SOURCE: Van Elk, Martine. “Urban Misidentification in The Comedy of Errors and the Cony-Catching Pamphlets.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 43, no. 2 (2003): 323-46.

[In the following essay, Van Elk relates instances of “misidentification” in The Comedy of Errors to the deliberate trickery represented in Elizabethan rogue literature.]

In Plautus's Menaechmi, the slave Messenio cautions his master, the traveling twin who has just arrived in Epidamnus, about the dangers that lurk in the city: “among the people of Epidamnus are the most outrageous voluptuaries and drinkers; besides, very many slanderers and flatterers live there; then, the whores of no other races are said to speak with a more flattering tongue.”¹ In translating the text for an early modern English audience, William Warner makes Messenio's warning more specific to English interests. His Messenio calls Epidamnus, “a place of outragious expences, exceeding in all ryot and lasciviousnesse: and (I heare) as full of Ribaulds, Parasites, Drunkards, Catchpoles, Cony-catchers, and Sycophants, as it can hold: then for Curtizans, why here's the currantest stamp of them in the world.”² In the following scene, where Plautus's Messenio warns his master of “sycophanta” (slanderers), Warner's translation has Messenio impress on Menaechmus the possibility that the inhabitants of the city are “cony-catching villaines.”³ And again, toward the end of the act, when Plautus's slave wants to know if his master will fall for the lures of Erotium so quickly, Warner's Messenio asks if Menaechmus will be “conycatcht thus wilfully.”⁴ Warner's translation reflects early modern concerns: he reproduces Plautus's catalogue but includes to his readership familiar figures, from “Catchpoles” (tax collectors suspected of trickery) to cony catchers. By repeatedly replacing the more general notions of slander and flattery with the historically and culturally specific idea of cony catching, associated with early modern urban life, his translation summons up a range of popular narratives and texts and establishes a contemporary context for this Roman comedy.

The importance of the theme of cony catching (or trickery by rogues and vagabonds) to the Elizabethans is attested to by the numerous reprints of the cony-catching pamphlets and rogue texts by Robert Greene and others. Printed in 1595, Warner's translation came out a few years after the reading public had seen the first publication of the popular cony-catching pamphlets by Greene in the early 1590s, which thrive on scenes of misidentification.⁵ When Shakespeare chose Plautus as his source for The Comedy of Errors, he was not the first to do so at a time when cony-catching texts were being widely read. Jack Juggler, the anonymous adaptation of Amphitruo, was composed close to the publication of Gilbert Walker's famous A Manifest Detection of Dice-Play (1555) and entered in the Stationers' Register in 1562, the year after the publication of John Awdeley's The Fraternity of Vagabonds (1561).⁶ With a trickster-rogue in the title role, the interlude is a successful example of the adaptation of a Plautine plot to an English setting—“Englishing” the Roman comedy—by blending classical material with rogue literature. Jack Juggler and Warner's translation make clear that an early modern audience, familiar with rogue texts and cony-catching narratives, could see a close link between unintentional misidentification and the possibility of cony catching. While The Comedy of Errors features no intentional deception (as do Jack Juggler and Amphitruo), it is important that Shakespeare selected the Plautine plays at a time when his audience had been avidly reading these stories of trickery.

This essay argues that The Comedy of Errors should be seen not only as Shakespeare's rewriting of a classical source, but also as a text that enters into a dialogue with the cony-catching pamphlets. It is not my purpose to uncover a hitherto ignored source for Shakespeare's play. Instead, I aim to establish an intertextual relationship between the play and these texts because Shakespeare's reworking of Plautus's comedies of misidentification and the popularity of the rogue literature point to the importance of misidentification as a cultural fascination.⁷ Shakespeare certainly read the cony-catching pamphlets at some stage in his career—much later, he would use them to create the character of Autolycus in The Winter's Tale.⁸ This early comedy interacts with the pamphlets in a deeper way, by speaking to the same social issues and appealing to the widespread interest in misidentification, even though it is intentional in the latter and unintentional in the former. In this essay, I propose that reading the scenes of misidentification in The Comedy of Errors in conjunction with the rogue literature enables a more historically informed assessment of the play's use of misidentification because it is placed within the context of the larger cultural interest of the 1590s in this subject. By reading the play alongside the pamphlets, we can further our understanding of the early modern fascination with processes of identification and see how Shakespeare's and Greene's scenes of misidentification work as complex, creative, and entertaining contributions to an early modern conversation on the social order.⁹

Identification is a crucial measure of the social order and the permeability of class and gender boundaries. When it becomes impossible to tell who someone is (regardless of whether the other is deceiving you intentionally or not), it is clear that the mechanisms that keep individuals in their rightful place have broken down. Like Greene, Shakespeare offers a spectrum of social positions from which misidentification is experienced, hence his additions to the basic plot of Menaechmi, which include not only the servant twins, but also scenes from the adultery plot in Amphitruo and a much more elaborate account of the wife's experience of misidentification. Moreover, the focus of the comedy is shifted from the underpinning of the individual's position to the expectations and assumptions that make misidentification possible and thus undermine the social order more generally. Beyond the issue of intention, these early modern texts show misidentification to be rooted in the nature of social exchange and the social constructions of self and other that come into play in encounters with fellow city dwellers. In widening his scope to include these larger questions, Shakespeare departs from his classical source to appeal to the concerns of his audience. Like the cony-catching pamphlets, the play addresses a basic anxiety about meeting fellow inhabitants of the city, one that had a specific resonance in the theater, as many contemporary warnings about the presence of cutpurses, pickpockets, and cony catchers in the audience testify.¹⁰ We cannot treat readers and playgoers as a homogeneous group or speak with any degree of certainty about their responses to these texts. Yet, it seems clear that the subject must have struck a chord with those who lived in a city that was growing at an unprecedented rate and who experienced the effects of vast historical and economic changes, such as urban growth and the emergence of new forms of trade, on social exchange.

