385
– I see we still did meet each other’s man,
And I was ta’en for him, and he for me,
And thereupon these errors are arose.
ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS [to the Duke]
These ducats pawn I for my father here.
DUKE
It shall not need: thy father hath his life.
390
COURTESAN [to Antipholus of Ephesus]
Sir, I must have that diamond from you.
ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS [Gives the ring.]
There, take it, and much thanks for my good cheer.
ABBESS
Renowned Duke, vouchsafe to take the pains
To go with us into the abbey here
And hear at large discoursed all our fortunes;
395
– And all that are assembled in this place,
That by this sympathized one-day’s error
Have suffered wrong, go, keep us company,
And we shall make full satisfaction.
– Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail
400
Of you, my sons, and till this present hour
My heavy burden ne’er delivered.
– The Duke, my husband and my children both,
And you, the calendars of their nativity,
Go to a gossips’ feast, and go with me;
405
After so long grief, such nativity!
DUKE
With all my heart I’ll gossip at this feast.
Exeunt omnes[, except] the two Dromios
and two [Antipholus] brothers.
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE [to Antipholus of Ephesus]
Master, shall I fetch your stuff from shipboard?
ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS
Dromio, what stuff of mine hast thou embarked?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE
Your goods that lay at host, sir, in the Centaur.
410
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE [to Antipholus of Ephesus]
He speaks to me; – I am your master, Dromio.
Come, go with us; we’ll look to that anon.
Embrace thy brother there; rejoice with him.
[Exeunt the Antipholus brothers.]
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE
There is a fat friend at your master’s house,
That kitchened me for you today at dinner;
415
She now shall be my sister, not my wife.
DROMIO OF EPHESUS
Methinks you are my glass and not my brother:
I see by you I am a sweet-faced youth.
Will you walk in to see their gossiping?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE Not I, sir; you are my elder.
420
DROMIO OF EPHESUS That’s a question; how shall we try it?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE We’ll draw cuts for the senior;
till then, lead thou first.
DROMIO OF EPHESUS
Nay then, thus: [embracing him] we came into the
world like brother and brother;
425
And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another.
Exeunt.
FINIS
Commentary and Textual Notes
HISTORICAL NOTES
LIST OF ROLES In the first published list of roles, Rowe (1709) grouped characters by sex. The present list modifies Rowe’s order but retains the gist of his descriptions. Main characters are listed first, in order of appearance, except with the twins paired. Secondary characters, starting with the Jailer, are presented in order of appearance.
1 EGEON Although the Folio entry SD (TLN 2) and the Duke’s address (TLN 7, 1.1.3) identify this character as the ‘Merchant of Siracusa’, editors since Rowe have employed the SP ‘Ægeon’ or ‘Egeon’. The name Egeon (1.1.157) arises from the character’s wandering through, and weathering by, the Aegean Sea in search of his lost son (see 1.1.132–6). That sea takes its name from the mythical King Aegeus, the father of Theseus (see 7n.). Aegeus, long separated from his son, failed at first to recognize him at reunion, and later drowned himself in the mistaken belief that Theseus had perished. Additionally, Riehle argues, ‘Egeon’ may partly derive from the Latin verb egere (egeo in the first-person present indicative), ‘to be poor, destitute, in need of something’ (177; see also King, 12, n. 2), and thus reflects the character’s circumstances in the first scene. F’s generic SP, treating Egeon as essentially a merchant, eventually breaks down. In Act 5, the Folio SP changes from ‘Mar.Fat.’ (for ‘Merchant Father’, at TLN 1671) to ‘Fa[ther].’ (TLN 1762+), as Egeon’s familial identity asserts precedence (see 5.1.195–6n.).
