The Comedy of Errors

by Kent Cartwright

  Some of the passage’s difficulties come about through the doubleness of particular words. Lines 109 –11, for example, contain a sequence of verbs that can have not only ambiguous but contradictory senses. Thus, touch (110) can mean both feel with the hand (OED v. 1) and ‘test the fineness of’, or assay, ‘by rubbing it on a touchstone’ (OED 8); bides (109) can mean both withstands (OED v. 7) and submits (OED 8); Wear (111) to suffer decay through use (OED v.1 14a) but also, when used intransitively, to withstand that decay (OED 15). These ambiguities may express Adriana’s conflicted attitudes about herself, her husband and her sense of their inextricable relationship. In performance, any clear meaning in these complicated lines is difficult to communicate, and many productions cut all or most of them. When the passage is retained, most Adriana-actors emphasize the aphoristic phrases, such as ‘yet often-touching will / Wear gold’, and try for a sense of closure by raising their voices on the speech’s final couplet.

  In a perceptive and ingenious interpretation different from the present one, Gary Taylor proposes only three emendations: ‘I see the jewel best enamellèd / Will loose [her] beauty. Yet the gold bides still / That others touch; and often touching will / [Wear] gold, and [yet] no man that hath a name / By falsehood and corruption doth it shame’ (Taylor, ‘Crux’). Taylor’s solution seems to read ‘I see … beauty’ as referring metaphorically to a woman as retaining her beauty by being touched. It also entails the argument that in ‘and [yet] … shame’, Adriana protests against the sexual double standard, in that a man (as opposed to a woman) will retain his good name, however false and corrupt his behaviour. That reading contravenes views about reputation maintained elsewhere in CE as well as Adriana’s customary position (see 2.2.125 –52) that husband and wife are so interconnected that the transgression of one is a stain on the other. More than gender equality, Adriana wants her husband back.

  2.2.127–9 Antipholus’ physical reaction to Adriana’s estranged from thyself (126) may prompt her repetition and amplification of thyself. Her relative pronoun That (128) refers to me (127). Likewise, undividable and incorporate (128) describe her (‘me, who is indivisible from and incorporated into you’). Shakespeare uses undividable uniquely here (but cf. ‘undivided’ at e.g. Son 36.2); incorporate means ‘united in one body’ (OED ppl. adj. 1); cf. VA 539 – 40. He returns to this theme of incorporation often, e.g. MND 3.2.208–11, RJ 2.6.37, JC 2.1.273. Ephesians, 5.21 touches on the idea of mutually constituted selfhood: ‘He that loueth his wyfe, loueth hym selfe.’ The biblical statement that a man ‘shalbe ioyned with his wife: and they shall become one fleshe’ (Genesis, 2.24; repeated in Ephesians, 5.31) was quoted in an alternative marriage homily in the Elizabethan BCP.

  2.2.142 The forehead, whose prominences constitute the brow (OED brow n.1 4a), can display beauty but can also betray boldness or lust; it is the place where cuckold’s horns appear. The forehead or brow makes evident the hidden truths of one’s character. Berowne refers to the ‘forehead’ as exposing the perjury that he has committed against his friends by falling in love (LLL 4.3.123), and Adam speaks of wooing with ‘unbashful forehead’ (AYL 2.3.50). Editors of CE often cite Laertes’ image of a mother branded as a harlot between her brows (Ham 4.5.119 –21), and Hamlet describes how lust ‘takes off the rose / From the fair forehead of an innocent love / And sets a blister there’ (3.4.42– 4). The image of the self-revealing brow or forehead is proverbial (‘In the forehead and in the eye the lecture of the heart (mind) doth lie’ (Tilley F590)). As Sidney puts it, ‘verity be written in their foreheads’ (Apology, 83). The idea is classical and humanist in origin: ‘Ex fronte perspicere’ (‘to see on the face of it’ (Erasmus, Adages, 191)).

  2.2.180 As well as biblical, the metaphor has classical antecedents. Ovid employs it in Met., where a lover urges marriage: ‘But if (quoth hee) this Elme without the vyne did single stand, / It should have nothing (saving leaues) to bee desyred: and / Ageine if that the vyne which ronnes uppon the Elme had nat / The tree too leane unto, it should vppon the ground ly flat’ (Golding, 14.758 – 61) (Steevens). Writers contemporary with Shakespeare were fond of the vine–elm metaphor for love relationships. It occurs, for example, in Lyly (MB, 1.3.137), Kyd (ST, 2.4.45) (Shaheen), and Spenser (FQ, 1.1.8). An eclogue in Sidney’s Arcadia likens bridegroom and bride to ‘the elm and vine’ (692), and Samuel Daniel’s ‘Complaint of Rosamond’ (1592) imagines a love-embrace as ‘the Vine married vnto the Elm’ (1.839).