Both The Comedy of Errors and the cony-catching pamphlets scrutinize the codes that rule social exchange, making them look random and artificial, to reveal and reflect on the extent to which subjectivity may be socially constructed. These works demonstrate that social identity, on which order depends, is not fixed, divinely ordained, or natural, but open to usurpation, theft, loss, or exchange. They show that the expectations and assumptions with which early moderns encountered one another were capable of being misapplied to individuals and therefore might be seen as conventional or arbitrary. Misidentification in these texts locates a problem in the nature of the constructions of self and other necessary to proper identification. Neither the comedy nor the pamphlets ultimately offer solutions to this problem—instead these texts simply present it and employ a set of rhetorical strategies to ease their reader's resulting sense of alienation from the city. The rogue texts by Greene and others demonize the rogue-trickster, suggesting that the social disruption caused by the vulnerability of identification can be avoided by isolating, properly identifying, and punishing the rogue. Shakespeare relies on the anomaly of the twin body to assume a lack of devious intention. For his conclusion, he draws on romance narratives, which end happily when the parties to the misidentifications confidently reassume their rightful position in the social structure. But these strategies do not eradicate apprehension about life in the city; the self-conscious nature of these containing gestures suggests that identification in general continues to be a problem. In retaining a sense of ambiguity about the city, these texts reveal that the social order, always on the verge of being disrupted, relies on verbal exchange, which is itself impeded by cultural expectations—the notions of self and other that prevent misidentification from being detected.

While rogue literature was long seen primarily as sensationalist hackwork, useful only as a source for historical information about the London underworld, it has in recent years become the subject of serious critical attention even as it has come to be seen as primarily fictional rather than historical. Linda Woodbridge's Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature gives rogue literature a place within a series of different discourses, including emerging forms of civility, nationhood, the reformation, humanism, and, in literary terms, the jest book tradition.¹¹ Craig Dionne also places these pamphlets at the heart of the historical transitions of the period, discussing their ideological function in relation to the emergence of capitalism and the social mobility of the rising merchant class.¹² According to Dionne, the task of the rogue books was to objectify the rogue in order to “solidify a consensus among readers who were starting to feel what might be called the weight of historical transition.”¹³ At the same time, he argues, the books bring to light a disturbing similarity between the trickster-rogue and the self-made gentleman: “Ironically, the otherness of underworld villainy gives voice to the anxieties of a social disruption brought about by the very practices that empowered London's new corporate class: self-advancement through histrionic manipulation of the social and linguistic registers of court and state.”¹⁴ The trickster's acting talent, then, problematizes the notion of social position in a larger sense, making social mobility a permanent possibility and a threat to the respectable members of the commonwealth. From a highly theoretical perspective, Bryan Reynolds treats this performativity as evidence of the rogue's “transversal power,” a power that enables the rogue to move between different subject territories and that genuinely disrupts the attempts on the part of the state to maintain order.¹⁵

The rogue books present the trickster's mutability as a consequence of his capacity to orchestrate “chance” encounters in the streets of London. In the simplest version of the trickster story, the sturdy vagabond simply pretends to be a licensed beggar, making a mockery of the Elizabethan legal system of licenses, passports, briefs, and badges, which was supposed to distinguish the deserving from the undeserving poor.¹⁶ Many rogues in these books carry false papers, which have to be scrutinized as carefully as the beggar's appearance before they can be taken as evidence of identity. In A Caveat for Common Cursitors (1566), Thomas Harman recounts a meeting with a “dummerer,” a vagabond who pretends to be incapable of speech. On being given the beggar's license, Harman subjects it to close observation and finds one of the seals “like unto a seal I had about me, which seal I bought besides Charing Cross, that I was out of doubt it was none of those gentlemen's seals that had subscribed; and, having understanding before of their peevish practices, made me to conceive that all was forged and nought.”¹⁷ The material nature of legal proof of identity has made it commercially available, for sale at Charing Cross, a situation that should make readers feel uncomfortable. But the cony catchers' defiance of the law goes further than that. Tricksters are even able to enlist the representatives of the law in their elaborate schemes. In one of Greene's pamphlets, A Disputation Between a He Cony-Catcher and a She Cony-Catcher (1592), the male trickster tells a story of a group of cony catchers who start a lawsuit against a farmer they aim to rob of his purse. Bringing a number of sergeants into St. Paul's Cathedral to arrest the victim, an accomplice pretends to protect the cony and starts a brawl, calling on the apprentices for help. Once the fight is over and there has been ample opportunity for cutting the purse, the trickster who started the suit simply claims to have misidentified the cony and drops the case.¹⁸

In The Comedy of Errors, the law is shown to be equally inept at controlling the city by means of identification. Antipholus of Syracuse is told, upon entering Ephesus, that he can escape the death penalty ordered for Syracusians by following the advice to “give out” that he is from Epidamium.¹⁹ The mechanisms that should protect the city's trade and prevent alien intrusion into the city are being undermined from within by the anonymous merchant. He is of course the very person whose interests are supposedly protected by the Ephesian law, which condemns Egeon in the opening scene for coming from Syracuse, the city that has mistreated Ephesian merchants. When the chaos intensifies, the ineffective sergeant, who is not in the source texts, comes to stand for the law in Ephesus. His actions are so fully determined by the exchange of money that Adriana is able to take legal control over her husband. As in the case of the cony catchers, the gullible representative of the law furthers disorder by assisting Adriana as she tries to rob the respectable citizen-twin of his place in society. Where in Plautus it is the father of the wife who attempts to have his son-in-law committed, in The Comedy of Errors, Adriana is in charge of a motley crew of assailants, which includes her sister, Pinch, and the courtesan. This helps create the impression of general disorder, which, as in the pamphlets, implicates those who should uphold the law. The treatment that Antipholus of Ephesus receives at the hands of the sergeant shows, as one of Greene's notorious villains, Cuthbert Cony-Catcher, puts it, that “men are valued by their wealth, not by their virtues” in an urban, mercantile environment.²⁰

This assessment is confirmed when Antipholus of Syracuse encounters the city at large. Innocently walking the streets of Ephesus, he discovers what it means to be a well-established merchant:

There's not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend,
And everyone doth call me by my name:
Some tender money to me, some invite me;
Some other give me thanks for kindnesses;
Some offer me commodities to buy.
Even now a tailor call'd me in his shop,
And show'd me silks that he had bought for me,
And therewithal took measure of my body.

