Something lost and partially recovered or newly found through time is marriage. In Errors, marriage participates in both the urgency of farce and the broader arc of comic and romance teleology. In the last act, the Abbess reveals herself as Emilia, Egeon’s long-lost wife, and frees the merchant from his fetters (5.1.339 – 40). This is a comic high moment, since it comes entirely unlooked for by the audience, happens outside the goal of fraternal reunion and often becomes, onstage, a delightful sartorial transformation in identity as the Abbess removes her nun’s habit and reveals herself underneath in full secular garb (much as Measure for Measure’s Duke steps out of his robes). The aged and estranged Egeon receives the antidote of fresh perspective and domestic embrace. Accordingly, marital reunion arrives as something both comic (can a nun so easily cast off her ‘habit’?) yet also deeply redemptive. Irony afflicts other potential marital relations: neither Syracusan Antipholus nor Luciana quite knows who the other is, while Ephesian Antipholus can only wonder but never ask what transpired between his brother and his wife.
The play puts the very nature of marriage under debate: is the husband the master, according to the traditional view defended by Luciana (2.1.15 –25), or do married partners share some kind of equality and even mutuality, according to the newly emerging vision of Protestant ‘companionate marriage’ as held by Adriana?57 (Shakespeare visits similar themes in Shrew, where Kate changes from a position somewhat like Adriana’s early views to a final one rather like Luciana’s.) Luciana’s male-mastery speech sounds stuffy and bookish, and Adriana legitimately mocks her inexperience. Later, Luciana argues that Adriana’s husband should conceal his adultery by means of deception (3.2.1–28). Given both her theory of male mastery in marriage and the apparent fact of male infidelity, Luciana understandably remains unwed, fearing ‘troubles of the marriage bed’ (2.1.27).
By contrast, Adriana declares herself for female liberty and ‘sway’ (2.1.28), defending the idea of approximate female equivalency in marriage. Yet the husband persists still as first among equals, for Adriana makes her beauty, discourse and wit dependent upon her mate’s favourable views (87– 97); later, she pictures herself as the clinging vine to his stout elm (2.2.179 – 82). Despite the earnestness of her speech to Syracusan Antipholus (2.2.116 –52), Adriana pushes the idea of a Pauline union between man and wife to such an extreme in terms of the body (e.g. the magical transference of sin) that it becomes physiologically incomprehensible. She imagines marriage as a Pauline oneness of flesh but casts it in negative terms: ‘stained skin’, ‘adulterate blot’, fleshly ‘poison’ and ‘contagion’ (2.2.142, 146, 149, 150).58 It is unclear how much the idea of spiritual or psychological mutuality explains Adriana’s view of marriage, for her desire to have some ‘sway’ and her sense of her vulnerability to her husband’s neglect (but not vice versa) remain not quite reconciled to her argument that to her mate she is ‘undividable, incorporate, … thy dear self’s better part’ (128 – 9).59
That Adriana (like others) could be deceived by the outward signs of identity shows the vulnerability of her doctrine of marriage. Indeed, the revulsion that Syracusan Dromio expresses towards Nell’s physicality makes evident a shared male distaste for the very flesh with which, according to Pauline doctrine, man would be one. Yet Adriana wants more than bodily union. For her, marriage creates a debt not just of the marriage bed but of love. That debt cannot be paid by flattery, as Luciana would have it, nor by golden carcanets, as her husband would prefer (see 2.1.105 –7). Adriana longs for the restoration of a romanticized past in her marriage (see 2.1.105 –11, 2.2.118 –24), but that bygone time, if it existed, can never be fully redeemed, nor can the marriage debt of love ever be fully paid. In the end, the carcanet is restored to Ephesian Antipholus, but what will be restored to Adriana? The playtext gives the Ephesian couple no lines of reconciliation or understanding. Likewise Luciana: although Syracusan Antipholus declares his intentions, the dialogue gives Luciana no reply. Instead, as events decelerate, attention turns to the restoration of personal property, the sorting out of confusions, the reunion of the Egeon family and the comic communion of the servant twins. Luciana and Adriana exit separate from, and prior to, the Antipholuses: the nuances in these relationships must be determined in performance, despite the ending’s jubilant and restorative air. Final questions of heterosexual bonds are elided, and the denouement narrows to celebrate re-established male kinship and fraternal equality. Comedies typically end with the possibility of joyful marriage, and that prospect can swell the genuine and well-earned euphoria of reunion and closure. Joy dominates Errors’s conclusion, yet, as in later plays such as Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare leaves, towards marriage, a sense of business unfinished. Only time will tell.
