William Shakespeare: The Comedy of Errors.
Performed by the Michigan Shakespeare Festival, July-August 2010. Directed by Kevin Theis.
Solinus, Duke of Ephesus, has handed down a judgment on Aegeon, a merchant from Syracuse. Ephesus and Syracuse are engaged in a trade war, very much with a vengeance. The Duke of Syracuse has been holding Ephesian merchants for ransom and executing those who cannot pay. As “our well-meaning countrymen” (I.i.7) are being treated so cruelly, Duke Solinus has “excluded all pity” from his judgment of Aegeon (I.i.10): pay a heavy ransom by sundown or you will be put to death. It’s nothing personal, but “By law thou art condemn’d to die” (I.i.25). As his name suggests, Solinus is a man alone—judge, jury, executioner.
Why, Aegeon, did you come here in the first place? Perhaps hoping for some shred of mercy, Aegeon readily explains himself, “that the world may witness that my end / Was wrought by nature, not by vile offense” (I.i.33-34). His wife, Aemilia, had given birth to identical twin sons—they “could not be distinguish’d but by names” (I.i.53)—and he purchased twin boys from an indigent woman to serve as their slaves as both sets of twins grew up. Soon after, the family was sundered by a shipwreck in a storm; the wife, one son, and one slave were picked up by Corinthian fishermen; Aegeon and the other two boys were picked up by a ship from Epidamnum. Before the family could be reunited, the Epidamnumian rescuers were themselves shipwrecked on a rock. “In this unjust divorce of us, / Fortune had left to both of us alike / What to delight in, what to sorrow for.” (I.i.105-07). By the time he and the boys were rescued a second time, he had no way to know where his wife and the other boys had been taken.
When he reached the age of eighteen, his son “became inquisitive / After his brother” (I.i.126-27), begging Aegeon to allow him to search for him and for the brother of his slave. Aegeon agreed, though “hazard[ing] the loss of whom I lov’d” (I.i.132). His son and his son’s slave never returned, so Aegeon himself undertook a separate mission, which has now extended to “five summers” in “farthest Greece” and Asia Minor (I.i.133). He came to Ephesus in desperation, “loath to leave unsought… any place that harbors men” (I.i.136-37). Aegeon has traversed the Aegean, and beyond, in search of his lost wife, sons, and their slaves. His argument in self-defense, then, is indeed that his “end” or purpose in coming to Ephesus was natural: a father’s quest for his son or sons. He evidently hopes that this appeal to nature will override the appeal to law, to convention, in the mind of his judge.
Duke Solinus sympathizes but holds firm. He blames Aegeon’s plight on “the fates,” not on Aegeon. If it were “not against our laws, / Against my crown, my oath, my dignity, / Which princes, would they, may not disannul, / My soul should sue as advocate for thee.” (I.i.143-46). A “passed sentence may not be recall’d / But to our honor’s great disparagement” (I.i.149), but I will do what I can, allowing you to seek ransom within the limits of the city—a lesser, shorter, landlocked voyage, and one that “hopeless and helpless” Aegeon will undertake “to procrastinate,” as the convicted man says of himself, “his lifeless end” (I. i.158-59). Friendless and unknown in Ephesus, he has no way to raise the money.
In this first scene, playgoers find neither comedy nor errors. They do find the themes of the play: the necessities of ruling a city—laws, crown, oath of office, dignity and honor of the ruler—in conflict with the family, with its fatherly and brotherly love. The family is more natural than the city; Aegeon’s cross-border quest emphasizes this. But the city has its own real necessities, including the defense of fair commerce and the need of rulers to uphold the law in order to be considered ‘legitimate’ in the eyes of those they rule. These are the themes of tragedy, as seen in the Antigone. But Aegeon was not born to rule. As a merchant, he has no claim to consideration as a member of some kingly or aristocratic line, nor does he arouse suspicions as a rival for the throne. As with Shakespeare’s more famous merchant, the merchant of Venice, he is ‘low,’ or at least lower than any ruler, a fit character for comedy.
The play was first performed for the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn, one of the four Inns of Court in London. These were professional associations of barristers and judges; they also served as law schools. In Shakespeare’s time Gray’s Inn was the most prestigious of them, enjoying the patronage of Queen Elizabeth. At Christmastime, when The Comedy of Errors premiered, the students were allowed to rule the Inn for a day, electing a Lord of Misrule (an office for which any of their number might have been well-qualified). A comedy about law, its relation to nature and especially the problem of understanding evidence—ultimately the question of how we can know—would have been a timely means to invite lawyers and judges to think about what they do, and to invite their students to think about what they will be doing..