(IV.iii.1-9)

Without realizing it, Antipholus of Syracuse gives a concise image of the daily enactment of social recognition within the urban space. The speech denaturalizes social recognition, making clear that position depends on repeated identification (saluting, calling by name) and exchange of material goods. The citizen's place in the social hierarchy is performed, confirmed, and enhanced by the circulation of money and objects either in the form of trade or through hospitality. His measures are taken for the purpose of providing the merchant with the silk clothing that represents his rank and wealth. The physicality of the citizen's engagement with the city and the need for constant confirmation through proper identification suggest that his reputation and position are undermined on the basis of the material aspects of social being. His domestic and social relationships are all given tangible presence in the play (in the form of food, the chain, the purse, and the rope), so that much like other objects, mercantile identity is capable of being stolen.²¹

As a matter of course, rogue books tell us, material signs of identity must be treated with a great deal of suspicion. The tricksters' unexplained access to different types of clothes, for instance, means that they can take on any type of social position. Like players on the stage, they can choose to present themselves as gentlemen or country rustics, upwardly and downwardly mobile at will. Even their appearance as beggars is forged, requiring elaborate dressing up, as in the case of Harman's favorite trickster, the counterfeit crank Nicholas Jennings, alias Blunt.²² Exposure happens in the case of Jennings by stripping him naked to reveal his sturdy body, eliminating the costume that has fooled the eyes of his victims. Only the most expert observation makes the discovery of the true nature of the rogue a possibility. In a more complicated falsification of material evidence, a trickster in The Third and Last Part of Cony-Catching (1592) introduces himself as a cousin to a maidservant who moved to London at a young age, so that he can burgle the house of her master. As a masterstroke, he earns the family's trust by sending a gift of bacon and cheese, “with inscription accordingly on it, that it could not be discerned but that some unskilful writer in the country had done it, both by the gross proportion of the letters, as also the bad orthography, which amongst plain husbandmen is very common, in that they have no better instruction.”²³ Cony catchers forge the material and social signifiers of identity, based on their knowledge of the evidence that serves to establish and confirm identity, class, and geographic origin. In highlighting this aspect of their deceit, the cony-catching pamphlets reveal, as does The Comedy of Errors, that ordinary social exchange relies on material objects and evidence that can be falsified.

While the material evidence of identity ties the play to the trickster narratives, both move beyond this topic to explore social exchange more generally. In the case of the play, the question of apparel, which would make the sumptuary laws a highly pertinent context, is relevant to the merchant's position, but not to the confusion of the twins. Anne Barton has remarked that this is typical of “that cloud-cuckoo-land of farce,” which allows playwrights to leave threads hanging in the interest of comedy.²⁴ Yet, in the more farcical Jack Juggler the question of duplicate clothing is explicitly addressed. When Jack decides to take the servant Jenkin Careaway's place, he announces to the audience,

This garments—cape and all other geare
That now you see apon me here—
I have doon oon all like unto his.(25)

The evidence of identity that causes confusion in Shakespeare is the material evidence of the twin body, but the process of sustained misidentification is more complex than a concentration on the materiality of identity would suggest. This is also the case in the cony-catching pamphlets—the rogue's ability to trick his victims is only partly based on his access to the material signs of social position. Greene uses the slippery figure of the rogue to depict, like Shakespeare, the disruption of all aspects of social exchange.

More threatening than his ability to manipulate his appearance is the trickster's counterfeit familiarity. The cony catcher may compel misidentification of himself by correctly identifying the cony. Cony catchers frequently present themselves as a relative or a friend of a friend to gain the trust of the cony, often an unsuspecting newcomer to the city. The cony, who expects no such treatment in London, is falsely comforted by finding social relations in the city seeming to be what they are in the country. As Katharine Eisaman Maus has remarked, “Greene's coseners self-consciously exploit rustic modes of identity formation based upon kinship relations, reputation among one's neighbors, and reciprocal acts of hospitality. They counterfeit social intimacy with one for whom that intimacy involves obligations.”²⁶ In the elaborate form of cony catching known in beggar's cant as “Barnard Law,” the cony is deliberately misidentified so that the cony catcher can begin a brief conversation in which the aim is to find out the cony's identity.²⁷ The information gathered thus is passed on to an accomplice who accosts the cony and addresses him by name, to take on the role of an acquaintance.

Maus discusses only the cheating of travelers from the country, but city dwellers are equally prone to this type of deception. Greene tells his readers of a particularly spectacular case of deceit of a lawyer in St. Paul's Cathedral, so remarkable that the trickster, the title tells us, thereafter “Scorned the Name of a Cony-Catcher, and would Needs be Termed a Fool-Taker, as Master and Beginner of that New-Found Art.”²⁸ The cony catcher and his female friend have their sights set on the lawyer's large purse. The “drab” has cheated the man before, but this does not mean she is found out. Instead, it enables her to greet him by name, to pretend to have been sent to him for legal counsel by a mutual friend. While the victim is talking to her, her friend makes it possible for her to cut the purse:

The time serving fit for the fellow's purpose, he came behind the gentleman, and, as many times one friend will familiarly with another, clap his hands over his eyes to make him guess who he is, so did this companion, holding his hands fast over the gentleman's eyes, said, “Who am I?” twice or thrice, in which time the drab had gotten the purse and put it up. The gentleman, thinking it had been some merry friend of his, reckoned the names of three or four, when, letting him go, the crafty knave, dissembling a bashful shame of what he had done, said: “By my troth, sir, I cry ye mercy. As I came in at the church door, I took ye for such a one (naming a man), a very friend of mine, whom you very much resemble.”²⁹

The moment enacts literally the blinding that is essential to cony catching. Inevitably, cony catchers succeed not merely because of their appearance but because their familiar gestures and phrases blind the cony to their unfamiliar appearance. The trickster's question “Who am I?” is a crucial one—rather than realizing that he has no answer for it, the cony believes that the question itself proves that this has to be a friend. As is the case with appearance and outward evidence of identity, words become untrustworthy signifiers of familiarity.