POETIC GEOGRAPHY, TRAVEL, DARK EPHESUS
Although constructed from real places (see Fig. 1), The Comedy of Errors’s world exists as a ‘poetic geography’ of layered frames of historical references and figurative meanings.60 Place operates in Errors as a metaphor and a ‘palimpsest of perspectives owned by more than one culture’61 to a degree greater than in Shakespeare’s other early comedies, such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona or The Taming of the Shrew. The play’s locale exudes both familiarity and exotic disorientation, and invites questions: why Ephesus? what values does the play’s geography call forth?
Plautus’ Menaechmi is set in Epidamnus, but Errors shifts the action to Ephesus, with Menaechmi’s site remembered in the name Epidamium (see 1.1.41n., on Epidamium, and 1.1.41 LN), which is mentioned seven times. Epidamnus was an ancient Hellenic commercial seaport on the north-eastern coast of the Adriatic in an area (now Albania) that was once known as Illyria or Illyricum (after the Indo-European Illyrii tribes; Twelfth Night takes place in Illyria).62 References to Epidamium lend Errors a vaguely Hellenistic aura, but Ephesus (where Plautus located Miles Gloriosus) was preferable as a setting, because it would have been better known than Epidamnus and would have evoked complex associations.
Ephesus, a Greek commercial city in Asia Minor (now in modern Turkey), is mentioned in the New Testament and was legendary for its wealth. Situated on the eastern Mediterranean coast, at the convergence of travel routes, the city thrived on international trade between east and west. In classical times, it housed a great temple of Diana (or Artemis), one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Famous for its mercantilism and pagan sorcery, ancient Ephesus was visited by the Apostle Paul in the first century AD and eventually became a centre of Christianity. The New Testament describes how, on his first, two-year visit, Paul won converts and performed miracles (see Acts, 19.1– 41). His sojourn made Ephesus notorious for magic and idol-worship as well as for greed and sharp mercantile practices. In Acts, craftsmen do good business selling silver shrines of Artemis, apparently to pilgrims and tourists. When Paul denounces pagan idolatry, the outraged artisans nearly riot (19.23 – 41), inducing him to depart (20.1). The Geneva Bible’s marginal commentary emphasizes the Ephesian merchants’ covetousness and preference for profit and worldliness over religion, likening them to Roman Catholics (‘Papistes’). Paul also converts various Ephesian magicians, upon which they burn their magic books, valued at ‘fiftie thousande peeces of siluer’ (19.19); perhaps echoing Acts, Errors’s Ephesus houses ‘Dark-working sorcerers’ (1.2.99). In addition, Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians contains an influential discussion of marriage to which Errors alludes (see e.g. 2.1.7–25n.; 2.2.116 –52n., 125 –52n.).
According to legend, Ephesus was the site of the Virgin Mary’s Assumption into heaven, and the home of St John the Evangelist, the author of the Book of Revelation. In AD 431, Ephesus hosted a famous Church council that repudiated Nestorianism, the doctrine that Christ is two distinct persons, a witting or unwitting association for Errors. The miraculous healing in the Apollonius of Tyre tale also occurs in Ephesus; the story was adapted by John Gower and Lawrence Twine and known to Shakespeare. In Shakespeare’s time, Ephesus
was held by the Turks, although the city had become largely uninhabited (Seltzer, 581). Shakespeare mentions Ephesus only in Errors, but Falstaff later uses the epithet ‘Ephesian’ to suggest ‘roisterer’ (2H4 2.2.150, MW 4.5.18); in Errors, Ephesus carries a hint of Asian luxuriance and sensuality. While Ephesus as a place possesses a number of associations, its most important ones for Errors are with eastern mercantilism and Paul’s biblical encounter.