Although Shakespeare’s characters can never entirely rule the fates, Shakespeare as playwright does so rule, and so he determines that the other searchers, Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse, are also in Ephesus. Antipholus sends Dromio back to the Centaur, the inn where they are staying, with the money an Ephesian merchant had been holding for him, and now has returned. Syracusan Antipholus tells Dromio that he intends to “view the manners of the town, / Peruse the traders, gaze upon the buildings” (I.ii.12-13). The kindly merchant advises him to tell people he’s from Epidaurus, given the ban on Syracusans and the news that another Syracusan merchant has already been apprehended, tried, and condemned. When the merchant departs to attend to business, Antipholus soliloquizes, “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,” “los[ing] myself” in his search for “a mother and a brother” (I.ii.35-40). ‘Pholus’ means ‘den’ or ‘lair’ in Greek, ‘leaf’ or ‘lightweight thing,’ ‘inconsequential thing,’ in Latin. Anti-pholus of Syracuse has no home, wishes he were not a mere drop of water in the world.
Dromio comes up to him. Antipholus takes him for his slave, Syracusan Dromio, but in fact it’s Dromio of Ephesus. Why have you returned so soon? Equally nonplussed, Ephesian Dromio tells him that he’s late for noontime dinner; the mistress of the household is “hot” because “the meat is cold” (I.ii.47). Antipholus assumes that his ever-joking attendant is playing with him, but “I am not in a sportive humor now” (I.ii.58): What did you do with my money? “These jests are out of season” (I.ii.68). Insisting that Antipholus is married and living at the Phoenix, not the Centaur, Ephesian Dromio earns a beating. Antipholus describes Ephesus as “a town full of cozenage,” suspecting that some sleight-of-hand artist, or one of the local sorcerers “that change the mind,” or one of the “soul-killing witches that deform the body,” or one of the other “disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks” of the city has been at work (I.ii.97-101). He will return to the Centaur. “I greatly fear my money is not safe” (I.ii.106).
The man-beast, the centaur, was part wise man or prudent adviser to rulers, part warrior-cavalryman—the centaur symbolizes the man of the ancient world, the man of logos and thumos. The Phoenix, the bird that arises from its own ashes, symbolizes rebirth, the sun that rises after setting, and in Christendom the Son, the Man who rose from the tomb. In another play, Shakespeare uses it to symbolize the princess and future queen, Elizabeth, a sort of Christian goddess named after the mother of John the Baptist. Syracusan Antipholus is an ‘ancient’; possibly Ephesian Antipholus will prove a Christian?
In Ephesian Antipholus’ house, his wife Adriana and her sister Luciana await the return of husband and slave. Attempting to moderate Adriana’s impatience, Luciana observes that “A man is master of his liberty” and time is the master of men (II.i.7). “Why should their liberty than ours be more?” Adriana indignantly demands. “Because their business still lies out o’ doors.” (II.i.10-11). This is true not only in a rural village but even in a trading city. Adriana is having none of that: When Luciana calls Antipholus “the bridle of your will,” she ripostes, “There’s none but asses will be bridled so.” (II.i.13-14). Luciana points to nature: beasts, fishes, and fowls all exhibit rule of males or females. “Man, more divine, the master of all these” creatures, “Lord of the wide world and wild wat’ry seas, / Indu’d with intellectual sense and souls, / Or more pre-eminence than fish and fowls / Are masters of their females, and their lords.” (II.i.20-24). Therefore, “let your will attend their accords” (II.i.25). Like Aegeon, then, Luciana appeals to nature against the harshness of her sister’s judgment of Antipholus.
Nothing doing, Adriana says in her rebuttal. You, Luciana are unwed, and the reason you stay that way is that you know the score; you don’t want to be subjected to a man’s rule. No, sister, Luciana innocently replies; rather, I take as my principle, “Ere I learn love, I’ll practice to obey” (II.i.29). Nonsense, says Adriana: If you do have a husband some day, your “fool-begg’d patience” will evaporate (II.i.41).