The rogues and vagabonds are experts at improvising and controlling the impression they make on others while keeping the cony tied to his own social position. The cony cannot observe the other as the cony catcher does, and, because he is himself identified correctly, fails to question the signs of identity with which the cony catcher presents him. The basic difference that enables the deception is that the cony takes convention for granted and sees it as a natural, transparent sign of inward truth, whereas the cony catcher sees convention as artificial, a construction that can be twisted for the purpose of making a profit. The trickster, in other words, sees familial and social relationships as capable of being performed. The narrators of these pamphlets logically testify that, although the underworld has its own hierarchies and structures that mirror the world of legality, the rogue's own personal relationships are primarily sexual, transient, and meaningless. The vagabonds use their outsider's knowledge of social relations only for the purpose of subverting them.³⁰ In recounting these narratives, the authors of the rogue books invite their readers to think about the constructedness of their own relationships, conventions, and expectations. Such awareness is in part what must have made reading these pamphlets a pleasurable as well as frightening experience. It allows readers to contemplate the possibility that normality is not natural and fixed but a simple set of codes that can be divorced from their correct context and are prone to subversion and performance.³¹

This implicit subject of the cony-catching pamphlets is central to The Comedy of Errors. The play begins with the unlikely premise of the undetected presence of twins, a feature that requires the audience's suspension of disbelief and is only important insofar as it allows for sustained confusion. From there, the play turns its focus to that which allows misidentification and confusion to persist, what Joel Altman calls, “the conjectures and affirmations upon which people act.”³² The cony-catching pamphlets give careful accounts of how the tricksters proceed in order to give readers the distance with which to reflect on the mechanics of everyday exchange. Defamiliarization happens in The Comedy of Errors by having the audience be aware of the source of confusion throughout, so that it is capable of reading every utterance in two ways: in accordance with the speaker's intention and with the hearer's interpretation. Normal utterances are placed out of context by having them spoken to or by the wrong twin. This means that the audience can begin to think of the mechanisms of exchange as artificial, prone to disruption and usurpation. Simple, customary gestures, from placing your hands over a friend's eyes as a joke to telling your husband to come in for dinner, are perverted in these narratives and, instead of confirming and enhancing social relationships, begin to destroy them. In short, misdirection leads to the unsettling of social position and has, in all these texts, a larger, disruptive effect on the social order.

Shakespeare's choice to make misidentification unintentional does not shift his subject substantially away from that of the cony-catching pamphlets (or from Amphitruo). Instead, it complicates the issue: now everyone is both cony catcher and cony, depending on one's perspective. Misidentification causes a rapid switching between social positions. For instance, Adriana is both an alluring temptress who tries to trick a traveler and a loyal wife who mistakenly invites an impostor into her house. In order to explain the strange words of the other, all fall back on a set of easy and inherently flawed assumptions about the other. This suggests that generally accepted, conventional modes of understanding the other cause a “blindness” to the other's true identity, much in the way that normal expectations about the ways in which social relationships are maintained cause the cony's inability to detect trickery. Thus, Shakespeare's avoidance of the trickster's agency builds on the trickery in the cony-catching pamphlets of the 1590s and highlights even further the insidious nature of the causes of misidentification.

The unconscious movement between positions is most obvious in the case of Antipholus of Syracuse. In spite of his own ignorance of the effects of his presence, the parallel with the cony-catching intruder into households and relationships is maintained in terms of the social disruption he causes.³³ At the same time, his confusion shows him to be the victim of misidentification. Entering the city as a Syracusian, he is in immediate danger, and it remains unclear whether he will follow up on the anonymous merchant's suggestion to pretend to be from Epidamium. His intention becomes irrelevant as he turns out to be already identified as a familiar and is therefore positioned in the role of the trickster by the Ephesian response to his presence. His physical resemblance to one of Ephesus's most respected citizens provides him with a watertight disguise from which he unintentionally makes a profit.³⁴ Becoming what seems to be a contradiction in terms, an unintentional trickster, Antipholus loses his grip on the world around him. He wavers between questioning himself, which opens up the possibility of becoming a trickster, and condemning the devious city around him, the type of response taught to the readers of cony-catching pamphlets. Immediately after the merchant has advised him to hide his true identity, the traveler expresses his loss of self in the famous “drop of water” speech (I.ii.33-40). Traveling into Ephesus, he is bereft of the relationships that anchor identity and finds himself, due to the legal limitations imposed on those who enter, in a state of fluidity, the position from which tricksters and rogues operate. This form of cony catching is even more difficult to control than conventional cony catching because it is the result of the innocent responses of others rather than the devious intention of the trickster.

From the first moment of misidentification, when Dromio of Ephesus tells the man he thinks is his master that he has to come home for lunch, Antipholus of Syracuse is turned into an unintentional trickster who sees himself as the innocent victim of the alien city. Like the unsuspecting countryman who enters London, ripe for gulling by devious urban rogues, he finds himself subject to unanticipated obligations: without his cooperation an entire household is in disarray. The first scene of misidentification grants Antipholus a radically new status of responsibility in unfamiliar social territory, an experience appropriately described as “uncanny” by Barbara Freedman.³⁵ Social historians of the period have chartered the many changes undergone by those who passed from the single to the married state. David Cressy has stressed the extent of the transformation involved: “Marriage assigned new privileges, advantages, and obligations. It redefined social and sexual roles, rearranged patriarchal obligations, and conferred new duties of status, authority, and dependency.”³⁶ Antipholus of Syracuse undergoes this transformation in a matter of minutes by means of misidentification. The false familiarity created by the cony catcher in Greene becomes the imposed familiarity of servant, wife, and sister-in-law, made threatening and supernatural. In both cases, a perverted familiarity destroys social relationships rather than validating and confirming them.

Antipholus's first response to his misidentification by Dromio of Ephesus contradicts his later sense of self-loss; it articulates his self-representation as victim rather than trickster. Bewildered, he remembers the city's reputation:

They say this town is full of cozenage:
As nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,
Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,
Soul-killing witches that deform the body,
Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,
And many such-like liberties of sin.

(I.ii.97-102)

The lines recall Messenio's warnings about the “Ribaulds, Parasites, Drunkards, Catchpoles, Cony-catchers, and Sycophants” in Warner. Antipholus's speech lists different dissemblers and brings to mind the catalogues of tricksters in the rogue pamphlets, referring to the liberties, where many of these figures were said to reside. As Alexander Leggatt has noted, Shakespeare adds the supernatural to Plautus's (and Warner's) version of the speech.³⁷ Antipholus's hostility toward the city is part of the play's examination of various types of social constructions of others that prevent effective exchange between different people. In drawing this conclusion, Antipholus sets up boundaries around the fluid self of his earlier drop-of-water speech and redefines his position in the corrupt urban environment, but it also keeps him from detecting the source of the confusion.