2 DUKE ‘Duke’ functions as a generalized term for ruler (OED n. 1a), more king than governor. The Duke’s name, Solinus (‘So-lìe-nus’), occurs once, at 1.1.1. It probably derives from Gaius Julius Solinus, a third-century AD Roman writer. Solinus was the author of Polyhistor (‘multi-history’), translated in 1587 by Arthur Golding as The Excellent and Pleasant Work of Julius Solinus Polyhistor. Originally published in Latin in Venice, 1473, Polyhistor is a compendium of historical geography, sometimes exotic; it was often consulted in the Middle Ages and later. The early occurrence of Solinus in CE may alert the spectator to be prepared for the ‘diversities of customes of unknown nations’ and even for the fabulous (Solinus, Dedicatory Epistle). Contrastingly, Dutton argues that the name Solinus evokes contemporary Turkish rulers–Suleiman, Selim or Selimus (316). An Athenian character named Solinus appears in 4.1 of John Lyly’s Campaspe (pub. 1584).
3, 4 ANTIPHOLUS The name Antipholus (‘An-tìf-o-lus’) is given to each of the twin masters, enabling much of CE’s comic confusion. In Plautus’ Menaechmi, the twins are distinguished at birth as Menaechmus and Sosicles; after the former is stolen as a child, the latter is memorially renamed Menaechmus (see 4n.). Shakespeare may wish the audience to assume a like explanation in CE. ‘Antipholus’ is preferable to ‘Antipholis’ (although both spellings occur), because it rhymes with another -us word, ruinous (3.2.2, 4) (Wright, 1.518). Of the name’s sources, Foakes observes candidly, ‘we do not know where Shakespeare found it’ (2, n. 1). Sidney’s Arcadia makes for the best candidate (Cuningham), with Terence, Lucian and Rich as other possibilities. Both the old and the new Arcadia contain the story of the Princess Erona (the name suggestive of ‘error’), who, after foolishly scorning Cupid, falls madly and unsuitably in love with her nurse’s son, the unworthy Antiphilus. Initially, their marriage is prevented; later Antiphilus betrays her, and by the end Erona comes to stand for wrong-headed and unrequited love. Variants of the name also appear in Roman comedy. A romantic heroine named Antiphila figures in Terence’s Heauton Timorumenos (the servant name Dromo also occurs there; see 5, 6n.); a lover called ‘Antiph
o’ figures in Terence’s Phormio; and his Eunuchus contains a friend of that same name (see Baldwin, Genetics, 101). More recently, Dutton has argued that ‘Antipholus’ derives from a famous classical essay by Lucian, Calumnia non temere credendum (‘On not believing rashly in slander’), widely translated in the 15th and 16th centuries. The only proposed source that connects a variant of the name Antipholus with the city of Ephesus, Calumnia contains an anecdote about Antiphilis slandering Apelles of Ephesus. Slander functions as an important subtheme in CE (see Dutton, 309, 310–13). A hitherto unnoticed possible source is Barnabe Rich’s prose romance The Adventures of Brusanus, Prince of Hungaria (1592). The romance’s main hero is Antipholus, Prince of Illyria, a valorous knight who sets out to find and recover his eloped sister, Moderna. In composing Twelfth Night, Shakespeare drew from a tale in Rich’s Farewell to the Military Profession (1581).
3 ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE This twin brother’s home city corresponds to that of the twins in Plautus’ Men. (on Syracuse). Oddly, Antipholus of Syracuse is identified in two of F’s entry SDs as ‘Antipholis Erotes’ (TLN 162) and ‘Antipholis Errotis’ (TLN 394). The Latinate but unknown terms Erotes/Errotis may imperfectly recollect some form of the Latin errare (erratus in the nominative past participle); Foakes speculates that the two cognomens are a corruption of erraticus (Latin ‘wandering’), although they are difficult to account for (xi–xii, xxvi–xxvii). The echoes of erraticus recall Plautus’ itinerant Menaechmus (just as the echoes of surreptus in the SDs for Ephesian Antipholus recall Menaechmus’ stolen brother; see 4n., and also Foakes, xxvii). The Latin infinitive errare means not only ‘to wander’ but ‘to float or drift’, ‘to be in doubt’, ‘to go astray’, ‘to think or act in error’ or ‘to stray from the path of virtue’ (OLD errare). Many, perhaps all, of those definitions apply to Antipholus of Syracuse.