Ephesian Dromio returns home, complaining that his master had boxed his ears and denied that he has a wife. “Too unruly deer,” Adriana hastily concludes; “he breaks the pale, / And feeds from home” (II.i.100-01). Calling her a victim of “self-harming jealousy” (II.i.102), Luciana tells her that she has no real proof of her husband’s infidelity, only hearsay. Only “unfeeling fools” think so, Adriana shoots back; “I know his eye doth homage otherwhere” (II.i.104). On the contrary, you are the fool, Luciana retorts; you are maddened by jealousy. ‘Luciana’ means ‘light’; her reasonable patience has served her well, if not in the eyes of her sister, an Adriana in need of an Ariadne’s thread. Her name means ‘dark.’ As both accuser and judge, Adriana commits the error of jumping to a false conclusion based on insufficient evidence.
Back in the marketplace, Syracusan Antipholus runs into ‘his’ Dromio, of whom he demands an explanation of his antic behavior—having pretended, as Antipholus assumes, not to know that he had received gold to be deposited at the Centaur, and claiming that his master is married. I, Antipholus, have been entirely too indulgent of your jesting; this permitted familiarity has bred contempt in you. (“Your sauciness will jest upon my love” [II.ii.280].) So he beats him.
Loyal Syracusan Dromio protests, “Was there any man thus beaten out of season, / When in the why and wherefore is neither rhyme or reason?” (II.ii.47-48)—he asks, rhyming and reasoning at once. Well, then, servant, “learn to jest in good time; there’s a time for all things” (II.ii.63-64). To rhyme, to harmonize with the mood of the audience, jokes must be rightly timed, well-reasoned in their placement.
Hearing the word ‘time,’ Dromio finds the thread to follow that will lead his master out of his mood. Father Time is bald. Hair is “a blessing that [Time] bestows on beasts, and what he hath scanted men in hair he hath given them in wit”—the source of all their rhyming and their reasoning (II.ii.79-80). What is more, being bald, Time “to the world’s end will have bald followers” (II.ii.105-06). “I knew t’would be a bald conclusion,” Antipholus replies, concluding the repartee with his fool. Like Adriana, Syracusan Antipholus judges hastily, but unlike her, he relents in good humor.
Another error-in-the-making arises with the entrance of Adriana and Luciana, looking for Ephesian Antipholus and finding his Syracusan twin. Adriana rebukes her putatively unfaithful putative husband. “If we two be one, and thou play false, / I do digest the poison of thy flesh, / Being strumpeted by thy contagion.” (II.ii.141-43). That is, reasoning from the Christian doctrine that husband and wife are “one flesh,” she must be a strumpet if he is a philanderer. Both sets of twins are of one flesh, but by nature not by divinely-instituted matrimony. Adriana’s error consists of mistaking the nature of her husband and compounding the error by her consequent misapplication of true, rightly-understood religious doctrine. [1] Indeed, even her theology is misappropriated, since adultery would make her a cuckold, not a strumpet; such a charge does fuel her indignation, however, and that seems to be what a thumotic soul is inclined to do. Her anger makes her ‘mad,’ irrational even as she tries to reason.
All of this lands Antipholus in an epistemological crisis. “What, was I married to her in my dream? / Or sleep I now, and think I hear all this? / What error drives our eyes and ears amiss? / Until I know this sure uncertainty / I’ll entertain the offer’d fallacy.” (II.ii.181-85). When the only certain thing is uncertainty, the reasonable person will test the claim made immediately in front of him; in this, Syracusan Antipholus resembles Luciana. Less rational, more superstitious, slavish Dromio can only exclaim and fear: “This is fairy land…. We talk with goblins, owls, and sprites. / If we obey them not, this will ensue: They’ll suck our breath, or punch us black and blue” (II.ii.188-191). Both men question their self-knowledge, their identities, knowing themselves somehow transformed, but not knowing how. As they don’t know who they are, they equally know not where they are: “Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell?” (II.ii.211), Antipholus asks. He remains ‘all at sea,’ even when on land. For her part, raging Adriana simply assumes that they mock her.
Act One began with the harsh but necessary consequences of rule. These appeared tragic, and they might yet become so. Act Two introduces a new and comic path. ‘Dromio’ or the Latin dromos means ‘path’; comedy takes the ‘low’ or slavish path. That path will have its twists, but they might be understood either in reason or in fear, either in the way of the master or the way of the slave. Comedy is philosophic, looking to correct the error or confusion caused in the human soul by appearances convention, nature, or chance places in front of it.