The confrontation with Adriana and Luciana emphasizes the destabilizing effect of misidentification on all the parties involved. Gradually, Antipholus edges closer to becoming aware of the advantages to being a cony catcher. Again, his responses to the situation are complex, ranging from a curious willingness to enter and dine with the unknown women (reminding us of his lack of response to the merchant's advice early on) to a sense of self-loss and a rejection of the other. He openly contemplates becoming a trickster when he is invited to do so, he thinks, by Luciana. On the edge of accepting his new identity, he retreats when he realizes that her invitation to betray himself is a threat to the core of his being, his “soul's pure truth” (III.ii.37). Faced with the self-loss that is a consequence of the imposition of the trickster role, Antipholus reconstructs his sense of self by claiming the opposite role of victim to the evil temptations of the female other. For Antipholus, the speeches of the women are adulterous, as he tries to probe the “folded meaning of your words' deceit” (III.ii.36).³⁸ The traveler's fears of the city and its “prating” mountebanks and the witches who “deform the body” seem to have come true: misdirected talk leads to a “deformation” of his body in the sense that another's name, and therefore another set of obligations, is attached to it.

Cony-catching pamphlets prominently feature female prostitutes and lovers of cony catchers who use devious language to trick their victims. A Disputation Between a He Cony-Catcher and a She Cony-Catcher is supposed to determine, according to the title page, “whether a Theefe or a Whoore, is most hurtfull in Cousonage, to the Common-wealth.” Greene leaves us with little doubt as to the outcome of the debate. Female cony catchers are clearly more dangerous, as even the male cony catcher admits: “you do it with more art than we men do, because of your painted flatteries and sugared words that you flourish rhetorically like nets to catch fools.”³⁹ The female cony catcher presents her language as supernatural, on a par with the fears of Antipholus of Syracuse. She points out that from a male cony catcher, the cony only needs to fear the loss of his purse, but in the case of a female cony catcher much more is at stake:

[I]f he fall into the company of a whore, she flatters him, she inveigles him, she bewitcheth him, that he spareth neither goods nor lands to content her, that is only in love with his coin. If he be married, he forsakes his wife, leaves his children, despiseth his friends, only to satisfy his lust with the love of a base whore, who, when he hath spent all upon her and he brought to beggary, beateth him out like the prodigal child, and for a small reward, brings him, if to the fairest end, to beg, if to the second, to the gallows, or at the last and worst, to the pox, or as prejudicial diseases.⁴⁰

Beggary, usually the cony's ultimate fate, is only the least of the terrible outcomes of an encounter with a female trickster. In any case, the effect of female trickery is not only social, financial, and spiritual, but also physical degeneration. Bewitching happens through sexual attraction, but also, importantly, through language. The women's speeches to Antipholus of Syracuse are from the perspective of the traveler marked by inexplicable, dark, violent language, containing the threat to his “soul's pure truth” that follows from exchange with the “Soul-killing witches” (I.ii.100). Without knowing it, the women do what the female cony catcher describes as a common practice: “we straight insinuate into his company, and claim acquaintance of him by some means or other.”⁴¹ That Antipholus of Syracuse is bewitched is clear: he asks Luciana to transform him and invites the complete loss of self in the other that he fears when first misidentified. Lorna Hutson suggests that Luciana's attempt to persuade Antipholus to hide his true feelings for her, “dissociates the figure of the rhetorically mobile imposter, the supposed husband, from the threat of sexual betrayal, and relocates that threat in the indiscreet or involuntary ambiguous implication of a woman's words.”⁴² But I would argue that along with the emphasis on female sexual betrayal, Antipholus himself does remain associated with adultery, as the source for these scenes, Plautus's Amphitruo, suggests. Both the “imposter” and the woman are innocent in intent but adulterous in terms of the effect of their misdirected words. It is not so much that Luciana's words let Antipholus off the hook as that misidentification places both in sexually suspect positions that put their essential selves in danger.

Dromio of Syracuse's misidentification parallels that of his master. Where Antipholus is summoned to live up to the obligations of a respectable householder, Dromio is called on to obey the sexual demands of Luce.⁴³ Luce's knowledge of Dromio's body is more invasive than the town's inexplicable awareness of the names of the travelers: “this drudge or diviner laid claim to me, call'd me Dromio, swore I was assur'd to her, told me what privy marks I had about me, as the mark of my shoulder, the mole in my neck, the great wart on my left arm, that I, amaz'd, ran from her as a witch” (III.ii.140-3). The signs that distinguish the body from all others, conventionally revealed in recognition scenes to herald the misidentified person's renewed acceptance into the social order, are here prematurely disclosed. This seemingly supernatural knowledge of the servant's body confirms the travelers' prejudice about the city and the women in it, allowing Antipholus to conclude that “none but witches do inhabit here” (III.ii.156). Having learned to attribute their own confusion to the seductions of the city, Antipholus and his slave wander through Ephesus like knights in a romance tale, ready to do battle with the powers that besiege them. Following his meeting with the courtesan, Antipholus proceeds, according to the 1623 Folio stage direction, to walk around “with his rapier drawn” (at IV.iv.143). By means of projecting his fears of losing the self outward, Antipholus maintains his own sense of self, but also prevents communication with the women, which could bring about a resolution to the confusion.

The fact that ordinary exchange is capable of generating such chaos accounts for what happens in all of the relationships between social superiors and inferiors in the play. From the female perspective, Antipholus's refusal to recognize Adriana is evidence of his refusal to recognize the social obligations of marriage. The suspicion of adultery on both sides, then, impedes exchange throughout where Adriana is involved. It intensifies the confusion, whereas actual adultery in Amphitruo turns out to have no serious repercussions. The citizen-twin, who values public recognition over his familial duties, consistently refers to the category of his wife's shrewishness to render her words meaningless.⁴⁴ Dromio of Syracuse is allowed to joke with his master in conversations in which linguistic competition opens up a small space for social equality. But this also means that his speeches, so important to the traveler who depends on him for safekeeping of his money, can be deprived of their ostensible meaning. Dromio of Ephesus is misunderstood for less complex reasons. His master simply believes him to be incapable of understanding and following orders. The Dromios themselves always suppose that their masters are either joking or testing them, so they never question their incomprehensible responses. All these relationships, which turn out to be crucial in maintaining order in general, are undermined by the very assumptions and expectations that normally structure them, but prevent effective exchange. Misidentification is thematically linked with different types of misjudgments. Its pervasive effect on how the individuals involved see themselves points to the artificiality and random nature of subjectivity.