4 ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS On Ephesus, F names Antipholus of Ephesus as Antipholis Sereptus (TLN 273). The cognomen Sereptus recalls the Latin nominative past participle for ‘stolen’, surreptus, and undoubtedly refers to the brother in Plautus’ Men. who was abducted and carried off to Epidamnus when the twins were children: ‘alitus ille surrepticius’ (Argumentum, 7). In Men., after the boy was stolen, his father died ‘because of his grief’ (Prologue, 35–6) and his grandfather decided to change the remaining son’s name to that of his lost brother, Menaechmus. Throughout the Argument and Prologue in Men., where the back-story is told, forms of surripere (‘to steal’, ‘to snatch’) appear multiple times in various conjugations. Shakespeare may have remembered the lost brother as ‘Menaechmus Surreptus’ and brought that mnemonic into CE for its analogous character (Warner’s translation of Men. has nothing comparable). According to Clark & Glover, the stolen Menaechmus was commonly distinguished in the 16th century as ‘Surreptus’ (1.462; see also Foakes, xxvi).
5, 6 DROMIO The proximate source for the name Dromio (almost always pronounced as two syllables, Dròm-yo), is Lyly’s farcical Mother Bombie, probably performed c. 1590 and published in 1594 (see Lyly, MB, 9). There, a character named Dromio is one of several prominently featured witty servants who seek to outscheme their masters and win freedom from indenture. With its identity tricks and surprise revelations of birth, Mother Bombie shows a debt to Roman comedy. The servant name Dromo occurs in several of Terence’s plays (Andria, Heauton Timorumenos and Adelphoe); the dialogue of Plautus’ Asinaria also mentions a servant named Dromo. In Greek, dromos means ‘running track’ or ‘race-course’. Thus, ‘Dromio’ might suggest ‘runner’, recalling the stock ‘running servant’ or servus currens of Latin comedy (see 2.2.200n., on Dromio, thou snail). The connection is made specifically when Syracusan Dromio enters out of breath from running fast (4.2.30) (see also 3.2.70.1).
7 ADRIANA The name probably alludes to the Adriatic Sea, which lies to the east of Italy, just as ‘Egeon’ recalls the Aegean Sea (see 1n.). Adriana repeats Antipholus of Syracuse’s sea-image of the drop of water (see 2.2.131–5 and n.), and she is linked variously to water by her weeping (see 2.1.114 and n.). The name also hints at a negative stereotype: Petruchio in TS says that he would not fear a shrewish wife were she as ‘rough’ as ‘the swelling Adriatic seas’ (1.2.73, 74). For a less obvious source, the stem of ‘Adriana’, adro, derives from an Italian variant of ‘dark’, facilitating a dark/light contrast with Luciana (see Feldman, 119; Levith, 69). Other associations have been proposed: for example, that the name is a variant spelling for the classical character Ariadne, alluded to elsewhere by Shakespeare and known for her weeping complaint at Theseus’ abandonment of her (as at TGV 4.4.167–8; see Riehle, 179–81); and that ‘Adriana’ recalls the Roman emperor Hadrian who refounded Ephesus, first settled by Amazonian women who refused male domination (see Maguire, 369, 364–5).
8 LUCIANA The first syllable of ‘Luciana’ suggests Italian luce, or ‘light’ (Latin lux), supporting the idea of a light/dark contrast in the appearances of Luciana and Adriana (see 7n.). Comparable pairings occur in other of Shakespeare’s early comedies (see Var., 6). Syracusan Antipholus refers to Luciana as a fair sun with golden hairs (3.2.56, 48). More complicated derivations include the possibility that ‘Luciana’ may recall ‘Lucina’ in Lawrence Twine’s prose translation (c. 1576) of the Apollonius of Tyre story and that the character, to the extent that she exposes folly, may allude to the Roman satirical essayist Lucian (see Riehle, 183–97). Like ‘Adriana’, ‘Luciana’ is Italianate. In F, ‘Luciana’ appears consistently except for one entrance SD (TLN 786), where she is called ‘Iuliana’, and the subsequent SP (TLN 787) where she is identified as ‘Iulia.’. For these exceptions, no satisfactory explanation has been found.
9 ABBESS The Abbess’s name, Emilia (in F, ‘Æmilia’ at TLN 1828, 1831, 1838), also occurs in Oth, WT and TNK. That last play dramatizes Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, in which Emilia is the beloved of two rival cousins. The name carries the aura of romance narrative.