Ephesian Antipholus arrives in front of his house with Angelo, a goldsmith, and Balthazar, a merchant. Antipholus asks that Angelo make excuses for him with his wife, to tell her that Antipolus’ delay in coming home was caused by lingering in the goldsmith’s shop as Angelo put the finishing touches on a gold necklace for her. Dromio catches up with his master. He is still smarting from the beating he received from Syracusan Antipholus, an act his master denies having done, taking his slave for having been drunk and delusional. Dromio can only say, “I know what I know” (III.i.11). When it comes to knowledge, his physical experience, his sense-impressions, cannot give way to his master’s authority; in extremis, brute nature must prevail, at least in the ‘low’ mind of the slave.
The minds of both master and slave then confront a more immediate problem, a problem of ruling authority. When Dromio seeks to enter the house, Syracusan Dromio denies entry to him, then to his indignant master. “O villain,” Ephesian Dromio sputters, “thou has stol’n both my office and my name” (III.i.44). Hearing the commotion, Adriana comes down and also denies entry to these fellows, whom she cannot see from behind the door. Perhaps suspecting that his wife is entertaining another man—we know he is not wrong!—Antipholus would like to break that door down. Balthazar prevails upon him to be patient, citing his wife’s “sober virtue, years, and modesty” (III.i.90); otherwise, Antipholus will injure his own reputation by ‘making a scene.’ Let us withdraw and dine at The Tiger, and not insist on dining with (what Balthazar does not suspect is) the tigress within. A hungry man is a cranky one, so let him eat elsewhere, then return in the evening alone, “To know the reason of this strange restraint” (III.i.97). This shows Balthazar has learned the lesson of his Biblical namesake: Prudent caution may prevent anyone from writing ominous handwriting on the wall.
Antipholus prefers to dine at the Porpentine and to give the necklace to the hostess there, a genial courtesan who evidently treats him better than his wife does. I shall do this, “be it for nothing to spite my wife” (III.i.118), who has “sometimes upbraided me” in the past (III.i.113). This raises the question of exactly what did delay Antipholus’ return home for noontime dinner. Legend has it that if you get too close to a porpentine it will shoot its quills at you. Antipholus risks a sticking.
They leave; next, Luciana reproves and advises the man she mistakes for her sister’s husband, whose denial of his marriage vow has made her assume his infidelity. If you married my sister for her wealth, then “for her wealth use her with more kindness” (III.ii.6); if you “like elsewhere,” then at least disguise yourself by being “secret-false” (III.ii.15). The sin of infidelity is bad enough; do not compound it with brazenness. Having no idea of what she’s going on about, but having fallen in love with her, Syracusan Antipholus protests, “Your weeping sister is no wife of mine” (III.ii.42). Calling her a siren, he willingly succumbs to the sound of her voice, proposing marriage on the spot. Luciana can only say, “What, are you mad, that you do reason so?” (III.ii.53). Reasoning based on a true premise can only seem irrational to one who reasons from a false premise.
Syracusan Dromio comes out of the house, fleeing a kitchen-wench who has mistaken him for Ephesian Dromio and claimed him as her beloved. The wench is dirty, ugly, fat, and sweaty, the slave reports, his slavishness not having impeded his sense of esthetics. Like his brother, Syracusan Dromio knows by means of his sense impressions. Worse, Nell makes her own claim to sense-knowledge, as she knows all his birthmarks. What can Dromio make of this? Only an explanation that reaches beyond his senses: “I, amaz’d, ran from her as a witch” (III.ii.142).
That does it. At this point, Antipholus the Syracusan just wants to get out of town. He too now believes the stories about Ephesus. “There’s none but witches do inhabit here, / And therefore ’tis high time that I were hence, / She that doth call me husband, even my soul / Doth for a wife abhor,” but her sister’s “gentle sovereign grace” and “enchanting presence and discourse, / Hath almost made me traitor to myself.” (III.ii.154-60). Odysseus-like, “I’ll stop my ears against the mermaid’s song” (III.ii.161).
To top off his confusion, Angelo now appears, necklace in hand, mistaking him for Ephesian Antipholus, who had told him to bring it by his house. Syracusan Antipholus chooses to grasp the reality he sees, taking the necklace on the grounds that “there’s no man so vain”—so empty of common sense—that “would refuse so fair an offer’d chain” (III.ii.178-79). Like his slave, his sense of esthetics, in this case his love of beauty, rules him. That gold chain will turn into an iron chain, soon enough.
