meaning as ‘the shining one’⁴⁵ entirely unconvincing; as we shall see, her character in fact is incorrectly described as bright and shining. As the metrical context suggests, the name is to be pronounced Luc-i-ana and not trisyllabically, as in the Italian pronunciation. In his edition, Foakes suggests that Shakespeare may have derived the name from the word Lucina, which, he says, is the name of Apollonius's wife in the medieval romance.⁴⁶ It is true that she is given this name in the title of the Apollonius edition of 1576. Yet we have to be aware of the fact that ‘Lucina’ in classical literature had a precise meaning and could not readily be transferred to another character: it was the cognomen of Juno as the goddess of childbirth, and as such it occurs in the Plautine Aulularia (692) and Truculentus (476) as well as in the Terentian Andria (473) and Adelphoe (478), or to give an example from Renaissance poetry, in Poliziano's Rime Varie.⁴⁷ Shakespeare was certainly aware of this because in his Pericles, based on the romance of Apollonius, he uses this cognomen in its correct sense, when Pericles addresses Juno with these words: ‘Lucina, o / Divinest patroness and midwife gentle’ (III, i, 10-11). It is therefore most unlikely that Shakespeare would have derived ‘Luciana’ from ‘Lucina’, especially because Luciana's status as an unmarried woman does not in the least remind us of ‘Juno Lucina’.

The reason for Shakespeare's choice of this name seems to lie elsewhere. In an age which was particularly language-conscious, it is simply inconceivable that this name was not meant as a deliberate allusion to Lucian, who was esteemed by the Renaissance humanists as one of their favourite authors of late antiquity. It is therefore hardly surprising that Shakespeare included a clear allusion to him in his ‘classical’ comedy. What Lucian meant to Renaissance humanism can only be assessed if his reception by Erasmus and Thomas More is taken into account; and in order to understand the full implications of the direct reference to Lucian, it is necessary to present an outline of the intertextual links between Lucian, the humanists Erasmus, Thomas More, and Shakespeare.

Notes

1. Cf. Baldwin, [T. W.,] Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke [(Urbana, 1944), 2 vols.] and especially Sr. M. Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (New York, 1947).

2. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 12.

3. Tillyard, ibid.

4. For example, in the edition P. Terentii Comoediae Sex elegantissimae cum Donati Commentariis (Basel, 1567); it explains the ‘Idiomata Personarum’ and ‘Ratio Nominum’.

5. Donatus, Commentum Terenti, II, 12.

6. J. L. Calderwood, ‘Elizabethan Naming’ in: Metadrama in Shakespeare's Henriad (Berkeley, 1979), p. 183-220.

7. Cf. Menaechmi, ed. H. Rädle (Stuttgart, 1980), p. 122.

8. J. W. Velz, Shakespeare and the Classical Tradition. A Critical Guide to Commentary, 1660-1960 (Minneapolis, 1968), p. 36.

9. J. Solinus, C. Ivlii Solini Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium, ed. T. Mommsen (Berlin, 1895).

10. Foakes, [R. A. The New Arden Shakespeare (London, 1962)], p. xxx.; Foakes's remark that there is a character called Solinus in Lyly's Campaspe is beside the point because he is so insignificant as to speak only two sentences (ibid.).

11. Op. cit. p. 56; p. 166.

12. For example, op. cit., p. 82.

13. Op. cit., p. 29.

14. Op. cit., p. 63.

15. Op. cit., p. 1.

16. Op. cit., p. 119, 111.

17. Tillyard, op. cit., p. 143.

18. The Aegean Sea occurs, for example, on p. 58; Solinus also mentions a certain Aegaeon Chalcidiensis who has, however, no connection whatsoever with the Shakespearean character. It is true there is an Aegaeon in Claudian's De Raptu Proserpinae, but he is a monstrous giant with a hundred arms (Claudiano, I Rapimento di Proserpina, ed. F. Serpa (Milano, 1981), I, 46, p. 52.

19. Foakes, op. cit., p. 2.

20. Baldwin, [T. W.] Shakspere's Five-Act Structure, [(Urbana, 1947)] p. 696.

21. Foakes, op. cit., p. 2.

22. M. J. Levith, What's in Shakespeare's Names (London/Sydney, 1978), p. 68. It escaped Baldwin's notice that it was Cicero who, in his famous De Amicitia, for the first time translated αντιφιλειν by his newly coined verb ‘redamare’. (W. A. Falconer, ed., Cicero. De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione, The Loeb Classical Library [London/Cambridge, Mass., 1964], p. 160).

23. Baldwin already suspected that ‘Antipho of Terence's Phormio […] is here really to blame for the o interchanged with the final i (Shakspere's Five-Act Structure, p. 696).

24. Cf. chapter IX, note 24.

25. Cf., for example, the editions M. Accii Plauti Sarsinatis Comici Festiuissimi Comoediae XX (Basel, 1535), Plautus Poeta Comicus (Strasbourg, 1508), and Baldwin, Five-Act Structure, p. 695.

26. Foakes, op. cit., p. xxvif.

27. Foakes, op. cit., p. xxviif. Baldwin is not helpful either when he points out that the name Erotes recurs in an obscure work, Nicolaus Wyman's Colymbetes sive De Arte Natandi; he fails to establish any connection between this text and Shakespeare's Errors. (Shakspere's Five-Act Structure, p. 697).

28. On Greek names in Shakespeare cf. J. W. Hales, ‘Shakespeare's Greek Names’, Notes and Essays on Shakespeare (London, 1884), p. 105-119.

29. Erasmus, De Ratione Studii, in: Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, ed. J. C. Margolin (Amsterdam, 1971), I,2,144,9.

30. Levith, op. cit., p. 69.

31. Levith, ibid.

32. Machaut, Le Jugement du Roy de Navarre, quoted in E. F. Shannon, Chaucer and the Roman Poets (Cambridge, 1929), p. 68. Boccaccio has Fiammetta compare her tears to those of ‘Adriana’ in: Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, ed. F. Erbani (Milano, 1988), p. 146f. On the Trecento translation of Heroides cf. S. Brown Meech, ‘Chaucer and an Italian Translation of the Heroides’, PMLA, 45 (1930), 116. On Shakespeare's knowledge of Chaucer see A. Thompson, Shakespeare's Chaucer (Liverpool, 1978).

33. Cf. J. Gower, Confessio Amantis in The English Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay (Oxford, 1901), II, 89.

34. On Chaucer's version of the myth cf. S. Brown Meech, op. cit., 110-28 and B. Harbert, ‘Chaucer and the Latin Classics’ in: Geoffrey Chaucer. Writers and their Background (London, 1974), p. 133-53.

35. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (London, ²1957), p. 512.

36. Ovid. Heroides and Amores, ed. and transl. G. Showerman (Cambridge, Mass./London, 1963).

37. Cf. Shannon, op. cit., p. 67.

38. Foakes, op. cit., p. 16, n. 75.

39. Foakes, op. cit., p. 49, n. 116.

40. On the important motif of transformation in Errors cf. W. C. Carroll, The Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy (Princeton, 1985), p. 63ff.

41. Levith, op. cit., p. 68.

42. Cf. Merry Wives of Windsor, IV,iv,58 and passim.

43. Levin, op. cit., p. 65.

44. Levin, op. cit., p. 55f.

45. Levith, op. cit., p. 69.

46. Foakes, op. cit., p. xxxi.

47. Angelo Poliziano, Poesie Italiane, ed. S. Orlando (Milano, 1976), p. 235.