[In the following essay, Green analyzes the representation of the mother figure within the patriarchal social system of The Comedy of Errors.]

I. MOMMY'S DEAREST

To begin with, we live in a situation in which the consecrated (religious or secular) representation of femininity is subsumed under maternity. Under close examination, however, this maternity turns out to be an adult (male and female) fantasy of a lost continent: what is involved, moreover, is not so much an idealized primitive mother as an idealization of the—unlocalizable—relationship between her and us, an idealization of primary narcissism.¹

In Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors, Antipholus of Syracuse expresses the loss of self to which his alienation from the family, as well as the general family dispersal, has given rise: “So I, to find a mother and a brother, / In quest of them (unhappy), ah, lose myself.”² Joel Fineman suggests the significance of the wandering twin's condition, of his lament and anxiety: “the duality of brothers that generates singularity, along with the mirroring complexity of dual reflexiveness and defused images of the discrete self, is the masculine rephrasing of the original relationship of son and mother, of son and his discovery of an outside world from which he is separated and to which he is attached.”³ But of course the Syracusan Antipholus merely articulates a condition applicable to his Ephesian brother as well. Though Antipholus of Ephesus believes he knows himself and has apparently relied on his connection to the Duke's Corinthian uncle Menaphon, presumably as adoptive father (V. i. 367-68), to ensure his place in the city he calls home, his orphaned state—marked primarily by the missing mother—belies the certainty with which he assumes his share of what these city fathers bestow. His separation—should we say alienation?—from his mother and hence his ignorance of several basic relationships, soon to enter into play, undermine his self-knowledge and his presumption of a secure place in the world. Whereas the Syracusan brother is errant, the Ephesian one is erring.

The Ephesian Antipholus, knowing neither father nor mother, founds himself on the patriarchs (Solinus and Menaphon) and their law; thus, for this merchant and his society, such fatherhood is presumably as valuable as biological paternity. However, as his Syracusan brother's doubt attests, this patrimonial currency is rather inflated. From the very first scene in which he appears the security of his familial and social position is called into question: “What art thou that keeps me out from the house I owe?” (III. i. 42). The Ephesian Antipholus does not yet know what ails him—the uncertainty that gnaws at all his worldly relations. On the other hand, though Antipholus of Syracuse knows his father, this twin looks for and to his mother to resolve his self-doubt but is, “like a drop of water / That in the ocean seeks another drop,” confounded by the world (I. ii. 35-38). Indeed, Coppelia Kahn notes “that he wants to make a mirroring mother” of the brother he is seeking.⁴ It is as if he, like Engels, senses that only a mother knows for sure: “In all forms of group family, it is uncertain who is the father of a child; but it is certain who its mother is.”⁵ Though the family in Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors is not the “group family” described by Engels, the notion that fatherhood is a far less certain matter than motherhood has been a central preoccupation of Western society. Until quite recently, proof of paternity has really depended on a woman's faithfulness and, more to the point, on a man's faith in a woman and her word. In a sense, the far-flung offspring of the monogamous union of Egeon and Emilia are subject to an analogous anxiety about identity: Where did I come from? Who am I?

In this play only the appearance and the word of the mother are able to constitute and confirm the identities of father(s-to-be) and sons, husbands, and brothers. In fact, the play opens with the father as alien and alienated, outcast and doomed. Egeon himself acquiesces in his fate: “Hopeless and helpless doth Egeon wend, / But to procrastinate his liveless end” (I. i. 157-58). Later when he mistakes Antipholus of Ephesus for the twin he had raised in Syracuse, Egeon feels the rejection of a father who has lost his station as head of the family: “perhaps, my son, / Thou sham'st to acknowledge me in misery” (V. i. 321-22). The son's denial casts doubt, albeit in a comic framework, on the “natural” bond between father and son, on the possibility of some “natural” recognition and affection between them. Patriarchal authority and paternal claims to respect are thus subtextually suspect.

Emilia's appearance as deus ex machina in the final scenes provides the maternal link, the key to the family history, the solution to the family plot. She distinguishes twin from twin; instructs all, including her daughter-in-law Adriana, in proper conduct; and, as abbess, sanctions all relations with a godly authority and “gossips' feast” (V. i. 406). Above all, she restores Egeon to his place in society—as husband and father: “Whoever bound him, I will loose his bonds, / And gain a husband by his liberty” (V. i. 339-40). Emilia re-establishes and corroborates—even in the case of the Syracusan son he has raised—Egeon's paternal function; without her, he has no assurance of any family tie.