  2.2.196 Editors have emended this line because (1) it appears to be missing a metrical foot; and (2) owls appears inconsistent with the more anthropomorphic goblins and sprites (i.e. spirits). Efforts to fill out the metre have often made recourse to ‘elves’, but such intervention seems unwarranted. The play contains other short lines, often creating dramatic effect, such as 1.1.156, where a short line signals a change in tone and action; 1.2.16, where the line may make room for physical action; and 5.1.371, where comic effect seems intended. Here the tetrameter has a fitting jingle, and its shortness may be the occasion for physical action. Concerning owls, Theobald thought it ‘Nonsense’ for Dromio to suggest that ‘Owls [could] suck their Breath, and pinch them black and blue’. But, as Warburton contended, in popular lore some owls were believed to suck the breath and blood of children (the classical striges, or screech owls, in Ovid’s Fasti, 6.131– 43, feed on children’s blood). The fifth Hag in Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queens describes sucking a child’s breath (171–3), and Jonson makes clear in his notes that he is alluding to the striges (see Roberts, ‘Owl’). Owls could be part of fairy land (195): in John Baret, An Alveary, or Quadruple Dictionary (1580), one meaning for screech owl is ‘a witch that chaungeth the fauor of children: an hagge or fairie’ (quoted in Halliwell). Shakespeare invokes owls frequently elsewhere but typically treats them as augurs of evil fortune and death; see e.g. 3H6 2.6.56 – 9, 5.6.44; MND 5.1.376 – 8; JC 1.3.26 – 8. On this difficult line, Whitworth comments wisely that ‘Dromio’s feverish imagination coins monsters pell-mell’ (Oxf1).

  2.2.222 mist Although mist occurs only once in CE, it comes freighted with a volatile set of early modern associations regarding the obscuring of truth – (1) historical, (2) conceptual, (3) moral, (4) urban and (5) religious. (1) Sidney famously admires Chaucer’s ability to see clearly in his earlier, ‘misty time’ (Apology, 110); mist is often associated with a dimness produced by time (OED n.1 2b). (2) The image also occurs frequently for conceptual errors. In The Steel Glass (1576), Gascoigne speaks of ‘such errour springs, / Such grosse conceits, such mistes of darke mistake’ (sig. C1r). Sidney applies it to the philosopher’s abstruse arguments (see Apology, 90); and Francis Bacon suggests with mist a ‘facility of credit and accepting or admitting things weakly authorized or warranted’, especially ideas based more on superstition than on evidence (142). (3) Morally, mist is often associated with conceptual errors that are wilful, culpable, even dangerous (OED 5a). At the House of Pride in FQ, ‘mist’ signifies moral confusion (1.4.36); a similar mist surrounds Guyon and the Palmer as their boat moves towards the Bower of Bliss (2.12.34 –5). Marlowe’s Tamburlaine tells the Virgins that their ‘fearful minds are thick and misty’ when they fail to recognize Death sitting on his sword (1 Tamburlaine, 5.1.110). (4) In urban England, mist was particularly linked to the falsehood inherent in ‘juggling’, a term connoting criminal deception and foolery, among other things (on jugglers, see 1.2.98n.). Henry Chettle’s Kind-heart’s Dream (1593) inveighs against London tricksters, swindlers and ‘jugglers’ who have learned ‘the mysterie of casting mysts’ (sig. F3r) (cf. Gosson, 2). (5) Mists and juggling extend to magic, demonism and religious error. In Acts, Paul brings confusion to a magician and false prophet by imposing ‘a myste, and a darcknesse’ on him (13.11), in symbolic imitation of his falsehood. Protestant reformers such as John Frith associate ‘juggling mists’ with Papist obfuscation and with an ‘ignorance’ that was sometimes ‘wilful’ (3.86); to Frith, the Catholic apologist Sir Thomas More ‘
caste[s] a mist before your eyes, that you might wander out of the right way’ (3.267). Chettle compares ‘jugglers’ in the religious sphere to ‘Schismatikes, Heretikes, and suchlike’ – i.e. Catholics – who ‘make Scripture a cloake for their detested errors’ (sig. G1r). Likewise, Samuel Harsnett refers to a time when ‘popish mist had befogged the eyes of our poore people’ (sig. S3v). In the Tudor imagination, then, mist opens upon the charged topics of historical distance, erroneous conceptions, chicanery, magic and religious superstition. Shakespeare could have hardly chosen a more loaded term for the terrain on to which Antipholus voluntarily enters.

