The Comedy of Errors

by Kent Cartwright

  402 burden an image of childbirth; see 343 and n., on at a burden; 400 and n., on travail.

  *ne’er Dyce’s ne’er, instead of F’s ‘are’, has been almost universally accepted. F’s ‘are’ is incompatible with the futurity of till (401) and disagrees with burden. Dyce’s simple emendation also keeps the idea of deliverance in suspense until the Abbess’s final lines.

  delivered deliverèd; see 393n.

  404 calendars i.e. the Dromios. Cf. almanac at 1.2.41 (see n.).

  404, 406 nativity … nativity F’s repetition of nativity has seemed to many a compositorial error, reducing the impact of each occurrence. Editors sometimes emend the second nativity to ‘festivity’ or ‘felicity’. Another suggestion is to change the first nativity to ‘maturity’ on the hypothesis that nativity was inadvertently transposed from 406 into 404, although ‘maturity’ problematically shifts focus away from birth. F’s repetition of nativity makes sense, since the first instance refers to the actual birth, the second to the metaphorical rebirth of the Abbess’s children (see 343 and n.). The dual instances of nativity could have been differentiated in sound, with -vity at 404 foreshortened to -v’ty (Walker, Versification, 201), maintaining the pentameter, but then accorded its full and climactic syllabification at 406, -ivity; repetition-with-variation is a characteristic strategy of CE (for related examples, see 1.1.57n.). Cf. Richard’s exercising of the line-ending word ‘crown’ four times in quick succession (3H6 3.2.168–79).

  405 gossips’ feast a celebration of the birth and christening of a child, to which gossips (or godparents (OED n. 1a)), relatives and family friends were invited; cf. 419. The gossips’ feast honoured both the fact of a birth and the spiritual affinity of a familial community (see Phillips, 156–7). CE’s metaphoric gossips’ feast thus mends and replaces the ‘failed dinners’ of Adriana and the Courtesan (Candido, 236). Cf. gossip’s bowl at MND 2.1.47, RJ 3.5.174.

  go This second go maintains the pattern of repeated language. The Abbess’s second clause, go with me, clarifies the vaguer first clause.

  398 wrong, go] Rowe; wrong. Goe F 400 Thirty-three] Twenty five Theobald; twenty three Capell travail] (trauaile), travell F2 401–2 and till … burden ne’er delivered] Hudson (Dyce, Remarks); and till … burthen are deliuer’d F; nor, ’till … are delivered Theobald; and, ’till … burthen not delivered Capell; until … burden not delivered Boswell–Malone (Boaden, per Boswell–Malone); and at … burdens are delivered Collier2 (Collier, Notes) 404 nativity] maturity (Clayton) 405 go] gaude Warburton; joy Rann (Heath); come Keightley

  408 a perfectly trochaic pentameter line, perhaps meant to alter the mood, after the sentiment-laden iambic verse

  410 at host at the inn (OED n.3 b); see 1.2.9 and n., on the Centaur.

  413 there See 189, 197n.

  413 SD In some productions, the two exit arm in arm, anticipating (and contrasting with) the Dromios’ more intimate hand in hand at 426.

  414 fat friend See 3.2.110n.

  415 kitchened entertained in the kitchen (OED v. 1a, citing only this usage as a transitive verb)

  417 glass mirror (OED n.1 8a)

  406 nativity] felicity Hanmer; festivity Singer2 (Johnson) 407 SD] Cam2; Exeunt omnes. Manet the two Dromio’s and two Brothers. F Antipholus] Rowe subst. 408, 411 SDs] Folg2 413 SD] Theobald subst.; Exit F; Exeunt the two ANTIPHILUS’S, ADR. and LUC. / Capell

  418 sweet-faced good-looking; also at MND 1.2.86, referring (indirectly) to Bottom

  419 gossiping See 405n., on gossips’ feast.