In The Comedy of Errors, social assumptions about others allow for a false interpretation of their words and thus further the chaos rather than ending it. As in the cony-catching pamphlets, misidentification is associated with exchange between men and women, travelers and city dwellers, servants and masters. Generally acceptable modes of understanding the other obscure the other's true identity and create a situation in which disruption of relationships becomes a permanent possibility. The effect on the social order at large is a general social mobility of which the source goes undiscovered. The downward mobility of the citizen, accused of greed, madness, and adultery, provides a mirror image of the traveler's unintended and misunderstood upward mobility. Significantly, the character threatened with downward mobility is the seemingly established Ephesian, while the traveler is repeatedly offered the rewards associated with upward mobility. His entrance into the city, as deceptive outsider mistaken for insider, shows that social position lacks firm grounding, for the citizen but also for Adriana. The uncertainty of Adriana's position is evident when her husband denounces her publicly as a “Dissembling harlot” (IV.iv.101) and her friends as her “customers” (IV.iv.60). As a consequence of misidentification and the assumption of wifely shrewishness, Adriana and the courtesan are conflated in this moment of “misidentification” by Antipholus of Ephesus, in spite of the absence of adultery.

The outcome of the trickster's intrusion into settled relationships is similar. The rogue pamphlets reveal the position of the most respectable citizens to be unstable, and those at opposite ends of the spectrum become interchangeable. The rogue texts go to great lengths to demonstrate that by means of deception, the vagabond threatens to turn his gullible victim, whether gentleman, yeoman, apprentice, farmer, or practitioner of any other profession, into a beggar. Most of the authors of these works present their writings as a warning to those who might be brought to ruin by tricksters and are in danger of losing their jobs, inheritance, and accumulated wealth. In A Notable Discovery of Cozenage (1591), Greene tells his readers of numerous cases in which young gentlemen are eventually “versed … to the beggar's estate.”⁴⁵ The effect of misidentification is, as in The Comedy of Errors, a swapping of position between outsider and insider: the trickster's victim ultimately descends into vagrancy while the trickster achieves social respectability.

More importantly, both the cony-catching pamphlets and Shakespeare's play highlight the extent to which the social order is already unstable, enabling the trickery and confusion to generate such (near-) disastrous results so easily. The readers and playgoers are reminded that the sources of instability are more pervasive than might seem at first sight. In The Comedy of Errors, the assumptions and expectations that are a part of everyday engagement with others destabilize social positions and undermine exchange, preventing correct assessment of the identity of the other, as they do in the cony-catching pamphlets. In other words, The Comedy of Errors, with its lack of intentional deceit, and the pamphlets, with their deliberate trickery, derive their comic effects from the extent to which individuals act upon limited assumptions and are subject to social constructions of self and other. Whereas these assumptions work by themselves to harm communication in the play, they are strategically deployed in the pamphlets to catch the unsuspecting citizens off guard. The possibility of social disruption is in each a consequence of the beliefs and codes that organize exchange.

The authors of these texts show disorder to be an inevitable part of city life. The readers of Greene's The Third and Last Part of Cony-Catching are told that “this famous City is pestered with the like or rather worse kind of people, that bear outward show of civil, honest, and gentlemanlike disposition, but in very deed their behaviour is most infamous to be spoken of.”⁴⁶ England's peace, Greene asserts, is only a surface matter. This claim alienates the Londoner (or Londoner-to-be) from his urban environment, instead of being made to feel a part of it. It is the opposite result of what Dionne sees as the ostensible task of these pamphlets, which is to create a social consensus in the face of change. One of the cheaters in Walker's A Manifest Detection of Dice-Play emphasizes the similarities between himself and more respectable members of the commonwealth. Enumerating the ways in which each social station relies in some way or other on deceit, he famously concludes that, “Whoso hath not some anchorward way to help himself, but followeth his nose, as they say, always straight forward, may well hold up the head for a year or two, but the third he must needs sink and gather the wind into beggars' haven.”⁴⁷ The idea is echoed, in the same, plagiarized words, by a cony catcher in Greene's A Notable Discovery of Cozenage.⁴⁸

Greene's commercial acumen must have told him that this sentiment was a popular one, for his honest and dishonest characters stress it repeatedly. His Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592) has honest Cloth-breeches reject many of the representatives of England's different professions as jury members for his trial because of their tendency to cheat innocent citizens to make money. The Defence of Cony-Catching (1592), written under the penname of Cuthbert Cony-Catcher, argues at length for the pervasiveness of cony catching. Cuthbert faults “R. G.” for his unjust emphasis on rogues: “You decipher poor cony-catchers, that perhaps with a trick at cards win forty shillings from a churl that can spare it, and never talk of those caterpillars that undo the poor, ruin whole lordships, infect the commonwealth, and delight in nothing but in wrongful extorting and purloining of pelf, when as such be the greatest cony-catchers of all.”⁴⁹ The logical conclusion, that Greene himself is guilty of cony catching, is not avoided.⁵⁰ In “Invisible Bullets,” Stephen Greenblatt argues that passages such as these are not intended to be subversive, but instead are an example of the use of subversion to further contain disorder.⁵¹ But whatever the intention behind these passages, the sentiment expressed is not fully contained by the authorial voice. These tricksters imply not only that all other professions are equally tainted by dishonest dealing, but also that the only honest men are those who become beggars. The rogue narratives frequently suggest this possibility, hinting at additional complications in assessing the true identity of the beggar one might encounter in the street. Harman ends his book with the wish that London's rogues may be discovered:

That all estates most plainly may see,
As in a glass well polished to look,
Their double demeanour in each degree.(52)

Walker's trickster makes an alternative reading of these words possible. All estates may see themselves in the “glass” that Harman has created, and the pronoun “their” may turn out to refer not to the rogues but to “all estates,” including the respectable readers of the pamphlet.

The Comedy of Errors also holds up a “glass well polished” to all estates. The absence of intention shows misidentification to be deep-rooted in social exchange. Like the pamphlets, the play stages the plight of those who are not in control of the effects of their identification by others. The result is invariably a loss of position, whether imagined as a loss of marital harmony, financial profit, trade relations, property, or even spiritual salvation. The restoration of order in The Comedy of Errors proceeds in close connection with the reformation of the law and the alleviation of the anxieties about the female other in the final recognition scene. Shakespeare concludes his play by transforming the urban space into a Christian, morally controlled, stable environment in which family is the primary source of identity. His ending, drawn from the escapist romance tradition, fails to solve the problem of exchange in the growing city as is made clear by the generic shift needed to effect it and by the silence of a number of important characters, including Adriana and Luciana.⁵³

The authors of the rogue books alleviate concern about city life by pretending to instruct their readers on how to identify the rogue and understand his speech, using different tactics to “fix” the mobile trickster. Awdeley classifies types of rogues and tricksters in The Fraternity of Vagabonds;  Greene produces detailed descriptions of the apparel of certain types of rogues and, like his predecessors, lists phrases in beggars' cant; Harman surveys the different types and gives a large number of names at the end of A Caveat for Common Cursitors. As Woodbridge has remarked, “The promise of disclosure animates the whole genre,” but it is a promise that is impossible to fulfill.⁵⁴ The rogue books make the mechanics of the underworld look so intricate and its practices so widespread that the readers can hardly feel secure about their own ability to recognize the rogue on the street. The relationships that break down in the play do so with equally alarming ease and without conscious effort on the part of anyone. The pamphlets and Shakespeare's play never fully dispel concern with the processes of identification and the mistakes people inevitably make.