Ephesus’s rival city was Syracuse, Sicily’s metropolis, ‘in the olde tyme of a meruailous renowme in strength and rychesse’ (Cooper, Thesaurus, sig. Q3r). Syracuse is imagined, like Ephesus, as one of a series of city-states in the Greek-dominated classical Mediterranean. In the fourth century BC, Syracuse was the seat of the Greek tyrant Dionysius, well known in the Renaissance and dramatized in Richard Edwards’s humanist play Damon and Pythias (1564). Ruled by Spain when Errors was written, Syracuse was an important commercial port and a departure point for Spanish naval excursions against the Ottoman empire, aspects that reinforce the play’s emphasis on trade and implicit contrast of west and east.63
Asia provides Errors’s geographical theatre.64 The Syracusans, from the western Mediterranean, have arrived in Ephesus across the sea, with western restraint putting eastern pleasure and magic into subtle relief. The play’s narrative arises out of the misadventures of travel. Travelling home from Epidamium, Egeon, his wife, their twin sons and their twin boy-slaves were shipwrecked (see Fig. 10) and separated, presumably near the Gulf of Corinth (see Parks, 93). The father, one son and one boy-slave were rescued, and eventually returned to Syracuse. The mother and the other two children were picked up by men from Epidamium, and the boys were subsequently kidnapped; all of them found their way to Ephesus in Asia Minor. Egeon, in search of his sons, has roamed ‘farthest Greece’ and ‘the bounds of Asia’ (1.1.132, 133) before arriving in the Ephesian harbour. A sense of movement across the Mediterranean infuses Errors’s action.
10 The rescue of the mother (Emilia) by fishermen of Corinth (narrated in 1.1). Painted by F. Wheatley, engraved by J. Neagle, from George Steevens (ed.), The Dramatic Works of Shakespeare, vol. 2 (1802)
Apprehended in Ephesus, Egeon is sentenced to death because of an inter-urban trade war. Syracusan Antipholus and Dromio then turn up, accompanied by a travelling merchant. Later, an Ephesian merchant prepares to depart for Persia, and the Syracusans book passage on one of the many outbound ships. The other Antipholus has resettled from Corinth to Ephesus and has soldiered (presumably abroad) with Duke Solinus in his wars. Much of the business of Ephesus is international trade.65 Before their intended departure, the Syracusans even stock up on valuable oil, balsamum and aqua-vitae, as if they were themselves traders (see 4.1.85 – 92). The action’s predominant location is ‘the mart’. The fictive world connotes displacement and relocation, along with commercial bustle and constant voyaging among the coastal cities of the Mediterranean.
In this atmosphere, differences between west and east blur, and the play’s locales become curiously undifferentiated. The places mentioned are urban and suggest a ‘larger Hellenistic world, at once far-flung and homogeneous’ (McJannet, 92). Ephesus and Syracuse, apparently sister cities, are now fighting an ‘intestine’ (i.e. internal) and presumably temporary war, prompted by a trade dispute (see 1.1.11 and n.) but not reflective of nationalistic or religious antagonisms. Incipient violence, such as the kidnapping or ransoming of shipwrecked survivors, is business by another name. Ottoman Ephesus hints at a fantasy version of Elizabethan mercantile life: its friendly merchants ply Syracusan Antipholus with luxury goods and offers of loans (see 4.3.1– 9); a finely crafted chain and an expensive ring circulate among characters; prosperity seems abundant even as debts pile up; and a merchant readies himself for a trade expedition to the interior of Persia (as if referring to Queen Elizabeth’s interest in cultivating trade relations with the Turk). That exotic world is synecdochally evoked in Ephesian Antipholus’ reference to a Turkish tapestry covering a desk at home that contains a purse of ducats (4.1.103 –5). Ephesus is so affluent, affable and seeming-generous that Syracusan Dromio could imagine remaining there and ‘turn[ing] witch’ (4.4.157). Ephesus ultimately occurs for him as a fantasy version of the world he already knows.