  420–5 Not … thus Pope ingeniously saw a way to scan F’s four lines (Not … thus) as three lines of shared iambic pentameter (see t.n.). His first two combinations (Not … question / how … senior) work well, the third (till … thus) more awkwardly, since that shared line contains only eight syllables. Despite Pope’s clever but speculative solution, the present edition leaves 420–4 as in F, treating them as rhythmic prose that changes the tempo and tone from iambic pentameter. At 425, Ephesian Dromio’s thus cues the action of embracing (Rowe), with the Dromios thereby fulfilling the exit request of Syracusan Antipholus at 413. Ard1 rightly offers 425 as one line, rather than as F’s two lines (‘thus: / brother: / ’), because the resulting couplet (brother/another) argues that 425 and 426 comprise two parallel lines of tumbling verse (see 3.1.11–85n.). Thus, the Dromios in this last sequence (a kind of epilogue) offer a witty reprise of the play’s basic aural rhythms: iambic pentameter (417–19), prose (420–4) and tumbling verse (425–6).

  420 Not I, sir Syracusan Dromio refuses to exit ahead of his brother, deferring to him as the elder, who would go first.

  423 draw cuts cast lots by drawing sticks or straws of unequal length (OED cut n.1 1a)

  for the senior i.e. to discover by fortune who is the elder; F’s ‘Signior’ implies a pun on seniority by rank as well as age. See 3.1.1n., on Signor.

  425 SD fulfilling the general injunction of Antipholus of Syracuse at 412

  426 This boldly egalitarian statement addresses a line of conflict and action that has commenced with the Antipholuses’ beatings of their servants and with Luciana’s speech defending male mastery (2.1.15–25). The Dromios achieve, at least with each other, the kind of equality whose lack they have complained of throughout the play.

  420–4] Kittredge; Pope lines elder. / question: / it? / senior: / first. / ; Capell lines elder. / question; / it [brother]? / draw / first. / ; Steevens4 lines elder. / it? / first. / thus: / ; prose F 423 senior] Rowe3; Signior F; Signiority F3 425–6] Ard1; F lines thus: / 2brother: / another. / 425 SD] Rowe subst.

  LONGER NOTES

  1.1.41 Epidamium This edition prefers F’s spelling, ‘Epidamium’, over Pope’s ‘Epidamnum’ (Latin accusative; ‘Epidamnus’ in the nominative). No classical city spelled ‘Epidamium’ existed, although ‘Epidamnus’ did (see below), while Ephesus, Syracuse, Epidaurus and Corinth, all mentioned in the play, are real place-names. Pope’s ‘Epidamnum’ keeps alive Plautus’ punning witticism from Men. that no one can stay in Epidamnus without being damned (‘propterea huic urbi nomen Epidamno inditum est, / quia nemo ferme huc sine damno deuortitur’ (263 – 4)). Proponents of Pope’s emendation point out that the accusative form, ‘Epidamnum’, is the declension that appears in Men.’s Argumentum and Prologus more often (five times) than any other form. A few twentieth-century editions – Baldwin, Riv, Folg2 – have retained F’s ‘Epidamium’. The place-name occurs seven times in F, and was typeset by two different compositors, C and B: such consistency makes it unlikely that F’s spelling was an inadvertent printing-house error. The proponents of ‘Epidamnum’ (or of ‘Epidamnium’) must also account for their avoidance of the nominative form, ‘Epidamnus’, which does occur in Plautus’ text. Advocates of ‘Epidamnum’ sometimes hypothesize the influence of William Warner’s then-unpublished translation of Men. (1595), which employs ‘Epidamnum’, but such argumentative grounds are marshy. Altogether, the case for emendation has too much to explain. Shakespeare may have written Epidamium as the misremembered form of the real city-name, Epidamnus, or of a variant in Plautus – or he simply may have invented it. At any rate, Epidamium seems to be intended.