Instead, The Comedy of Errors leaves the playgoers, like the readers of the pamphlets, with the uncomfortable sense of an unpredictable social world in which cultural expectations and assumptions only serve to further disorder and the truth about the other is forever elusive.

Notes

1. I would like to thank Clifford Dammers for the literal translation of the passage. The original reads:

                       in Epdamnieis
   voluptárii atque potatores maxumi;
   tum sycophantae et palpatores plurumi
   in urbe hac habitant; tum meretrices mulieres
   nusquam perhibentur blandiores gentium.

   (2.1.1.258-62)

   For the Latin version of the play, see Plautus, “Menaechmi,” in The Perseus Project, ed. F. Leo, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, ed. Gregory R. Crane, October 2002.

2. William Warner, “The Menaechmi of Plautus,” in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols. (London: Routledge, 1957), 1:12-39, 17.

3. Warner, 1:18.

4. Warner, 1:21.

5. I avoid the use of literary labels such as “mistaken identity” and “recognition” (or the Aristotelian term anagnorisis) to stress the social and historical as opposed to the aesthetic and conventional significance of scenes that involve identification.

6. Gámini Salgádo suggests an original date of 1552 for Gilbert Walker's book in Cony-Catchers and Bawdy Baskets: An Anthology of Elizabethan Low Life (Harmondsworth, Middlesex UK: Penguin, 1972), p. 25. I have used this collection for all rogue pamphlets cited in this essay. For the composition of Jack Juggler, E. K. Chambers proposes a date between 1553 and 1558 (The Mediaeval Stage, 4 vols. [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1903], 2:457). For speculation about the date and possible authorship by Nicholas Udall or Thomas Heywood, see the introduction to Three Tudor Classical Interludes: Thersites, Jacke Jugeler, Horestes, ed. Marie Axton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), pp. 15-24. Authorship of the two rogue texts usually attributed to Walker and John Awdeley is uncertain.

7. For an essay that argues for an intertextual relationship between the rogue literature and Twelfth Night, see Angela Hurworth, “Gulls, Cony-Catchers, and Cozeners: Twelfth Night and the Elizabethan Underworld,” ShS [Shakespeare Survey] 52 (1999): 120-32. Hurworth's interests are different from mine, however, in that she works primarily within a literary paradigm, not examining the social and larger cultural significance of the connection between Shakespeare's play and the trickster narratives.

8. Editors have pointed out that Shakespeare used The Second Part of Cony-Catching (1591) and The Third and Last Part of Cony-Catching (1592) for the gulling of the clown and some of Autolycus's speeches. See The Winter's Tale, ed. John Dover Wilson and Arthur Quiller-Couch, New Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1931), pp. xxii, 176-7.

9. Social historians have not reached a consensus with regard to the stability of early modern England and London in particular. Some point to political and social inequality, unemployment, and poverty as sources for unrest; others place emphasis on the decentralized, participatory nature of government to argue that London was, unlike its continental counterparts, a relatively peaceful community. Most agree, at any rate, that the perception of instability was widespread. For balanced accounts of the differences between the two camps, see Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), and, from a literary point of view, Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995).

10. See Appendix 2, “References to Playgoing,” in Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 205-51. In The Second Part of Cony-Catching, Robert Greene describes the “Nip” who frequents playhouses and “standeth there leaning like some manerly gentleman against the doore as men go in,” ready to pick their pockets (Salgádo, p. 212, qtd. in Gurr, p. 208). Later references voice complaints in which the term cony catching is explicitly used. For instance, the Lord Mayor wrote to Lord Burghley in 1594 that the plays were “the ordinary places of meeting for all vagrant persons & maisterles men that hang about the Citie, theeves, horsestealers, whoremoongers, coozeners, connycatching persones, practizers of treason, & other such lyke” (Gurr, p. 210). The antitheatrical literature often cited the rogue's presence in playhouses, positing him as an “other” over and against which proper identity is established.

11. Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2001).

12. Craig Dionne, “Playing the ‘Cony’: Anonymity in Underworld Literature,” Genre 30, 1/2 (Spring/Summer 1997): 29-50.

13. Dionne, p. 35.

14. Dionne, p. 46.

15. See Bryan Reynolds, Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2002). The term “transversal” is expanded from its use in the work of Félix Guattari. Reynolds makes connections between the rogues and performativity also drawn in this essay, but is more deeply concerned with the relationship between the binary opposition of criminal culture and official culture than I am here.

16. Arthur Kinney's introduction to his collection of rogue texts discusses the licensing system (Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars [Barre MA: Imprint Society, 1973], pp. 1-56, 40-5). See also A. L. Beier's Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560-1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), esp. chap. 7.

17. Thomas Harman, “A Caveat for Common Cursitors,” in Salgádo, pp. 79-153, 118.

18. The story is entitled “A Pleasant Tale of a Country Farmer, that Took it in Scorn to have his Purse Cut or Drawn from him, and how a Foist Served him” and appears in Greene's A Disputation Between a He Cony-Catcher and a She Cony-Catcher, in Salgádo, pp. 265-315, 275-78.

19. Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2d edn., ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), I.ii.1. All quotations from the play are from this edition and will appear parenthetically within the text by act, scene, and line number.

20. [Cuthbert Cony-Catcher], “The Defence of Cony-Catching,” in Salgádo, pp. 339-77, 346.

21. Many readers of The Comedy of Errors have been struck by the material nature of mercantile exchange in the play and the extent to which individuals depend on the proper circulation of goods and objects to maintain their position and identity. Douglas Lanier, for instance, claims that the play engages with a “larger cultural drive to determine identities by determining the range and meanings of their material manifestations” (“‘Stigmatical in Making’: The Material Character of The Comedy of Errors,” ELR [English Literary Renaissance] 23, 1 [Winter 1993]: 81-112, 85; rprt. in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays, ed. Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare Criticism 18 [New York: Garland, 1997], pp. 299-334, 302).