But Ephesus also has a nightmare aspect. Shakespeare’s comedies, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It, often develop a contrast between city and country, or between the stiff and artificial court world and the more metamorphic and unmediated green world, with the action moving from the entanglements of the former to the resolutions of the latter.66 Errors lacks such contrasts of locale; it has no Forest of Arden as refuge for characters from the court. Instead, its mundane, workaday world and its magical green world co-exist as different dimensions of the same place. Rather than distinct realms geographically separated and diachronically experienced, these two interfused domains are encountered simultaneously. Errors was Shakespeare’s first such experiment, and remains his most fully developed.67 The simultaneity of the ordinary and the magical makes possible Errors’s uncanniness. The play’s bourgeois environment intersects with an unnerving Ephesian potential: despotic execution, pagan sorcery, Turkish carnality. Shakespeare’s audience might have been bothered by Ephesian death threats and money demands, recalling vexatious Turkish acts of kidnapping and piracy and of the ransoming of English seamen and travellers (Degenhardt, 42). Elizabethans, of course, would have known Ephesus’s alarming reputation for sorcery from the New Testament (see 1.2.97n., on this town). Ephesus’s ancient temple of Diana was a central symbol of heathen fertility-cultism, and its associations with matriarchy and female sensuality colour the play’s women characters, Luciana, Adriana, the Courtesan, Nell and even the Abbess Emilia, whose priory displaces Diana’s temple.68 Male nightmarish fears about engulfment by females prompt Syracusan Dromio’s cartographic description of Nell’s gargantuan body, imagined as multiple countries, nasty extrusions and bad airs (see 3.2.115 – 44). Such is the flip-side of the comfortable Ephesus of pan-European trade and Pauline conversion. But sorcery and tyranny finally dissipate; the Courtesan, for example, turns out to be not the ‘devil’s dam’ (4.3.53) but a kindly businesswoman. The dangers of Ephesus emerge, in the end, as more psychological than real; Dark Ephesus resides largely in the mind’s predispositions, desires, fears and imaginings.
At the outer edge of Ephesus, however, lies a hazardously real (if ultimately providential) geography: the sea, the grand image of upheaval and change. At the margin of the bourgeois city built by the seaways of trade waits this dimly evoked, watery place in all its danger, ‘alienating, threatening, and vast’ (Mentz, 40). Trade thrives upon the sea, but the sea’s perils divide members of the Egeon family and hurtle them in opposite directions that will define their identities. Egeon’s physical deterioration is an index to the toil of voyage. Sea travel has eroded his will to live, and in the play’s recognition scene he appears so sea-changed with grief – wrinkled face, dimmed eyes, cracked voice, deformed presence – as to be unrecognizable as himself (see 5.1.298 –318). Yet for a moment, life returns from the sea. A reknitting of a family after it has roamed and changed almost beyond knowing; a reunion sanctified by suffering, profoundly desired and joyously fulfilling: Shakespeare would come back to such moving scenes of loss and recuperation over the course of his playwriting life.
It is a truism that every Shakespearean city is always, to some degree, London, and so with Ephesus. Its characters’ unintentional ‘misidentifications’ can be compared to the intentional misidentifications, or larcenous tricks, exposed by Robert Greene and others in the cony-catching pamphlets of 1590s London, for the city was a place where urban selfhood had to be established largely by outward material signs.69 Shakespeare alludes to pamphlets by Greene and Thomas Nashe and to the then-roiling dispute between Nashe and Gabriel Harvey (see e.g. 4.4.44n.). The Officer (see Fig. 11) who detains Ephesian Antipholus hails from contemporary London’s urban literature an
d evokes the fear of debtor’s arrest that troubled many citizens (including Inns of Court students) (see e.g. 4.2.32– 40n.). Various Christian references also pull the play’s sense of locale towards contemporary England (see e.g. 2.2.194nn.), as do its English household names: ‘Maud, Bridget, Marian, Cic’ly, Gillian, Ginn!’ (3.1.31), and, of course, Nell. Such present-world allusions emerge distinctly in Act 4, as the stage community enlarges to catch more and more city character-types in the whirligig of confusion. These evocations of London fill out Dark Ephesus: the Officer, in Syracusan Dromio’s imagination, constitutes a demonic figure capable of carrying poor souls to hell (see 4.2.40n., on hell).
11 A jailer or officer. From Geffray Mynshul, Essays and Characters of a Prison and Prisoners (1618)
Although Errors is anchored to actual places with histories and reputations, its poetic geography has nonetheless the character of a borderland, altering according to perspective, difficult to fix – properties consistent with the play’s sense of movement, change, juxtaposition and surprise. Even more, Ephesus becomes a place where virtually all the characters lose control, and experience powerlessness and even helplessness, sometimes benign, sometimes not. The play begins, of course, with Egeon ‘Hopeless and helpless’ (1.1.157). The Antipholus brothers and the Dromios progressively lose control of situations; so does the wooed Luciana; so do minor characters such as the goldsmith and the Courtesan. Adriana struggles throughout the play to assert authority, only to yield it to the Abbess. The incipient chaos that overtakes and disempowers characters is embodied in the exorcist Pinch and adumbrated by the play’s preternatural suggestion of magic. As it will turn out, of course, ‘helpless’ is not necessarily ‘hopeless’, for Ephesus is also a place of transformations.
The Comedy of Errors Page 6