  3.1.47 Editors have emended F’s ‘face’ to ‘office’, ‘pate’ or ‘place’. A change to ‘office’ would arguably entail emending the preceding thy to ‘thine’. Oxf1’s ‘place’, adopted here, employs the word of the preceding line. Further, changing F’s ‘or’ to and clarifies Ephesian Dromio’s logic of substitution: in his place simply the name Dromio, and in that name’s place, ass (with place (46) and ass effecting a concluding end-rhyme; see Cercignani, 176). The repetition of name from the end of one clause to the beginning of the next is rhetorical anadiplosis. However read, the line’s reductio ad absurdum (or ad asinum) has a rude humour consistent with the scene’s spirit (see 75 – 6), so that precise logic may be less important than effect.

  4.2.32 Tartar limbo ‘Tartarus’ or Tartar refers to prison; in Homer, it was a region far below Hades (Sugden, 502), and the prison of the Titans, with ‘gates … of iron’ (Il., 8.14). Socrates, in Gorgias, calls Tartarus ‘a prison of vengeance and torture’ (Plato, 303, par. 523). Confinement in classical Tartarus was worse than in Christian hell (Shaheen, 111). Ethnically, Tartar also designates a native of Central Asia, especially a feared Mongol or Turk warrior; thus, figuratively, Tartar indicates roughness, violence or intractability (OED n.2 1, 3). Tartars were famous for cruelty and savagery (Sugden, 502), connotations perhaps applied satirically to the Officer. Shakespeare may also be alluding to the physiognomy of the Officer-actor; in MND he refers to ethnic Tartars as ‘tawny’, that is, of a brownish-orange hue suggestive of mixed blood (3.2.263; see also 101). Fennor speaks of sergeants in a similar vein: ‘The other of these Pagans had a phisnomy much resembling the Sarazens head without Newgate’ (sig. B2r). In Elizabethan cant, limbo meant hell or prison; for Catholics it was also the abode of unbaptized infants and just souls born before Christ; cf. Tit 3.1.149.

  4.2.55 Dromio’s hour may pun on ‘ower’, i.e. debtor (Wells conj.) (OED ower n. 2) or on ‘whore’. Since a sergeant makes arrests for debt, an ‘ower’ would obviously shun him (as in 55). Dromio uses owes at 57. A pun on ‘ower’ clarifies the meaning of ’a as ‘he’ later in the line. Although neither Kökeritz nor Cercignani discusses ‘ower’, the former notes that hour rhymes with ‘bower’, ‘flower’ and ‘power’, making hour disyllabic here and at 61 (though not at 54); a variant spelling of hour is hower, which occurs elsewhere in F (e.g. MND TLN 1030, MA TLN 2499) and in Shakespeare’s quartos. This reading’s limitation is that Shakespeare nowhere uses ‘ower’, even though he uses ‘owe’ and ‘owes’; CE, however, contains a number of unique word-occurrences. ‘Ower’ was a contemporary word, occurring in Jonson (see OED ower n. 2). Most critics have seen a pun on hour/whore (see Kökeritz, 117–18; Cercignani, 74): a whore, when seeing a sergeant, would turn around and walk the other way for fear of being arrested.

  4.3.14 the picture … new-apparelled The opposition implied between an old and a new Adam recalls Paul’s exhortation in Ephesians ‘[t]o lay downe … the olde man … And to put on that newe man’ (4.22– 4), which finds a parallel in the baptismal service prayer: ‘Mercyfull god, graunte that the olde Adam in these chyldren maye bee so buryed, that the newe man may be raysed up in them’ (BCP, sig. N5v; see Shaheen, 112). For Paul, the old man, or old Adam, is bound to the Jewish law, while the new man, or new Adam, is liberated by God’s grace. Thus, new-apparelled may evoke the idea of transformation or redemption. It also alludes to the theme of time, for historical time begins with Adam’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden: ‘Since leathern Adam till this youngest hour’ (E3 2.2.116).