  Epidamnus was called Dyrrachium under the Romans, became Durazzo in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and is now the Albanian city of Durrës. Roman Dyrrachium was a military and naval base; Pompey fought a battle against Julius Caesar there in 48 BC, and the city was a stopping-point on routes into Macedonia and to Constantinople. As Durazzo, the city was held by the Venetians from 1392 until 1501 when they surrendered it to the Turks, who ruled in Shakespeare’s time (see Davis & Frankforter, 154–5; Sugden, 180; OCD, ‘Dyrrhachium’; Seltzer 543 – 4).

  1.1.93 Epidaurus The text imagines Epidaurus to be on the eastern shore of the Adriatic. It was displaced in the Middle Ages by nearby Ragusa, now Dubrovnik (north of Epidamnus) i
n modern Croatia (part of ancient Illyria). Adriatic Epidaurus had an eastern twin, the Aegean Epidaurus, near Corinth on the Peloponnesian peninsula, with which it could have been confused. The Aegean Epidaurus (south-east of Epidamnus) was an ancient Greek city famous for its theatre and as the legendary birthplace of Aesculapius, the god of medicine. Julius Solinus Polyhistor, to whom CE may allude, mentions Aesculapius’ temple and occult dreams of the sick (see Solinus, sig. I4r), but also, in the margin, identifies this Epidaurus mistakenly with Ragusa and Dubrovnik. Both Epidauruses appear on Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1584), and Thomas Cooper describes Aegean Epidaurus in his Thesaurus (1565). The rescue from shipwreck makes most sense if the Adriatic Epidaurus is imagined.

  1.2.102 *such – like liberties This phrase poses a long-standing interpretative problem, because liberties’s subject of comparison is difficult to identify. When the phrase is taken as ‘such-like liberties’ (introducing a hyphen into F’s ‘such like’), liberties has been understood as ‘Unrestrained action, conduct, or expression … beyond what is … recognized as proper’ (OED liberty n.1 5a). Thus, liberties might be interpreted as referring to the actions – deceptions, deformations – performed by Antipholus’ gallery of rogues. Grammatically, however, liberties should refer to the preceding nouns, from jugglers to mountebanks, but these are not comprehended by liberties. On those grounds Hanmer (followed by Oxf1) emends to ‘libertines’. The change contributes grammatical clarity but creates a redundancy in the phrase ‘libertines of sin’ (because libertines might be considered inherently sinful), collapses differences (as between sorcerers and cheaters) and lacks a Shakespearean ring (‘libertines’ occurs only once elsewhere, at MA 2.1.139). The emendation also forfeits the textual resonance of liberties, since in the next scene Adriana and Luciana argue over male and female liberty (2.1.7, 10); indeed liberties and liberty occur seven times in the play. Compositor D set libertie(s) four times elsewhere, which might be reason to trust his accuracy here.

  The present version entails its own difficulties. It requires the listener to reach back five lines in memory, and then to recollect the first of two nouns in a phrase, town … cozenage. It also has the disadvantage of being anomalous, since Shakespeare typically uses such + like as a compound word, e.g. ‘such-like toys’ (see TGV 4.1.50, R3 1.1.60, VA 844, Ham 5.2.43, TC 1.2.254 –5, Tim 3.2.22, Tem 3.3.59). On the other hand, Shakespeare sometimes employs such to identify particulars that lead to a general comparison, like: for example, ‘such advice … / Such temperate order … / … Who hath read or heard / Of any kindred action like to this?’ (KJ 3.4.11–14 (emphasis added); see also KJ 4.3.108–10, TC 3.2.35 – 8, KL 2.2.72– 4). No reading answers all objections.