Perhaps what is most telling in her final appearance (V. i. 330-407) is the effect Emilia has on the two men who might claim some authority, familial and political, over her: they are, in her presence, surprisingly hushed. The “most mighty” Duke Solinus and the amazed Egeon defer to her: the first to corroborate the parallel between Egeon's story and hers; the other to inquire about his long lost son. But in marked contrast to the opening of Act I, they are much quieter; whereas Egeon's interminable tale of woe dominates the opening, the abbess' presence dominates the crucial, albeit mercifully shorter, denouement. In resolving this play's errors, Emilia's word alone can “make full satisfaction” (V. i. 399)—sexual, social, and theatrical.⁶

II. CIRCE'S CUP (V. I. 271)

The mother is never just one person (Freud's error), nor is she ever simply a person.⁷

The young boy is trained in puberty to the point of near madness to live his whole life within the structure of a fictitious before-and-after construct. ‘Once I've had a woman—the woman—then. …’ This ‘then’ covers everything: guilt, fear, uncertainty, feelings of inferiority will all vanish; life will begin; I will be strong; I will defeat my father; I will leave him; my potential will unfold; SHE will belong to me, and I will protect her.⁸

We began with the Syracusan Antipholus' fundamental self-doubt, the remedy for which lies in recovering his mother and, through her, his twin or other self and that other other-self, his wife. But this errant twin, this wandering Syracusan, strays from his intended goal, the search for his maternal origin and mirror image; in The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare digresses from the plot of the original Roman comedy into a romantic love plot. In relying on Plautus' Amphitruo for the doubling of the servants, Shakespeare seems also to have seen the possibility of expanding the role of the wife from Menaechmi⁹ and highlighting the flirtation with infidelity, incestuousness, and, through the introduction of Luciana, love. But this digression is also a repetition, a doubling of another sort. For in the confusion surrounding Adriana's claims on him and his own attraction to Luciana, the Syracusan Antipholus again experiences a loss of self. When he falls in love with Luciana, his words to her suggest that he is willing to surrender any claim to—and any responsibility for—himself: “Are you a god? would you create me new? / Transform me then, and to your power I'll yield” (III. ii. 39-40). Perhaps the most complex moment of attraction occurs when, having called Luciana “mine own self's better part” (III. ii. 61), the Syracusan Antipholus compounds the confusion about which sister he should love by asking Luciana to “Call thyself sister, sweet, for I am thee” (III. ii. 66). In addition to giving himself—like that drop of water in the ocean—over to her, this Antipholus's words transform for an instant his (supposed) sister-in-law into his own sister and, through a nearly simultaneous evocation of the marriage bond, himself into her. As Theweleit notes,¹⁰ desire for the sister is commonly substituted for or associated with desire for the mother. In effect, the love plot and the search for the mother are different versions of the nostalgic yearning for pre-Oedipal union with the mother.

The Ephesian Antipholus' frustration with Adriana—tellingly corroborated by his brother—and his ready substitution of whore('s body) for wife('s body) suggest one aspect of the conflation of sister and mother, of lover and mother, of all women to one woman: the Ephesian twin bases his encounters with all women—and, if his irascibility is any indication, with the world—on what he lacked from one woman, his mother.¹¹ In a related but distinct way, the Syracusan brother responds to love ultimately by suspecting the woman to whom he has surrendered himself—and the whole Ephesian society—of witchcraft: “There's none but witches do inhabit here” (III. ii. 156). The Syracusan Antipholus' alienation from his mother and the basic social and natural bonds she embodies manifests itself in a desire for engulfment, most clearly expressed to Luciana: “Spread o'er the silver waves thy golden hairs / And as a bed I'll take thee, and there lie” (III. ii. 48-49). Yet anxiety about such self-loss, even in love, results in suspicion of Luciana and, by extension, of all women and social entanglements, from the threat of which this twin then seeks to extricate himself: “her fair sister, … / Hath almost made me traitor to myself; / But lest myself be guilty to self-wrong, / I'll stop mine ears against the mermaid's song” (III. ii. 163-64).

III. MAKE ROOM FOR DADDY'S

The most highly evolved and effective form of encoding the earth's body as the body of infinite womanhood seems to consist in the even narrower conceptualization of the body of all women as the body of the mother—incest as a substitute for further exploration.¹²

So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.¹³

To draw the ‘homosocial’ back into the orbit of ‘desire,’ of the potentially erotic, then, is to hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual—a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted.¹⁴