The comedy of the central, third act of the play amplifies the problem of knowledge. What counts as true evidence, and how can one reason from it? I know what I know when I’m driven to that knowledge by sheer physical evidence. Ephesian Dromio is right in knowing what he knows, that way. But the knowledge needed to rule well is trickier. Appearances are deceptive, often confused by the need to know motives, which are not sensually perceivable, and by the ruler’s need to keep up appearances, for authority’s sake. To achieve knowledge, a ruler needs more indirect ways of approaching than a box on the ears. Love, and especially married love, faces the same problem. What is the real nature of my beloved? Does the jealousy engendered by a suspicion of my beloved’s violation of marital vows, according to the laws of the city, not preclude me from knowing, or at least interfere with it?
Act IV begins in “a public place,” where Angelo, a merchant, and an officer of the law discuss how to obtain payment for the gold chain Angelo gave to Syracusan Antipholus, under the erroneous assumption that he was his Ephesian twin. Angelo needs the money now, as he owes money to another merchant, who is about to leave for Persia on business. Angelo proposes that they go to Antipholus’ house to collect the payment.
But no need: Ephesian Antipholus and his Dromio happen by, having dined with the courtesan at the Porpentine. Antipholus sends Dromio to buy a rope, with which he intends to whip “my wife and her confederates” as punishment for locking him out (IV.i.18). Antipholus complains to Angelo that he hasn’t received the chain. Judging him a cheat, Angelo has him arrested: “I shall have law in Ephesus” (IV.i.84). When Syracusan Dromio comes along and reports that the ship is about to depart from Ephesus, Ephesian Antipholus has no idea what he’s talking about, but orders him to go to Adriana to get bail money. The slave can only sigh, “Thither I must, although against my will, / For servants must their masters’ minds fulfill” (IV.i.113-14). There, Luciana has been telling her sister of Syracusan Antipholus’ love-suit, confirming Adriana’s suspicions of her husband’s character. Dromio arrives and gets the bail money, along with a command from the enraged wife to bring her husband home, where she plans some punishment of her own devising.
Syracusan Antipholus has been walking through the market, marveling at the warm reception he has received from people he’s never seen before. “There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me / As if I were their well-acquainted friend” (IV.iii.1-2). ‘Knowing’ that Ephesian men are crooks, even as he now ‘sees’ that the women are witches and sorceresses, he decides that these must be “imaginary wiles,” possibly sorcerers’ lures (IV.iii10-11). Syracusan Dromio now offers him the bail money, which Ephesian Antipholus had told him to bring. Antipholus assumes his slave has gone mad. He’s not the only one: “The fellow is distract, and so am I; / And here we wander in illusions / Some blessed power deliver us from hence!” (IV.iii.37-39). Evil spirits have deranged their minds and senses. With no natural explanation at hand, he can only pray for divine assistance.
So, when the courtesan comes up to him and asks him for the necklace he’d promised her, Antipholus takes her for the Devil, or maybe a sorceress. At dinner, his twin had accepted her ring as a token of amity; since Antipholus won’t give her the necklace, she demands that he give it back. “I hope you do not mean to cheat me so” (IV.iii.73), the injured, innocent courtesan remarks. At this, the men flee in horror. The courtesan deems him mad—”else would he never so demean himself” (IV.iii.78). She will go to his house and report his misbehavior to his wife.
Thus Syracusan Antipholus and Dromio explain the inexplicable spiritually and seek a spiritual assistance to escape the city . The courtesan explains the inexplicable in terms of nature and seeks material satisfaction from the wife who might well suspect a courtesan of being her rival. It all seems unlikely to end well.
The officer of the law is leading Ephesian Antipholus away when Ephesian Dromio returns with the rope, instead of the bail money his master now needs a lot more. Another beating, along with more comic whining, ensue. Adriana, Luciana, the courtesan find them; they’ve brought with them Pinch the Schoolmaster, who pronounces master and slave alike to be mad and proposes to exorcise Satan from their bodies. When Antipholus complains of having been locked out of his own house, this only confirms the diagnosis. For his part, he calls his wife a “dissembling harlot,” guilty of entertaining another man while leaving her husband outside (IV,iv.48). The real courtesan, along with his wife and sister-in-law have him bound, along with his slave, but the law officer objects: “The debt he owes will be required of me,” the bailiff. As might be expected, Adriana remains inflexible and orders her husband to be carted home. When the officer tells her that Antipholus owes money to the goldsmith, she stops, saying, bring me to him. “I long to know the truth hereof at large” (IV.iv.140).