  2.1.15–25 In Genesis, 1.26–8, God gives man ‘rule of the fisshe of the sea, & of the foule of the ayre, and of cattell’, creates man both male and female and instructs man to ‘replenishe the earth, and subdue it’ (for the Bishops’ Bible’s ‘cattell’, the Geneva Bible reads ‘beastes’). Psalm 8 reiterates man’s ‘dominion’ over ‘the beastes of the fielde: the foules of the ayre, and the fishe of the sea’ (5 – 8). Luciana’s term pre-eminence suggests that Shakespeare may have recalled Ecclesiastes, 3.19, which likens the condition of men and beasts in that they both die, ‘so that in this a man hath no preeminence aboue a beast’ (for ‘preeminence’, the Geneva Bible uses ‘excellencie’). Shaheen notes verbal similarities (indued, pre-eminence) between Luciana’s speech and a passage from Calvin’s Institution of Christian Religion, as translated by Thomas Norton (1587): man is ‘endued with reason … the nature of man hath preeminence among al kind of liuing creatures’. Shaheen adds, however, that such language was part of the Elizabethan ‘standard religious vocabulary’ (106). Luciana is putting the biblical passages to ‘special use in applying them to the relations of husband and wife’ (Ard2). For the submission of females to males in marriage, the most famous biblical passage was St Paul’s exhortation in Ephesians, 5.22–3: ‘Wyues, submit your selues vnto your owne husbandes, as vnto the Lorde: For the husbande is the head of the wyfe, euen as Christe is the head of the Church.’ Paul’s position is cited specifically in the Elizabethan ‘Homily on the State of Matrimony’: ‘Let women be subject to their husbands, as to the Lord’ (Homilies, 539). Luciana’s emphasis on liberty (10, 15) may reflect the marriage homily, which insists that in matrimony women ‘relinquish the liberty of their own rule’ (Homilies, 540). Further biblical passages paralleling Luciana’s contention that men are masters and lords over women (24) include Genesis, 3.16; 1 Corinthians, 11.3; 1 Peter, 3.1; Titus, 2.5 (Shaheen, 107; see also Baldwin, Genetics, 166 – 9).

  2.1.42.1 *In F, Dromio enters after 43, so that Luciana announces him (at 43) in advance of his entrance SD. By contrast, in the previous scene, Dromio’s entrance SD (at 1.2.40) comes just before Antipholus’ announcement (41). The Folio Errors has some 11 occasions when an Enter direction is coupled with a dialogue announcement, the SD preceding the announcement five times and following six. In these latter instances, SDs have been relocated editorially to anticipate their announcements (2.1.42.1; 2.2.6 SD, 114.1; 5.1.8.1–2, 127.1–3, 185.1–2; see also 4.4.108 SD). Variations in the placement of entrance SDs in CE and elsewhere may arise from their having been written in the margins of the manuscript copy-text, forcing the compositor to decide their precise placement for print. Even relocated entrance SDs reflect editing conventions more than exact theatrical practice. An Elizabethan actor may have taken two to four dialogue lines to move from a door in the frons scaena to a downstage position (Gurr & Ichikawa, 84). Thus, in 2.1, Dromio might have entered the stage as early as 40 or 41 (fool-begged in 41 makes an attractive entrance cue for him) to be available for address at 44. Entrance SDs might be understood, then, not as moments when an actor takes precisely his first step on to the stage but as moments by which a character must be available to participate in the action and dialogue.

  2.1.57–8 *These two lines are set as three in F (ending ‘villaine? / Cuckold mad, / stark mad: / ’), which editors since Pope and Hanmer have typically combined into two lines, but with two possible configurations, ending ‘villain? / stark mad: / ’ (after Pope) or ‘cuckold-mad. / ‘stark mad: / ’ (as verse, after Collier). In Pope’s configuration, followed here, Adriana’s 57 can be understood as prose, while Dromio’s 58 returns to verse. In Collier’s version, 57 and part of 58 make up a line of blank verse, and the remainder of 58 is left as a short verse line. If Adriana’s speech (57) shifts the tone to prose, Dromio’s two F lines (the two parts of 58) allow, as a single line of blank verse (with he is contracted), the re-establishment of some rhetorical order.