As the comically befuddled Dromio of Syracuse runs from Luce/Nell, he encounters his master and asks: “Am I Dromio? Am I your man? Am I myself?” The Syracusan Antipholus replies affirmatively to all three queries, but the master's answer just doesn't satisfy the man: “I am an ass, I am a woman's man, and besides myself” (III. ii. 73-76). As the parodic potential of the names Luce and Luciana suggests,¹⁵ Shakespeare burlesques in this Dromio's predicament the male paranoia and frustration that characterize the Antipholi, especially in their relations with women. But we also have something more: in a comic inversion of Antipholus' idealizing words to Luciana, which make her “my sole earth's heaven, and my heaven's claim” (III. ii. 64), Dromio makes of the kitchen wench's body a “globe,” another earth to be explored. In his subsequent banter with his master, the Syracusan Dromio claims that he “could find out countries” in Luce/Nell's body. His joke exposes the problem of otherness posed by women (or located in them by men), here figured fundamentally and ultimately in maternal terms,¹⁶ and also manifests the male response to the problem: territorialization, subjugation, exploration, colonization of the female body—and mind. Though a comic servant might have to succumb to the “monstrous” body of a kitchen wench, free men and aristocrats face no such fate.

The complex interplay between male anxieties about the world and about women is most notable in male control over the bodies of women through servitude, prostitution, Pauline marriage, and religion—all of which methods figure in the play. Ironically, in this play Emilia herself reestablishes and fosters familial, social, and even commercial bonds¹⁷ in accordance with male homosocial desire: she reproduces the social fabric that reflects their interests; she even restores the possibility of free trade between Syracuse and Ephesus. (We might wonder if she is the “Elizabeth” of Ephesus, an Elizabeth who at about fifty will suddenly—and thankfully—turn out to have [had] a husband and a doubled offspring: indeed the play may mask an anxiety about succession, figured in the unremarked problem of twin heirs; as John M. Mercer reminds us, the play's first audience may have been the lawyers of Gray's Inn, who “were fascinated by twin-like characters, presumably because of the legal implications of mistaken identity, and fostered a long tradition of plays involving such characters.”¹⁸) Particularly noteworthy in respect to Shakespeare's construction of masculinity is the way in which Emilia has the power to confer identity on the male doubles by turning the women, who are singular despite their sisterhood, into good wives (and mothers—of their new husbands' identities and future offspring). As abbess, she appears endued with divine authority so great that it overwhelms the temporal (and theatrical) power of the Duke. But from whence that authority? From the ultimate Father? And to what end(s)? Finally, unlike the queen, she transfers her submission from God to a husband; thus her powers are subtly circumscribed—not, as in the later case of Prospero, strictly by herself, but by her subjection to another.

The Abbess' near-usurpation of the Ephesian Duke's civil function does suggest that the role of the good wife and mother may be essential to a healthy state—that motherhood precedes and supersedes the state's patriarchal care and may in fact make it possible. In V. i Emilia instructs her daughter-in-law Adriana (and by extension Luciana, who is present) how to bring together the woman's role as wife and as worthy object of sexual desire; she chides Adriana's shrewishness, blames the wife for the husband's “madness” and faults, and counsels patience. But in so doing, she erases all but the bodily differences among all the (“respectable”) women in this play: they are all reduced to good Pauline wives (and eventually mothers). On the other hand, Emilia fosters the differences among the doubled men (their [future] wives' different bodies become the Antipholi's distingushing feature), makes them individual, and restores them to their father. As with many women, Emilia's role as mother implies significant participation in patriarchal structures. As Arthur F. Kinney shows in an analysis of the play's debt to native medieval drama, Emilia may temper the structures of “Justice” and Law with “Mercy”¹⁹ (we may well ask for whom), but she does not undo them.

IV. MEN, MOTHERS, AND THE LAST WORD

What the comedies demonstrate, then, is that in sexuality as in all other cultural constructs, societies are not monologic, but full of ideas, some old or new, some dying and some just born.²⁰

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 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.²¹

Whereas comedy is concerned with unity, adaptation, purposiveness, and harmony, farce is committed to the discontinuous and the dysfunctional.²²

Hennings says of The Comedy of Errors that it is not a farce but a comic “celebration of marriage and the family,” particularly the Anglican doctrine of “affectionate marriage.”²³ Certainly as constructed in this play, Emilia's role and function, though vital, do not constitute a feminist position; even at her most powerful, Emilia serves the ends of male homosocial desire. In fact, there are hints of anxiety about her power, especially the power of her word: the Duke is on hand to corroborate her story's relation to Egeon's and to ratify her resolution of the play's “errors” by agreeing to “gossip at this feast” (V. i. 407); moreover, the last word goes not to the abbess, but to the Dromios. Though their lack of a mother prevents certainty about their origins (which is the elder?) and hence underscores the power of the Antipholi's mother in this play, the final scene privileges the bonds between “brother and brother” (V. i. 425). On the one hand, the shift undermines the Abbess' resolution by slipping almost imperceptibly from the re-constitution of the familial and social order to a world of twin identities and social indeterminacy: “Methinks you are my glass and not my brother” (V. i. 417). As Barbara Freedman has suggested, “The Comedy of Errors proliferates meanings as a means of escaping containment and at the same time generates narratives that seek to effect closure.”²⁴