The Syracusans arrive, swords drawn. In the Odyssey, Hermes teaches Odysseus how to counter Circe’s spell over his men, whom she has changed into swine. Hermes digs up the root of the moly plant and shows him its nature—the first known mention of the word ‘nature’ in Western literature. A concoction of moly will reverse the effects of the witch’s potion; that is, nature will ‘re-nature’ the men who have been de-natured, metamorphosed into animals. The god also tells him that sorcerers and sorceresses must be routed with swords. Confirming the truth of the Syracusans’ error, the women and Pinch flee; indeed, they must be so many witches. “I see these witches are afraid of swords,” Antipholus tells Dromio (IV.iv.145), reprising the experience of his distinguished predecessor in questing on the wine-dark sea.
The fifth act begins with Angelo and the merchant in front of a priory. Perhaps taking his words from their surroundings, Angelo assures his creditor that Antipholus enjoys “a most reverend reputation” in Ephesus—his “credit infinite,” the man himself “highly beloved” (V.i.6). A saint among merchants. When the Syracusans walk by, Angelo’s faith is put to a test more severe than he can bear; there is the chain around Antipholus’ neck, the very chain “he forswore most monstrously to have” (V.i.11). Accused by both men, Antipholus indignantly protests, “Thou art a villain to impeach me thus”; he challenges the merchant to a duel (V.i.29).
Before the men can do any injury to one another, the women arrive. The priory evidently affects Adriana’s language, too: “Hold, hurt him not, for God’s sake! He is mad.” (V.i.33). She orders husband and slave to be bound again and returned to the house. They run into the priory to request sanctuary. The Abbess soon emerges. Hearing Adriana’s lament, initially she reproves her for being insufficiently severe in chiding her husband for his supposed adultery, then reverses herself and criticizes her for being too severe: “The venom clamors of a jealous woman / Poisons more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth” (V.i.69-70). Against Adriana’s claim of demonic possession, the Abbess offers a naturalistic explanation: unquiet meals lead to indigestion, and fire in the stomach causes madness. (“What’s a fever but a fit of madness?”) (V.i.76). In addition, sexual deprivation causes melancholy, that “kinsman to grim and comfortless despair,” which, in consort with the wife’s deprivation of her husband’s “life-preserving rest,” causes “a huge infectious troop of pale distemperatures and foes to life” (V.i.80-82). Convinced that she can care for Antipholus better than Adriana can, she refuses to release him. She will “bring him to his wits again” (V.i.91), in keeping with “a charitable duty of my order” (V.i.107). Given her diagnosis of madness in husbands as an illness caused by bad food, sexual deprivation, and nagging, one might be forgiven for suspecting that her interest in the gentleman is les a matter of caritas than of eros. Adriana has lost her husband to another woman, after all.
As comic fortunes would have it, along come the Duke of Ephesus and his doomed prisoner, Aegeon, heading for the gallows. Not one to let a crisis go to waste, Adriana interrupts the solemn procession, demanding justice against the Abbess. The Duke agrees to investigate and a quasi-judicial inquiry begins. A messenger then arrives with the news that Antipholus has broken free from the house, not before delivering some humiliating punishments to meddlesome Pinch. But no, Adriana insists, he just went into the priory. When her real husband and his real slave do arrive, the vexed lady can only shout, switching now from spiritual to legal language, “Ay me, it is my husband! Witness you / That he is borne about invisible / Even now we hous’d him in the abbey here, / And now he’s there, past thought of human reason” (V.i.186-89).
For his part, Ephesian Antipholus also demands justice—against his termagant of a wife. Citing his faithful wartime service to the Duke as evidence of his character, he charges that the woman “whom thou gav’st to me to be my wife” has “abused and dishonored me” with her false charges (V.i.198-99). He delivers a detailed explanation of the affair of the necklace and the payment, followed by his illegal house arrest. After further witness testimony, the Duke delivers his verdict: “I think you all have drunk of Circe’s cup” (V.i.270), that “you are all mated”—that is, bewildered—”or stark mad” (V.i.281). [2] An equal-opportunity explainer, the Duke is quite willing to entertain spiritual or natural causes for their behavior; for all he can see, they might be bewitched, bothered, and/or bewildered. And indeed they are all mated—not only bewildered but related to one another by blood or marriage, and by error.