  2.1.108–12 *The lines, as they appear in F, have confounded readers and editors. They start paradoxically and become manifestly nonsensical and corrupt: ‘yet the gold bides still / That others touch, and often touching will, / Where gold and no man that hath a name, / By falshood and corruption doth it shame’. Cam1 supposed that lines had been lost between ‘Where gold’ and ‘and no man’ (111). The present reading combines emendations from Theobald (F’s ‘yet’ to and, 109), Hanmer (F’s ‘the’ to though, 109), Theobald again (F’s ‘and’ to yet, 110; F’s ‘Where’ to Wear, 111) with a recent conjecture by Weiss (F’s ‘no’ to any at 111), plus dashes as employed by Weiss at 109, 111. These changes render the three clauses roughly parallel in argument: the jewel will lose beauty, the gold will wear and the name will be shamed. Weiss’s conjecture has three advantages: (1) it makes only one fairly simple change at 111 and requires no change at 112; (2) it regularizes the metre of 111 by adding a syllable; and (3) it avoids a confusingly negative statement in 111–12.

  As editorial contortions demonstrate, the meaning in F’s passage must be inferred. Adriana’s recollection of the piece of jewellery, the chain (105) – perhaps standing as a guilt-payment from Ephesian Antipholus for his suspected infidelity, and thus even standing for Adriana – triggers her elliptical reflection on the fate o
f an enamelled ornament (jewel, 108). In this train of thought, the jewel represents Adriana’s beauty (cf. 88), as Gollancz (per Ard1), Ard2 and Wells advocate. Indeed, Shakespeare often associates jewel with women or makes it a metaphor for female qualities such as beauty or chastity (e.g. AW 4.2.45 – 6, Cym 1.4.153), so that for Adriana the dulling or wearing away of an ornament’s lustre evokes the idea of loss of beauty (109). That idea will have its correlative in her determination to erode her own beauty with tears (113–14). Shakespeare also sometimes uses jewel as a metaphor for reputation (as in Oth 3.3.155–6); the multivalence of this image may facilitate the movement of Adriana’s thought towards reputation at the end of the passage.

  The image of a jewel prompts the associated image of gold, more durable than enamel. (The suggestion, by Ard2 and others, that the gold in question lies underneath the enamel seems overly complicated.) A further contrast arises (based on Theobald’s emendation of F’s ‘Where’ to Wear): occasional touching of gold versus too-frequent touching (110). That contrast emerges from the emendations of F’s ‘yet the’ to and though (109) and F’s ‘and’ to yet (110). Malone notes Damon and Pythias’s ‘Gold in time doo wear away, and other precious things do fade’, and Ard2 cites the proverb ‘Gold by continual wearing wasteth’ (‘Gold with often handling is worn to nothing’, Dent, I92). Still, the awkwardness in the present reading of and … gold (109 –11) should be acknowledged, for the gold at first does not wear and then does, making it initially unlike and subsequently like the jewel and the name. That eventuality, however, may be the point: everything touched, literally or metaphorically, becomes blemished in the end, no matter how resistant.

  With the image of worn gold, the implicit referent shifts; Adriana’s beauty is now replaced by Antipholus’ golden reputation as the thing dulled. The succeeding idea, as emended, about a man’s tarnished name (111), becomes roughly parallel to that about gold: even good reputation can be worn away by misdeeds. Similar ideas are expressed elsewhere in the play (e.g. ‘Herein you war against your reputation’; ‘A vulgar comment will be made of it; / And that supposed … / Against your yet ungalled estimation’, 3.1.86, 100–2). Indeed, Adriana’s next speech, 2.2.116 –52, takes as its moral the contagion (150) of corrupt behaviour. If the image of worn gold fits her husband better than it does her, then Adriana’s thoughts have moved associatively from her ruined (2.1.96) beauty to his ruinous behaviour, a rhetorical connection already made in 88 – 98, where she accuses Antipholus of being ‘the ground / Of my defeatures’. While Adriana imagines herself as the enamelled jewel, her analogical thinking leads her to connect ornamental gold with good reputation (‘even as pure as Gold’ (Theobald)), and the diminishing of gold with her husband’s self-sullying of his reputation, a train of thought that maintains a link between her condition and his behaviour.