10 JAILER See 16n.
11 FIRST MERCHANT To F’s Marchant (TLN 162), Dyce added ‘First’ in order to distinguish the character from the other merchant who appears in Act 4 (see 4.1.0.1n.). F’s SPs initially use Mer. and subsequently E.Mar., with E. presumably signifying ‘Ephesian’. On this character’s lone appearance, see 1.2.26n., on five o’clock.
12 ANGELO The goldsmith’s name evokes gold, since in Elizabethan times an ‘angel’ was a gold coin (introduced in 1465), worth 10 or 11 shillings and stamped on one side with the image of St Michael (and on the other with an Elizabethan galley; see Fig. 9). F introduces the character as ‘Angelo’ (SD at TLN 617), but after 3.1., his SPs name him as ‘Gold[smith].’, his identity absorbed into his type. Shakespeare also gives the name Angelo to the hypocritically righteous deputy in MM.
13 BALTHAZAR The name Balthazar has an association with feasting, fitting for a prospective dinner guest in 3.1, the character’s only scene. Balthazar (i.e. Belshazzar) was the pagan King of Babylon, named in Daniel, 5.1, who ‘made a great feast’ and ‘dranke wine before the thousand’ of his princes, using gold and silver vessels that his father had taken as spoils from the Temple. Voragine, in The Golden Legend, also gives ‘Balthasar’ as an alternative name for one of the three magi (1.79). The name recurs for servants or attendants in MA, MV and RJ.
14 LUCE The name (pronounced as one syllable) appears only in 3.1. Critics have generally accepted the argument that the kitchen-maid whom Syracusan Dromio describes in 3.2 as Nell is the same character as Luce (see 3.2.110n.). Later Dromio will refer to her as Dowsabel (4.1.110). ‘Luce’ shares a syllable with ‘Luciana’; perhaps to avoid confusion, Shakespeare switched to ‘Nell’ in 3.2, where the character functions as Luciana’s parodic double (see 3.2.75–149n.). Maguire (369–70) associates ‘Nell’ with other sexually forward females in Shakespeare, such as Helena in MND and Helen of Troy in TC, with a sexual pun on Luce/loose (for ‘loose’ as ‘unchaste’, see Williams, Glossary, 193–4). Wells cites Bland’s suggestion that ‘Lu
ce’ refers topically to a famous London brothel-keeper, Lucy ‘Negro’ Morgan (see Bland, 94).
15 SECOND MERCHANT This character’s entrance SD in F (TLN 981) reads ‘a Merchant’. As early as 1741, the stage role was identified as ‘Second Merchant’ (Scouten, 3.942), and it appeared again in Thomas Hull’s 1793 adaptation. The editorial ‘Second’ was subsequently introduced by Dyce to distinguish this merchant from the one in 1.2 (see 1.2.0.1–2 t.n.).
16 OFFICER The Officer (or sergeant; see 4.2.55, 60) is introduced in 4.1 in relation to debt collection (see 4.1.6n., on officer). Later, in 4.4, with Ephesian Antipholus under arrest, F identifies him as a Iailor (TLN 1280; see 4.4.0.2, 110, 143), the term perhaps following the character’s changed function. In Act 1, a Jailer guards Egeon (1.1.0.2). That Jailer and the Officer of Act 4 are sometimes treated in production as the same character, thus linking the story of Egeon to that of the Antipholuses.
18 DOCTOR PINCH Pinch’s name reflects his pinched, sour, lean-faced look (5.1.238), a key to his humourless and zealous character. Pinch is also described as hungry, threadbare and needy (5.1.238, 240, 241), so that he is ‘pinched’ in both face and pocket (see OED pinch v. 10c). Doctor Pinch engages in ‘pinching’ when he binds Ephesian Antipholus and Dromio. Syracusan Dromio has feared that Adriana and Luciana, as witches, will ‘suck our breath or pinch us black and blue’ (2.2.198); that fear comes true in his encounter with Adriana’s agent, Doctor Pinch. Pinch was probably played by John Sinkler (or Sincler or Sinklo), a character actor notable for his thinness. See 4.4.40.2n., 5.1.238–42n. and Appendix 3.
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