Aegeon mistakes his Ephesian son and slave for the Syracusan son and slave he saw five years ago. The Antipholus in front of him says, “I never saw my father in my life” (V.i.318), and the Duke, who knows Antipholus has been in Ephesus for many years, takes the old man to be senile. When the Abbess comes out of the priory with the Syracusans, Adriana reacts with, “I see two husbands, or my eyes deceive me” (V.i.330). But she sees only one husband, and it is her mind that deceives her, not her eyes. The Duke has recourse to the spiritual realm, taking “one of these men” to be “genius to the other” (V.i.331). “But which is the natural man, / And which the spirit? Who deciphers them?” (V.i.332-33). (If Pinch were there, he would claim such power of discernment, but he evidently remains indisposed, back at the house.)
The Syracusans recognize their father immediately. The Abbess, having questioned them, reveals herself as Aemilia, Ageon’s wife. ‘Aemilia’ means ‘rival,’ and she did indeed become the rival of her unbeknownst daughter-in-law over possession of her son, now restored to both women in his rightful stature in nature (to his mother) and in law (to his wife). Aemilia had been separated from her children, first the twin raised by her husband in Syracuse but also from the twin she had saved, who had been ripped away from his mother by some “rude fishermen of Corinth,” who boarded the Epidamnumian ship which had rescued mother, son, and slave (V.i.348). Fishers of men, indeed. “Thereupon these errors are arose,” Syracusan Antipholus now sees (V.i.387).
The Duke tells Ephesian Antipholus he will pardon his father. Before, he was steadfast in enforcing the rule of law. What has changed? Although he now has much more convincing evidence that Aegeon’s story is true, that need not be dispositive. The law is still the law; Ephesus remains in a trade war with Syracuse, which as far as he knows continues to abuse Ephesian merchants. But now he knows that Aegeon’s son is not only the merchant respected and even loved throughout the city, but a man to whom he owes a debt of gratitude for his military service to that city. The debt that Antipholus has asked him to repay by prosecuting Adriana (who has suffered and, presumably, been chastened enough) will now be discharged by pardoning the father.
“Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail / Of you, my sons,” Aemilia tells them (V.i.399-400). “And till this present hour / My heavy burden ne’er deliver’d” (V.i.400-01). Thirty-three years, Christ’s lifespan, has indeed brought them to being born again, in their parents’ eyes. They retire to the priory. Syracusan Antipholus reminds Luciana of his suit, now known to be legitimate. Beleaguered Ephesian Antipholus and his much-agitated wife might reconcile. The two Dromios, however, leave the audience with no doubt. After a short discussion of who should precede the other on the basis of prior birth, Ephesian Dromio settles the matter on the basis of natural equality: “We came into this world like brother and brother, / And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before the other” (V.i.423-424).
In this Christmastime play for lawyers and law students, Shakespeare gives his audience the laughs they want, in a sort of Three-Stooges-meet-Rumpole-of-the-Bailey slapstick farce. He nonetheless gives them something to think about—assuming they can recall what they’ve heard, after their revelries are over.
Law, Shakespeare reminds them, contrasts with both nature and mercy, the criterion of the ‘ancients’ and the criterion of the Christians. To apply the law rightly, the judge needs to take account of fortune, producer of the circumstances which, as the saying goes, ‘alter cases.’ Law may override fortune in the sense that it can correct the ‘errors’ or injustices fortune metes out, compensating bilked creditors, punishing scammers, all in defense of the commerce and property the city was founded to protect. The judge (or, in the case of a married couple, both spouses) must coordinate the exigencies of law, the reason that understands nature, and the divine example of mercy, without disregarding the political necessity of maintaining respect for laws, for the judges who decide cases under them, and for the regime of the city which enacts the laws. Judges political and familial must also recognize that commerce in the city and ‘commerce’ in the household requires fidelity and trust, always at hazard if either is misplaced and a violation of civil or marital law occurs.
How, then, is a judge to judge rightly? What counts as evidence? What is knowledge? “Know the reason,” Balthazar advises, but that’s easier said than done. Presented with baffling, contradictory evidence, logic not fallacy is the first prerequisite. Adriana’s jealous passion precludes logic. But even if the reasoning capacity is sound, one still needs to establish right premises for one’s syllogisms.