  4.3.52–3 Nay … dam In F (TLN 1234), this part of Dromio’s speech appears set as verse, but the speech as a whole is prose like the rest of Dromio’s speeches in the scene. Two explanations are possible. (1) Some compositors occasionally ended lines at punctuation marks near the margin, instead of setting type all the way to the rule, as Werstine (‘Line division’) has shown; that practice may have occurred here. (2) Perhaps more likely, this line marks the end of compositor D’s setting of this column, with the text continued by compositor C (see Appendix 2); the difference in compositorial styles may account for the way this line differs in appearance from the remainder of the speech.

  5.1.170–3 The allusion best known by Elizabethans would probably be to the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse, who, for fear of having his throat cut, was ‘wont to singe his beard himself with coal and firebrands’ (Richard Edwards, ‘Prudence: The History of Damocles and Dionysius’, in The Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576); see Edwards, Works, 210; emphasis added). The detail is repeated in Edwards’s play Damon and Pythias (DP, 12.38); it derives from Plutarch, Life of Dion (noted in Boswell–Malone) and is reported in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations (5.20) – although the circumstances of Dionysius’ shaving differ from Pinch’s. The puddled mire (173) and the shaved beard may allude to Marlowe’s Edward II, in which the King’s murderers wash his face in ‘puddle water’ and shave his beard, the King having already been forced to stand in ‘mire and puddle’ (Brooks, ‘Marlowe’, 79; see Edward II, 5.3.30, 5.5.59).

  5.1.299 Time’s deformed hand According to Ard2, Shakespeare has in mind ‘the withered hand of Father Time, as commonly personified and depicted’, and that gloss has been followed by subsequent modern editions. Although Shakespeare refers elsewhere to Time’s ‘cruel hand’ (Son 60.14), his ‘injurious hand’ (Son 63.2), his ‘fell hand’ (Son 64.1) and his ‘fairer’ (i.e. non-scythe-holding) hand (Tim 5.1.123), nowhere does he invoke Time’s deformed or withered hand. Likewise, Renaissance paintings of Time and Elizabethan emblem-book images of Time do not show a deformed hand (although Time may occasionally be depicted as skeletal) (see Fig. 5). Thus, pace Ard2, Shakespeare here does not seem to be drawing upon a common or traditional image of Father Time. A different approach is to treat deformed as a transferred epithet (rhetorically sometimes called hypallage). In the present case, the modifier (deformed) that is properly applied to an object (face) when acted upon by the agent (hand) is transferred to that agent, so that Father Time’s hand now becomes the thing deformed (when it is properly the thing ‘deforming’). A transferred epithet makes the effect part of the agency. The image of the deformed hand thus brings Time and Egeon into resemblance, especially so if, when Egeon speaks 299 –300, he also gestures with his own aged hand towards his face. On Father Time, see also 2.2.72 and n., on Father Time. On Renaissance representations of Time, see Panofsky, 69 – 93, and Macey, esp. 40 – 66.

  5.1.346–51 Capell moved the Duke’s speech to follow the next two speeches of Egeon and the Abbess, 352– 61. Doing so allows the Abbess’s call for Egeon to speak (345) to be answered immediately by his ‘If I dream not, thou art Emilia’ (352), while Egeon’s concluding allusion to the shipwreck (354) would prompt the Duke’s exclamation, ‘Why, here begins his morning story right’ (346). Capell’s relineation attracted numerous editors, until the original order in F was restored by Cam1. F’s arrangement makes sense as it is, since the father might plausibly stand in awed silence – a pause filled by the Duke – before he can acknowledge a reality beyond his expectations or hopes. The Duke’s interjection also allows for dramatic intensity to build before the reunion of husband and wife. In F’s ordering, the Duke’s lines might verbalize the hopeful speculation going on in the Merchant’s mind that leads him finally to embrace Emilia as his own.

  APPENDIX 1

 
Date of composition

  The Comedy of Errors was composed within the five-year period 1589 – 94.1 The 1594 terminus ad quem (the latest possible composition date) reflects the virtual certainty that Errors was performed on 28 December 1594 for the Christmas revels at Gray’s Inn. The play was in existence and known to the public when Francis Meres referred to it in Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury (Stationers’ Register, 7 September 1598):

  As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latines: so Shakespeare among ye English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for Comedy, witnes his Ge[n]tleme[n] of Verona, his Errors, his Loue labors lost, his Loue labours wonne, his Midsummers night dreame, & his Merchant of Venice: for Tragedy, his Richard the 2. Richard the 3. Henry the 4. King Iohn, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet.