[In the following essay, Cacicedo argues that the language of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors can be read not only in psychoanalytic terms, as most critics have done, but also in relation to the comedy of humors.]

Recent readings of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors take as their starting point the psychological text most clearly inscribed in Syracusan Antipholus' first soliloquy:¹

I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
(Unseen, inquisitive) confounds himself.
So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.

(I. ii. 35-40)²

The text underscores the double-edged character of Antipholus' search. He seeks to rediscover relationships in order to find his own identity, and yet in doing so, he recognizes he is threatened with the loss of all identity. But then, as Barbara Freedman says, “The confusion of identity is … a necessary step in the recreation of identity.”³ To validate a conception of one's own selfhood one must first recognize that there is a distinct self to validate: to have experienced a loss of identity is the most direct route to such recognition.

The brilliant interpretations of critics such as Freedman depend on modern psychoanalytic theory. And of course a play that treats the problem of identity will almost inevitably have a psychological foundation. The emphasis on psychoanalysis, however, seems to support Terry Eagleton's witty remark that Shakespeare “was almost certainly familiar with the writings of … Freud” among other luminaries of the modern world.⁴ Indeed, at times one wonders whether The Comedy of Errors is a play at all or a fantasy of the psychoanalytic couch, “expressive,” to be sure, but also “therapeutic.”⁵ I do not intend to detract from the achievement of psychoanalytic critics in reading The Comedy of Errors. My contention is simply that the language of the play can be read not only in psychoanalytic terms, but also in terms of the psychology available to Shakespeare himself, as a comedy of humours. I hope to show that in The Comedy of Errors psychoanalysis and humour psychology coincide.⁶

Before I present my case for The Comedy of Errors as a comedy of humours, I should explain what I do not mean by the term. L. G. Salingar points out that Shakespeare's “farces,” among which he includes The Comedy of Errors, share a “vigorous clowning” with the humour plays of the period from 1595 to 1609.⁷ For the purposes of this paper, however, the connection of The Comedy of Errors with other humour plays goes no farther. Instead, the presentation and development of character in Shakespeare's play are more closely allied to an effort to discover the basis for character implicit in the faculty psychology of the Renaissance. Of course, Ben Jonson makes it clear in the 1598 version of Every Man In His Humour that the humour plays are derived from that same psychological tradition (III. i. 144-53).⁸ However, as it appears in Jonson's plays, humour “is a monster bred in a man by selfe loue, and affectation, and fed by folly” (III. i. 157-58), a “monomania,” as Salingar calls it, and as such, in Jonas A. Barish's words, “it was amenable to purgation through ridicule.”⁹ Hence, in Every Man Out Of His Humour, when the observer character Mitis asks why Jonson “should properly call it Every Man Out of his Humour, when I saw all his actors so strongly pursue, and continue their humours,” his friend Cordatus, Jonson's spokesman, answers that “when in the flame, and height of their humours, they are laid flat, it fils the eye better, and with more contentment” (IV. viii. 163-64, 167-69).

By implication, the purgative effect of such comedy is upon the audience: our eye is “filled” and more contented. And, indeed, the “critics” in Every Man Out Of His Humour serve as a stage audience which at the end of the play articulates the desired effect of the play on the theater audience: “wee'le imitate your actors, and be out of our Humours” (V. xi. 70-71). Jonson's plays, like humour plays in general, are satirical “vehicle[s] for moral judgment,” by means of which the audience can define and imitate true civility by contrasting it with all of the false civility of the humorous characters.¹⁰ Shakespeare's humour play, The Comedy of Errors, on the contrary, although it is peripherally concerned with “genuine ‘civility,’”¹¹ is more concerned with the discovery of character and of identity. I begin, therefore, with the fact that the two Antipholi, physically identical though they may be, and so, in language that resonates with psychoanalytic implication, proper mirrors for each other, are nevertheless of very different physiological temperaments: they are distinct characters.

The first characterization that Syracusan Antipholus gives of himself indicates that he is of a melancholy disposition. His Dromio “very oft, / When I am dull with care and melancholy, / Lightens my humour with his merry jests” (I. ii. 19-21). This speech is important in two ways. First, the fact that Syracusan Dromio is called upon to “lighten” his master's melancholy “very oft” but not continually, suggests that Antipholus of Syracuse suffers from “hypochondriacal or windy melancholy,” one of the three kinds of melancholy defined by Robert Burton, who cites Thomas Erastus to the effect that “windy” as well as “whole body” melancholy is distinguished from “head” melancholy because it is “interrupt … com[ing] and go[ing] by fits,” whereas “head” melancholy is “perpetual.”¹² Later, Burton distinguishes between “windy” and “whole body” melancholy by their etiologies: “windy” melancholy begins “most commonly [from] fear, grief, and some sudden commotion or perturbation of the mind”; “whole body” melancholy, although it can be brought about by the same emotional causes, is related “especially [to] bad diet.”¹³ Egeon's statement to Solinus, that Antipholus “At eighteen years became inquisitive / After his brother” (I. i. 124-25), echoes Antipholus' own statement as to his motivation (I. ii. 38), and suggests that at that time, for some unexplained (and according to Burton theoretically unexplainable)¹⁴ reason, commenced the “perturbation of the mind” that characterizes Antipholus' melancholy disposition as “windy” melancholy.

The speech in which Antipholus of Syracuse defines his Dromio's function in lightening his melancholy is also important in distinguishing Antipholus' temperament from his brother's. The Ephesian Antipholus has been variously characterized as being “stolid” or violent, and as having a “solid bourgeois complacency and fiery temper.”¹⁵ In truth, the Ephesian Antipholus is much more violent than his Syracusan brother, and seems to be habitually so. At any rate, the Ephesian Dromio is very experienced at enduring blows. In the first “error” of the play, when Syracusan Antipholus demands of the Ephesian Dromio, “Where is the thousand marks thou hadst of me,” the servant's response is, “I have some marks of yours upon my pate; / Some of my mistress' marks upon my shoulders” (I. ii. 81-83).¹⁶ Antipholus interprets the response as an ill-timed joke and begins to beat Dromio, who begs him “for God's sake hold your hands. / Nay, and you will not, sir, I'll take my heels” (I. ii. 93-94). Dromio's alacrity in legging it out of harm's way suggests that he knows his master's humour to be beyond lightening.

Dromio's assumption, of course, is that the man beating him is in fact his master, the Ephesian Antipholus. By implication, then, Antipholus of Ephesus must very often break out into beatings of this sort. By contrast, when the Syracusan Dromio is beaten by his master, he is surprised: “Hold sir, for God's sake; now you jest in earnest, / Upon what bargain do you give it me” (II. ii. 24-25). Clearly the two Dromios sound very much alike, but where the Ephesian's puns tend to distance Antipholus, the Syracusan's tend to bring him closer to his master, as if to help Antipholus seek out the cause of melancholy and “lighten” the humour. And in fact Syracusan Dromio's punning method works, for not long afterwards Antipholus also begins to pun (II. ii. 53-54), and soon he is joking along with Dromio (II. ii. 71-107). Dromio's surprise at being beaten, moreover, occasions the only direct reference in the play to the physiological humour that governs Ephesian Antipholus' temperament: choler (II. ii. 61-62, 65-66).

Syracusan Antipholus' behavior, from the first “error” of the play onwards, seems to mimic his brother's choleric temperament. Contemporary psychoanalytic interpretations of the similarity between the two brother's identities suggest that the Antipholi are halves of a single personality struggling to reunify and form a complete whole.¹⁷ Alternatively, the twins are mirror images who “must be separated out from one another to know who they are; and yet they can know who they are only by seeing themselves mirrored in one another.”¹⁸ To psychoanalytic explanations of the twins' characters can be added the explanation that would be common sense to Shakespeare's contemporaries. According to the psychological literature of the Renaissance, changes in the “temperature,” or temperament, of a person by means of some “disease” are not unexpected. Juan Huarte, for instance, writes that

if a man fall into any disease by which his braine upon a sodaine changeth his temperature (as are madnesse, melancholy & frenzie) it happens, that at one instant he leeseth, if he were wise, all his knowledge, and utters a thousand follies; and if he were a foole, he accrues more wit and abilitie than he had before.¹⁹

The Syracusan's temperament does not convert into choler as such. Rather, as Syracusan Antipholus encounters “error” after “error,” his intermittent “windy” melancholy worsens into a kind of “head” melancholy. The deeper Antipholus goes into Ephesian strangeness, the less intermittent does his melancholy become, and the madder does he seem.

Burton points out that at their extremes of expression “Madness, phrenzy, and melancholy are confounded by Celsus and many writers; others leave out phrenzy, and make madness and melancholy but one disease,” but that if there is a difference between madness and melancholy, it depends on the greater violence of madness. “Phrenzy,” derived from physiological choler, is distinguished from madness by its “heat.”²⁰ Starting out from a temperament characterized as melancholy, Syracusan Antipholus grows into madness. So, as soon as he begins to experience the “errors” of Ephesus, the wandering Antipholus expresses a typical symptom of madness:

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 images of sorcery, witchcraft, and demonic possession are repeated time and again in the play, and are finally identified expressly with madness itself:

COUR.
How say you now? Is not your husband mad?
ADR.
His incivility confirms no less.
Good Doctor Pinch, you are a conjurer;
Establish him in his true sense again,
And I will please you what you will demand.

(IV. iv. 43-47)

As Burton says of madness, “the other species of this fury are … obsession or possession of devils.”²¹ Antipholus is obsessed with devils; others are convinced he is possessed.

That Syracusan Antipholus' madness is related to melancholy and not choler is suggested by the fact that he shows the relatively “unfevered” symptoms of extreme melancholy—melancholy “adust,” in short. The “adust” humour is termed “unnaturall” by Timothy Bright, who says that such

an humour … [rises] of melancholie [the physiological matter itself] …, or else from bloud or choler, whollie chaunged into an other nature by an unkindly heate which turneth these humours, which before were raunged under natures government, and kept in order, into a qualitie whollie repugnant, whose substance and vapor giveth such annoyance to all partes, that as it passeth or is seated maketh strange alterations in our actions, whether they be animal or voluntarie, or naturall or not depending upon our will.²²

In the case of Antipholus of Syracuse, his responses to the “errors” he encounters are not especially violent and may even be considered rational reactions to apparently irrational circumstances: even the beatings of the Dromios are not excessive given Antipholus' position in a foreign and, as he has been warned, hostile town. Knowing himself sane, Antipholus displaces the insanity outwards onto the strange city he is visiting and comes to believe that others must be possessed. He therefore does all he can to protect himself—including brandishing a sword when he feels particularly threatened. When at the maddest point in the play the two Syracusans enter “with rapiers drawn” (IV. iv. 141 s.d.), one must recall that, in the sequence of the play's action, they have just left the Courtesan with the words, “Avaunt, thou witch” (IV. iii. 76).

From the point of view of the citizens of Ephesus, of course, the demonic possession is localized in Antipholus himself, so that the accusation of witchcraft that Antipholus makes provokes from the Courtesan the conclusion that “Now out of doubt Antipholus is mad” (IV. iii. 78). When the Syracusans enter with their swords drawn, therefore, the Courtesan's judgment seems to be vindicated. The Courtesan's judgment and its effect in the treatment of Antipholus reflect exactly the physiological theory of humours, for, as Huarte indicates, those who seem to be possessed by demons in fact suffer “from a naturall distemperature.”²³ Thus, although Adriana urges Dr. Pinch to “conjure” away Antipholus' madness and Pinch in her presence seems to comply, the method that he actually takes to cure the humour is strictly physiological: “They fell upon me,” says Ephesian Antipholus, “bound me, bore me thence, / And in a dark and dankish vault at home / There left me and my man, both bound together” (V. i. 247-49). Dr. Pinch, in short, gives them a dose of phlegmatical treatment, cold and wet, to counterbalance the frenetic heat and dryness of choler adust, frenzy. Stephen Greenblatt's remark that “exorcism is the kind of straw people clutch at when the world seems to have gone mad”²⁴ is perfectly correct from the point of view of Adriana's turning to Dr. Pinch for a magical solution to her husband's ills. But for Dr. Pinch himself it is the humours, not possession, that he must address: the good doctor's title, honorific though it may be, nonetheless conveys the role that Pinch conceives proper to himself. He is this play's version of what Greenblatt calls “the very slender reed of Jacobean [Greenblatt is writing about Lear] medicine.”²⁵

Pinch, of course, treats Ephesian Antipholus correctly, but for the behavior of his Syracusan brother. In fact, Antipholus of Ephesus evinces the “heated” behavior that characterizes choleric frenzy rather than the relative coolness of melancholy. From the point of view of situational dynamics, Gwyn Williams is correct to point out that the Ephesian Antipholus undergoes a much more distressing set of “errors” than his brother simply because he is in his home town and so cannot displace the apparent madness that he encounters out onto a “possessed” world.²⁶ Antipholus of Ephesus is put in the position of accepting the way others perceive him—as mad, in short—or of reacting in fairly violent ways against that definition of himself, which he knows is incorrect.²⁷ Antipholus of Ephesus, like his brother, is threatened with dissolution of identity, but he must react to the threat violently because he has no means of withdrawing from the situation in which he finds himself.

The play suggests that Ephesian Antipholus' temperament has also changed: in him one can see the same three stages of the expression of temperament as in his brother, from the disposition itself, through its initial exacerbation, to its fully expressed manifestation. His Dromio's testimony suggests that he—as well as his wife—is habitually of a choleric humour. However, once again, the physiological humours will not lead to the temperamental disorders associated with them unless they are adust.²⁸ What we see in Ephesian Antipholus, then, is the same process of adustion that we see in his Syracusan brother. In the case of Ephesian Antipholus, the “unkindly heate” that changes his habitual temperament into the adust variety commences with his wife's treatment before the action we see in the play as such commences. Hearing of how Adriana has “reprehended” her husband, for instance, Emilia says, “And therefore came it that the man was mad / … / Thereof the raging fire of fever bred, / And what's a fever but a fit of madness” (V. i. 68, 75-76). Although Emilia goes on to say that Antipholus will therefore suffer from “moody and dull melancholy” (V. i. 79), her emphasis on fever suggests otherwise. The heat of fever, in fact, is the symptom that distinguishes choleric frenzy from melancholy madness.²⁹ The heat, as we see beginning with Ephesian Antipholus' first entrance in Act III, increases as “errors” multiply and he is forced to understand or resolve them. The result is choler adust and frenzy.

From the point of view of the physiological humours, in short, Ephesian Antipholus' reaction follows reasonably from his choleric temperament. “[I]magination,” says Huarte, “consists of heat,” and is therefore the reasonable faculty most closely related to choler.³⁰ As soon as Antipholus of Ephesus experiences his first “error,” he jumps to an imaginative conclusion:

EPHESIAN Antipholus.
There is something in the wind that we cannot get in.
EPHESIAN Dromio.
You would say so, master, if your garments were thin. Your cake here is warm within; you stand here in the cold; It would make a man mad as a buck to be so bought and sold.

(III. i. 69-72)

Dromio's pun reveals whither his master's imagination tends. To be “mad as a buck” is to be “horn-mad,” an expression Dromio has used before, as he claims, to “mean not cuckold-mad” (II. i. 57-58). In effect, Antipholus jumps to the same conclusion about Adriana that Adriana has jumped to concerning him. Balthasar's advice that Antipholus “Have patience” (III. i. 85) in fact echoes Luciana's advice to Adriana in the scene where Dromio defines “horn-mad” (II. i. 9), and suggests that husband and wife have the same choleric humour. Moreover, just as Adriana ignores Luciana's advice, so her husband, seeming to heed Balthasar's advice, actually ignores it: “that chain will I bestow / (Be it for nothing but to spite my wife) / Upon mine hostess there” (III. i. 117-19). This sort of rashness, which persists despite Antipholus' knowledge that “this jest shall cost me some expense” (III. i. 123), is typical of the “heat” of choler.

That Antipholus of Ephesus is treated as his brother seems to deserve—that each twin, in fact, “is recurrently debited or credited for the transactions of the other”³¹—is part of the confounding of identity that Syracusan Antipholus' first soliloquy introduces into the play in terms of the water-drop image.³² The identity that Adriana wishes to establish between herself and her husband is marked by the same waterdrop image:

How comes it now, my husband, O, how comes it,
That thou art estranged from thyself?—
Thyself I call it, being strange to me,
That undividable, incorporate,
Am better than thy dear self's better part.
Ah, do not tear away thyself from me;
For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall
A drop of water in the breaking gulf,
And take unmingled thence that drop again
Without addition or diminishing,
As take from me thyself, and not me too.

(II. ii. 119-29)³³

One may conclude with Kahn that here “Woman becomes identified with those engulfing waters in which Antipholus [of] S[yracuse] feared to ‘confound’ himself” and that therefore the primary psychological context for the oceanic imagery in the play is Freudian, “a representation … of our earliest sexual feelings” of identity with our mother. Freud associates such oceanic imagery with the origins of “the religious attitude,” which in The Comedy of Errors may be expressed in the action of an Abbess who resolves all the problems.³⁴

Water imagery is in any case central to the play's presentation of identity and selfhood. Both Antipholus of Syracuse and Adriana use it to convey the idea of dissolution of personality in an encompassing set of relationships. One gets the impression of water as a universal solvent of the humours that constitute personal identity. From a medical point of view, water is indeed one of the more useful elements of diet in the treatment of melancholy.³⁵ Water is also associated with one of the humours, phlegm, a cold and moist humour that functions in a manner exactly opposite to choler.³⁶ Dr. Pinch attempts to use the characteristics of phlegm to cure Antipholus of Ephesus of his frenzy, and in fact a good dose of phlegmatic coldness and calmness might be what Antipholus needs.

Despite the imagery of water that she uses, however, Adriana is clearly not suited to administer such a dose to her husband. She, like Antipholus himself, suffers from the rashness and impatience characteristic of choler. Adriana herself suggests that she is converting her husband's substance into a noxious humour—“I do digest the poison of thy flesh’ (II. ii. 143)—precisely in the way Bright indicates happens when “by perturbation of mind, by temper of aire, and kind of habitation” the natural humours contained in food and held in solution in the blood are made adust.³⁷ In the language of the physiological humours, in other words, Adriana in effect acknowledges that she is not the proper physician for her husband. The same physiological context is at work when Adriana tells Emilia that it is her wifely duty to “diet” Antipholus (V. i. 99). Emilia's response explicitly indicates why Adriana is not able to perform that duty: “Be patient” (V. i. 102).

To complicate matters further, the water image that Adriana uses is closely linked to the blood image with which she continues her efforts to teach her husband, as she supposes, that two are one:

I am possess'd with an adulterate blot,
My blood is mingled with the crime of lust;
For if we two be one, and thou play false,
I do digest the poison of thy flesh,
Being strumpeted by contagion.

(II. ii. 140-44)

That Adriana is “possess'd with” her husband's sin connects the speech with the other cases of “possession” that the play presents and converts to humour psychology. Furthermore, just as phlegm is the exact opposite of choler, so the sanguine humour, blood, is the exact opposite of melancholy, moist and warm as opposed to cold and dry. Not incidentally, phlegm is “apt to be converted into the substance of pure bloud if nature faile not in her workinge.”³⁸ Blood is also associated with youthfulness, and perhaps Syracusan Antipholus gets exactly what he needs to cure his original melancholy when he falls in love with Luciana, whose speeches are so full of wise old saws taken literally that they betray her youth and inexperience. Adriana's speech is still more suggestive. The “mass of blood,” as distinct from the sanguine humour as such, is that substance in which all four humours are “comprehended.”³⁹ It is, in fact, the universal solvent that mediates the conversion of humours.⁴⁰ The link between water and blood at this point in the play suggests that water becomes an external sign of the “mass of blood.” The women, particularly Emilia, are associated with the water imagery and become essential to tempering the Antipholi's humours.

Emilia's role in the denouement of the play illustrates that she, not Adriana or Dr. Pinch, “With wholesome syrups, drugs, and holy prayers” (V. i. 104) appropriate to physiological humours, is the one who will convert the humours of Antipholus into a proper balance and so “make him a formal man again” (V. i. 105). Because Emilia is so scantily developed, we might turn to modern psychological theory to read her function in the play, always with the proviso that, if we take the juncture of water and blood suggested by Adriana, then in the tradition of the physiological humours Emilia's function is to be the phlegmatic and sanguine counterweight to the frenzy of Ephesus.⁴¹ Emilia is both religious figure and mother figure. Under both categories she participates in the oceanic imagery of the play.⁴² Furthermore, if MacCary is correct to see Adriana and Luciana as “the split image of the mother, the one threatening and destructive, the other yielding and benevolent,” then Emilia is the “unsplit” image of the mother, combining both aspects and, according to Jung, leading to self-knowledge if properly approached.⁴³

It is, perhaps, the dangerous aspect of the image⁴⁴ even in the “benevolent” Luciana that warns Syracusan Antipholus against yielding too readily to his sudden passion for his sister-in-law:

O, train me not, sweet mermaid, with thy note
To drown me in thy sister's flood of tears;
Sing, siren, for thyself, and I will dote;
Spread o'er the silver waves thy golden hairs,
And as a bed I'll take thee, and there lie,
And in that glorious supposition think
He gains by death that hath such means to die;
Let love, being light, be drowned if she sink.

(III. ii. 45-52)

In MacCary's formulation, to Antipholus, Luciana seems part of a dream world that gratifies his every wish but who nonetheless can serve to lead him to conscious object-choice and so beyond his narcissistic search for the twin version of himself: the nightmare side of the dream is Adriana, his brother's temperamental counterpart, who works to extinguish all desire in undifferentiated relationship.⁴⁵ Both women, moreover, are figured in terms of water imagery. In their different ways, both of them represent the oceanic, womb-like world that, in his first soliloquy, Antipholus says he seeks and yet fears. That world is like the unitary world of infancy in which, as Jung puts it, every thing “bends over … [the child] and even forces happiness upon him.”⁴⁶ So, when Angelo gives Antipholus the gold chain, Antipholus says, “I see a man here needs not live by shifts / When in the streets he meets such golden gifts” (III. ii. 181-82).

The satisfaction of desire is dangerous from either perspective: Adriana may seek to drown Antipholus in a “flood of tears,” but Luciana is a “siren” luring him to his death. Having found his oceanic oneness, Antipholus discovers that it threatens to destroy his identity while at the same time it contains, in the person of Luciana, what seems to be the dangerous source of his potential salvation. The method by which Antipholus of Syracuse can find the relation he seeks without the sort of “narcissistic mirroring” that will destroy him depends, once again, on Emilia.⁴⁷ If Ephesus for Antipholus is a kind of womb-world that dissolves his identity, then there is only one way that he can recover his self, distinguish his identity from his brother's, and so be capable of winning Luciana for himself: he must break the circle of water, so to speak, and be born again. That function is mediated by his mother, Emilia. She is the actual agent, the mirror, that brings the Antipholi face to face. At this point the confusion of identity between the two brothers becomes useful, perhaps even therapeutic, simply because each brother can see himself objectively mirrored in the other. What each sees is his own melancholy or choler externalized in the twin. At the moment that the twins see each other mirrored by the instrumentality of Emilia, the play enacts what Jacques Lacan conceives as the “mirror stage,” the moment at which identity is constituted, when “the I … is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other.”⁴⁸ In the end, seeing his own deformation by means of his brother's mirror image of his own passion, each Antipholus can objectify himself and so become a “formal man.”

Despite Lacan's insistence that at this point in the life of the ego narcissism is always involved,⁴⁹ the danger of narcissism for the two Antipholi is minimized specifically because the oceanic madness of Ephesus forces the two brothers to look not for similarity but for difference. Their second birth requires that they affirm their temperamental humours, and so can be considered an affirmation of ego identity. The language of the discovery scene in fact suggests that Emilia sees her role in precisely those terms: “Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail / Of you, my sons, and till this present hour / My heavy burden ne'er delivered” (V. i. 400-02). The delivery breaks the circle of water that has encompassed the twins and kept their identities in solution. Moreover, the Christian tenor of the “thirty-three years,” a number not warranted by other figures in the text, suggests that the twins enter into a kind of spiritual adulthood, symbolized perhaps by the “gossip's feast” (V. i. 405) to which Emilia invites Solinus. There, drops of water will be poured over the children not to dissolve identity but to establish it. To balance a person's temperament is not to destroy it, but rather to bring it to its natural, non-adust condition. Neither Antipholus will lose his character, but both will be brought to a correct temperature.

Psychoanalytic readings of The Comedy of Errors elicit profound meaning from a play that, more often than not, has been treated as one of the less interesting of Shakespeare's youthful works. However, the complex patterns of loss and recovery on which such readings focus do not easily allow one to see that the most central loss and recovery involve the identities of the Antipholi themselves, and that those identities are differentiated on the basis of the psychology available to Shakespeare. Reading The Comedy of Errors from the perspective of the physiological humour psychology of the Renaissance helps to recenter the play on the twins themselves.

Notes

1. See, for example, Coppélia Kahn, “The Providential Tempest and the Shakespearean Family,” Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 217-43; Barbara Freedman, “Egeon's Debt: Self-Division and Self-Redemption in The Comedy of Errors,” English Literary Renaissance, 10 (1980), 360-83; W. Thomas MacCary, “The Comedy of Errors: A Different Kind of Comedy,” New Literary History, 9 (1978), 525-36; Janet Adelman, “Male Bonding in Shakespeare's Comedies,” Shakespeare's “Rough Magic”: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, ed. Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1985), pp. 73-103.

2. All references to The Comedy of Errors are from The Arden Shakespeare edition, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Methuen, 1968).

3. Freedman, p. 363.

4. Eagleton, William Shakespeare: Rereading Literature (London: Blackwell, 1986), p. ix.

5. Ruth Nevo, Comic Transformation in Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 30.

6. By the same token, I do not wish to suggest that the theory of humours allows for the complete intelligibility of Shakespeare's characters, even in so early a play as The Comedy of Errors. A thoroughgoing but nonetheless unsatisfactory attempt in the direction of reducing all of Shakespeare's plays to humour psychology has been made by John W. Draper, The Humours and Shakespeare's Characters (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1945).

7. L. G. Salingar, “The Elizabethan Literary Renaissance,” The Age of Shakespeare ed. Boris Ford, A Guide to English Literature, vol. 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), pp. 85, 83, respectively.

8. References to Jonson's plays are from Ben Jonson, 11 vols., ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), vol. 3.

9. Salingar, p. 79; Jonas A. Barish, Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 217.

10. Salingar, p. 79.

11. Salingar, p. 85.

12. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 3 vols., ed. A. R. Shilleto (London: Bell, 1926), vol. 1, p. 200. Although the first edition of Burton's Anatomy was not published until 1621, there is good reason to use the book as a source of information on humour psychology. After all, Burton sets out to compile as much traditional lore as he can find, and is therefore using material that must have been available to Shakespeare or any other writer in the late sixteenth century.

13. Burton, vol. 1, p. 438.

14. Burton, vol. 1, p. 194.

15. Respectively, Karen Newman, Shakespeare's Rhetoric of Comic Character: Dramatic Convention in Classical and Renaissance Comedy (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 81; R. A. Foakes, Introduction, The Comedy of Errors, by William Shakespeare, ed. R. A. Foakes, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1968), p. xliv; Gwyn Williams, “‘The Comedy of Errors’ Rescued from Tragedy,” Review of English Literature, 5 (1964), p. 64; Nevo, p. 28.

16. See also IV. iv. 27 ff., where Ephesian Dromio accuses his master of plain cruelty.

17. Freedman, passim.

18. Adelman, “Male Bonding,” p. 76.

19. Juan Huarte, Examen de Ingenios. The Examination of Mens Wits, trans. R[ichard] C[arew] (1594; Gainesville: Scholar's Facsimiles, 1959), p. 41.