On the other hand (and yet in line with Freedman's paradox), the conclusion's shift in focus from the abbess to the Dromios may alleviate subtextual anxiety, most evident perhaps in the ambivalence that might well have attended the use of a Catholic figure to resolve the plot, especially if, as Kinney notes, the Abbess and the priory are transformed versions of the courtesan and the Porpentine.²⁵ But if the Elizabethans would take this transformation of courtesan into nun into (good Anglican?) wife as a series of divine displacements, it is hard for us not to see in it the resolution/repression of a nightmare. (In this respect the play may look forward to Measure for Measure, with its Duke-cum-friar and wife-to-be nun.) The all-male mode of production in this comedy, though it does not foreground the boy-actors' cross-dressing, may nonetheless provide some further relief from the theatrical image of female authority. Indeed, behind the staging of The Comedy of Errors may lie theatrically inexpressible fears and wishes about an aging, unmarried queen with no undisputed heir.

The problematic centrality of the mother in this play—the constitution and elision of so powerful a female agency—belies the typically unproblematic descriptions of Emilia, like that of Janet Adelman, as “the benign and purified mother …, in whose presence masculine identity and the family can be safely reconstituted.”²⁶ Rather, in the Abbess of Comedy of Errors, who is both present and absent, both powerful and, as Adelman would say, “occluded,”²⁷ we find hints of the contradictions surrounding maternity in early modern England; as Mary Beth Rose argues, “motherhood was very slowly beginning to be construed as a problematic status, and … the perceived conflicts center on parental power and authority.”²⁸ This early comedy's strange, elliptical representation of motherhood, however positive on the surface, may help to account for the anxiety surrounding subsequent mothers in Shakespeare: Tamora, Gertrude, Lady Macbeth, Volumnia, and Hermione. These figures are impugned because their power, associated in various ways with maternity, somehow contradicts or otherwise unsettles their crucial function (biological, social, theatrical) in a presumably patriarchal social fabric—a function acknowledged, yet only ostensibly celebrated, in Comedy of Errors.

Notes

1. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), 99-118. I quote from p. 99.

2. William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, The Arden Edition, ed. R. A. Foakes (New York and London: Methuen, 1962), pp. 14-15. References to this edition are hereafter cited parenthetically by act, scene, and line numbers, as follows: I. ii. 39-40.

3. Joel Fineman, “Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare's Doubles,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, eds. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 70-104; the quotation is from p. 104.

4. Coppelia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), p. 201.

5. The quotation is taken from p. 99 of the selections from Friedrich Engels' essay on “The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State,” in Feminist Frameworks, eds. Alison M. Jaggar and Paula Rothenberg Struhl (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), pp. 97-107.

6. On the play's “commercial vocabulary,” see Russ Macdonald's “Fear of Farce,” in “Bad” Shakespeare: Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon, ed. Maurice Charney (Rutherford, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 77-90, especially pp. 85-86.

7. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 1, Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans. Stephen Conway, with Erica Carter and Chris Turner (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota, 1987), p. 367.

8. Theweleit, p. 376.

9. For background on the sources, see Foakes' introduction to the Arden edition, pp. xxiv-xxxiv, and appendix I, pp. 109-15.

10. See Theweleit, p. 377.

11. See Theweleit, pp. 367-68.

12. Theweleit, p. 299.

13. Ephesians 5:28.

14. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 1-2.

15. See pp. 99-101 of Thomas P. Hennings' “The Anglican Doctrine of the Affectionate Marriage in The Comedy of Errors,” Modern Language Quarterly, 47 (1986), 91-107.

16. See the passage from Theweleit, p. 299, quoted at the start of this section.

17. See Macdonald, pp. 82-84.

18. See p. 25 of John M. Mercer's “Twin Relationships in Shakespeare,” The Upstart Crow, 9 (1989), 24-39.

19. See Arthur F. Kinney's “Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors and the Nature of Kinds,” Studies in Philology, 85 (1988), 29-52, especially p. 48.

20. Marilyn Williamson, The Patriarchy of Shakespeare's Comedies (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1986), p. 182.

21. Hennings, p. 93.

22. Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), p. 105.

23. See Hennings, p. 93 and passim.

24. Freedman, p. 112.

25. Kinney, p. 44.

26. Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest” (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 9-10.

27. Adelman, p. 10.

28. The quotation is from p. 296 of Mary Beth Rose's “Where Are the Mothers in Shakespeare? Options for Gender Representation in the English Renaissance,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 42 (1991), 291-314.