For that, Shakespeare builds on the fact that English lawyers had won the separation of the common law from canon law, centuries earlier. But the boundary needs to be guarded by his inheritors, his audience, as human beings incline to violate it. Do not, then, assume that witches and demons are the cause of apparently irrational behavior, as indeed Puritans did and could continue to do, during and after Shakespeare’s lifetime. Dreaming and madness may be regarded as spiritually or naturally caused, but they too may not be causes. Drunkenness and passion may or may not be the cause of the behavior you are considering. The passion of jealousy, in particular—a deformation of the love of one’s own—ruins good judgment, whether confined to the family or in the city at large. Even sense-perception, the most nearly self-evident form of knowledge, can mislead, as it needs to be interpreted correctly.
Judgment can mean life or death, as the play’s first act establishes. It can mean the continuance of a marriage or its dissolution, with the right rule or the ruin of a family at hazard. It can mean the protection or loss of property which, along with family, determines the prosperity or destruction of a city. There being no such thing as being ‘non-judgmental’ when it comes to human choices, and especially rulers’ choices, there can be no evading these matters.
The comedy of the errors has Shakespeare’s judges of family and of city saved from their own hasty judgments based on false premises. They learn the true premises in a sense Socratically, by testing the various stories they hear against one another, by finding the rationally coherent overall story that accounts for each piece of each person’s narrative—the comprehensive argument that encompasses all the others in a non-contradictory way.
Shakespeare also invites his audience at Gray’s Inn to reflect on what the law they apply to cases protects. Fundamentally, the common law reflects the natural human love of one’s own. That love can be rightly or wrongly directed. In the family, the husband and wife have property in one another; a degree of jealousy properly registers that right, but extreme jealousy violates and undermines it. Parents and children rightly love one another, but incest (hinted at, comically, when the abbess temporarily appropriates a man who turns out to be her son from his wife) perverts that love. In civil society, property sustains life, liberty, and happiness; we are right to love it. But loving it too much is covetousness and greed, leading to theft and cheating. One’s country deserves love, patriotism, seen most simply in the human longing for a homeland. It can be abused, sometimes provoking trade wars. Lawyers, judges, and law students should stay alert for the manifestations of all these sentiments and passions.
This being a comedy, the story ends happily. The parents who were divorced by fortune operating on nature’s most ‘fortuitous’ element, the often-chaotic sea, renew their marriage. Syracusan Antipholus, who begins as a self-described drop of water in that sea, a person of no consequence with no family and no real homeland, an Odysseus with neither an Ithaca nor a Penelope to come home to, finds a likely wife in a city where his new-found brother already has credit and standing. Ephesian Antipholus, a husband with a shrewish wife who understandably distrusts him but lets her jealousy run wild, thus giving neither herself nor her husband a proper home, defends himself at the bar of both wife and fellow-citizens; he may yet find stability in a household in which the Christian-Ephesian precepts of wifely submission and husbandly love complement one another. Luciana, an eligible young lady with no suitor, a respectable woman and too much so, over-committed to upholding appearances (to the extent of having instructed her future husband on how to conduct an extramarital affair—an error indeed), now has the prospect of a marriage in which the reality will need no such hypocrisy.
As for the slaves, Shakespeare gives the last word to Ephesian Dromio, his master’s partner in advancing toward Phoenix-like rebirth. He is the one who coordinates the natural relation of brotherliness with the spiritual relation of equality before God, before entering God’s kingdom insofar as it lives on earth, in the priory where Aemilia found refuge from the chaos of the sea.
Notes
- It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the Apostle Paul states this doctrine in his letter to the church in this city, Ephesus. Writing of the Church, he explains, “We are members of [Christ’s] body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife and they two shall be one flesh…. Let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband.” (Ephesians V.30-33).
- The story of Circe’s cup, containing the potion which transformed Odysseus’ crew into pigs, had accumulated at least two traditions in the centuries before Shakespeare’s time that he has appropriated. It was said to be a cautionary tale against drunkenness, a condition often associated with sailors; recall that drunkenness has been one of the explanations offered for bizarre behavior here. Circe had also become a traditional figure of female jealousy. Ovid tells the story of Glaucus, enamored of the nymph, Scylla, who asks the sorceress for a love potion. When Circe falls in love with him and he refuses her advances, in her jealous rage she turns him into a monster.
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