22. Beier claims that with Nicholas Jennings we have one of the few cases in which the description in a rogue pamphlet has been confirmed by the historical record (pp. 117-8). For an interesting reading of the Jennings episode, see William C. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 70-96.

23. Greene, “The Third and Last Part of Cony-Catching,” in Salgádo, pp. 231-63, 238.

24. Anne Barton, introduction, “The Comedy of Errors,” in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2d edn., pp. 111-4, 111.

25. “Jacke Jugeler,” in Four Tudor Comedies, ed. William Tydeman (Harmondsworth, Middlesex UK: Penguin, 1984), pp. 45-94, lines 174-6. Modern productions of The Comedy of Errors often feature the twins in identical clothing, a choice that is an interpretative shift away from the play, which does not call for or offer an explanation of the twins' similar dress.

26. Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 25.

27. Barnard Law is described in most rogue books, based on the frequently plagiarized A Manifest Detection of Dice-Play. Much of Walker's entire work is presented as if never before published in the anonymous Mihil Mumchance (1597).

28. Greene, “The Third and Last Part,” p. 242. The jargon is a little confusing because this type of trickery is also known as “cross-biting,” i.e., deceit that involves the help of a female.

29. Greene, “The Third and Last Part,” p. 243.

30. Steve Rappaport's revisionist argument for London's stability during the period relies on the strength of close personal contact between and within social groups; the rogue literature shows that the very types of relationships that maintain stability may be undermined and exploited by cony catchers. See Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), chaps. 6 and 7.

31. For a very different argument about the reading of rogue literature, see Woodbridge. Her situation of rogue literature in the jest book tradition means that in spite of the many ways in which she takes these works seriously, she assumes that early modern readers did not. She sees these texts as “aiming mainly at entertainment” (p. 91).

32. Joel Altman's remark points us in a fruitful direction, though I do not share his conclusion that the play is primarily about the errors involved in egoism (The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978], p. 165).

33. In the context of a different argument, Eamon Grennan has also treated the traveling twins as deceptive regardless of intention in “Arm and Sleeve: Nature and Custom in The Comedy of Errors,” PQ [Philological Quarterly] 59, 2 (Spring 1980): 150-64.

34. In Plautus, the traveling twin fully intends to make the most out of his misidentification. Gail Kern Paster has helpfully pointed out that the scenes of misidentification in Shakespeare follow a distinct pattern, “outward from the domestic world to the world of commerce,” the opposite of the pattern in Plautus, whose traveling twin begins by meeting the courtesan and ultimately encounters the wife (The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare [Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1985], p. 188). On the whole, this means that Antipholus is more estranged from the city while Menaechmus Sosicles is always on top of the confusion.

35. Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 28-113; rprt. as “Reading Errantly: Misrecognition and the Uncanny in The Comedy of Errors,” in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays, pp. 261-97.

36. David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), p. 287.

37. Alexander Leggatt points out that the supernatural hints at the famous representation of Ephesus as a town of witchcraft in the Bible (Shakespeare's Comedy of Love [London: Methuen, 1974], pp. 1-3; rprt. in Miola, pp. 135-53, 135-6).

38. In “Shakespeare, Molière, and the Comedy of Ambiguity,” ShS 22 (1969): 15-26, 18, Michel Grivelet highlights the thematic importance of Adriana's potential adultery. He sees this as an instance of Shakespearean ambiguity.

39. Greene, “A Disputation,” p. 275.

40. Greene, “A Disputation,” p. 287.

41. Greene, “A Disputation,” p. 274.

42. Lorna Hutson, The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 205. Hutson's thesis is that Shakespeare resolved the problem of representing women within the scandalous context of the Roman comic plot by making his female characters “productive … at the level of the audience's uncertainty about their sexual intentions and desires” (p. 190).

43. As is well known, the character is confusingly also named Nell by Dromio. Thomas P. Hennings points to interesting connections between Luciana and Luce in “The Anglican Doctrine of the Affectionate Marriage in The Comedy of Errors,” MLQ [Modern Language Quarterly] 47, 2 (June 1986): 91-107, 98-101.

44. Ann Christensen has argued that Antipholus of Ephesus fails to see that the domestic and the commercial spheres are closely tied. She claims that “the interdependence of the ‘separate spheres’ everywhere inflects the action” (“‘Because Their Business Still Lies Out A' Door’: Resisting the Separation of the Spheres in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors,” L&H [Literature and History] 5, 1 [Spring 1996]: 19-37, 24).

45. Greene, “A Notable Discovery of Cozenage,” in Salgádo, pp. 154-92, 181.

46. Greene, “The Third and Last Part,” p. 233.

47. Walker, “A Manifest Detection of Dice-Play,” in Salgádo, pp. 27-58, 43.

48. Greene, “A Notable Discovery,” p. 174.

49. [Cuthbert Cony-Catcher], p. 346.

50. On p. 360 of “The Defence of Cony-Catching,” Cuthbert asks tauntingly, “what if I should prove you a cony-catcher, Master R. G., would it not make you blush at the matter?” and goes on to accuse R. G. of selling his dramatic version of Orlando Furioso to two playing companies.

51. Stephen Greenblatt asserts of Walker's passage and of rogue literature in general: “The subversive voices are produced by and within the affirmations of order; they are powerfully registered, but they do not undermine that order” (Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988], pp. 21-65, 52). The case for containment, to my mind, underestimates the ambiguity of the effect of these passages on the reader, who may feel a complex mixture of attraction to the wit of the trickster, admiration for his intelligence, fear of what he means in terms of everyday encounters on the street, and anxiety about the consequences of his presence for the commonwealth at large.

52. Harman, p. 153.

53. Dorothea Kehler's argument that the play is in fact a problem comedy is in part based on the silence of the two women in the concluding scene (“The Comedy of Errors as a Problem Comedy,” RMR [Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature] 41, 4 [Winter 1987]: 229-40).

54. Woodbridge, “Imposters, Monsters, and Spies: What Rogue Literature Can Tell Us about Early Modern Subjectivity,” Interactive Early Modern Literary Studies Dialogues (1999): 4, 1-11, http://purl.oclc.org/emls/iemls/Dialogues/01/woodbridge.html, October 2002.