20. Burton, vol. 1, p. 160.

21. Burton, vol. 1, p. 161.

22. Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (1586; New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1940), pp. 2-3.

23. Huarte, p. 45.

24. Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 173.

25. Greenblatt, p. 168. Greenblatt's point that the credibility of possession and of exorcism begins to attenuate in the new religio-political circumstances of the Jacobean period can very easily be extended backwards in time and internationalized. See, for example, Bright, p. iii. See also Huarte, p. 45.

26. Williams, p. 69.

27. Harold Brooks presents a very similar argument in “Themes and Structure in The Comedy of Errors,” Shakespeare, the Comedies: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Kenneth Muir, Twentieth Century Views (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965), pp. 14-15.

28. Burton vol. 1, pp. 197-98.

29. Burton vol. 1, pp. 160-61.

30. Huarte, pp. 64, 60.

31. Freedman, p. 370.

32. A similar conflation of character occurs in relation to the two Dromios. When Syracusan Dromio tells his master about Nell's claims on him, he begins by saying, “I am an ass, I am a woman's man, and besides myself” (III. ii. 76-77). When Ephesian Dromio complains about his treatment, he says,

    I am an ass indeed; you may prove it by my long ears. I have served him from the hour of my nativity to this instant, and have nothing at his hands for my service but blows.

    (IV. iv. 27-30)

    The conflation culminates after the brothers see each other, when the mirror image that underlies much of the confusion of character comes to the surface: “Methinks you are my glass, and not my brother” (V. i. 417).

33. MacCary points out that “The exact words of Adriana's address … are, of course, very like his [i. e. Syracusan Antipholus'] opening remarks” (p. 531). Adriana echoes not only the sense and imagery but also the orthographic and grammatical form of Antipholus' speech. Compare I. ii. 38 and II. ii. 122, for example. The general effect is to make Adriana into a kind of imperialist of character, overtly demanding identity with her husband and implicitly expressing identity with her brother-in-law.

34. Kahn, pp. 224, 221, respectively; Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. Joan Riviere (Garden City: Anchor Books, n.d.), p. 11.

35. Burton, vol. 2, pp. 26-29.

36. Burton, vol. 1, p. 169.

37. Bright, p. 35.

38. Bright, p. 5. Draper suggests a further association between the two when he says that phlegmatics “under Venus” include “Women, children, artists, and voluptuaries.” “Under the moon” are included all those people associated “with movement and with water” (pp. 13-14).

39. Burton, vol. 1, p. 169.

40. Bright, pp. 4-5.

41. Unlike Egeon (Freedman, p. 373), Emilia seems never to have considered seeking out her lost family. Her lack of movement may well be what leads Foakes to remark that Emilia's life story is not very fully explained (p. xxxi). Her passivity may also indicate a phlegmatic temperament very unlike the active women of other comedies, who must in any case disguise themselves as men in order to act. It is not until Hermione in The Winter's Tale that Shakespeare presents a character with a similar function.

42. Freud, Civilization, p. 11; and “The ‘Uncanny,’” trans. Alex Strachey, On Creativity and the Unconscious: Papers on the Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, Religion, ed. Benjamin Nelson (New York: Harper-Colophon, 1958), p. 143.

43. MacCary, p. 531; C. G. Jung, “Aion: Phenomenology of the Self,” The Portable Jung, trans. R. F. C. Hull, ed. Joseph Campbell (New York: Viking, 1971), p. 158.

44. Jung, p. 150.

45. MacCary, pp. 351-53.

46. Jung, p. 148. The threat to identity presented by the omnicompetent mother is most clearly represented by Volumnia in Coriolanus. But see Janet Adelman's analysis of the pervasiveness of mothers as sources of danger to identity in “‘Born of Woman’: Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth,” Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance, ed. Marjorie Garber, Selected Papers from the English Institute, ns 11 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 90-121.

47. Kahn, p. 223.

48. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 2.

49. Lacan, p. 6.