Finding Oneself in Ephesus

The Comedy of Errors is a play about a Syracusan man named Antipholus who wanders in Ephesus with his servant Dromio in search of his twin brother, also named Antipholus, from whom he was separated during infancy. Neither Antipholus is aware that their merchant father Egeon has also recently arrived in town and has been sentenced to death, as it is a crime for a Syracusan to enter Ephesus.

The play’s action takes place within a single day, during which Egeon awaits his execution, which will occur at five o’clock unless he can obtain a thousand marks to pay for his release. Throughout the course of the day, the Antipholus brothers repeatedly get mistaken for one another, as do their twin Dromios, resulting in a series of highly amusing events.

Ever since its earliest performances, The Comedy of Errors has been known to elicit uproarious laughter, but the play is not without its darker elements. Ephesian Antipholus could have been a tragic figure in a different type of play. He is a valiant soldier, who once saved the Duke’s life and a man of great wealth. He appears to be as well-liked, trusted and respected as any man in town. Yet, he is prone to rashness, anger, and violence (he is not above sending his servant for a rope with which to thrash his wife). He is an unfaithful husband who lies to his wife and encourages his friends to vouch for his lies, while his neglected wife Adriana suffers acute distress on account of his behavior. Throughout the play, there are signs that his hitherto pristine reputation is suddenly becoming vulnerable, though fortunately for him it is saved (at least temporarily) by the play’s concluding scene when his seemingly insane and erratic behavior is finally explained by the existence of his twin brother and the many instances of mistaken identity.  

But what truly lends the play its spookier quality is not the danger that Ephesian Antipholus runs of ruining his hard-earned reputation or being taken for a madman, but the harrowing experiences of his brother, a stranger in a very strange land. Syracusan Antipholus feels uneasy and apprehensive from the start, because of all that he has heard about Ephesus:

They say this town is full of cozenage –
As, nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,
Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,
Soul-killing witches that deform the body,
Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks
And many such – like liberties of sin.
If it prove so, I will be gone the sooner. (1.2.97-103)

The sense that this land is bewitched only intensifies as the play progresses, particularly when he and Dromio begin to encounter people who claim to know them.

Moreover, Ephesus is frequently depicted in such a way as to confirm Antipholus’s notion that it is a dark and wicked place. But what makes it so unsavory is not witches, ghosts, or spirits so much as injustice, suspicion, pretense, and hypocrisy. It is a land of lying prostitutes and quack doctors, where men are quick to threaten one another with arrest and unlucky foreigners are sentenced to death. And just as Adriana feels “strumpeted by contagion” when her husband is unfaithful, Ephesus is not only a sinful place but a place where it is difficult to live without being tempted to dishonesty.

For instance, in the second scene of the first act, a merchant tells Syracusan Antipholus that he should lie and tell people that he is from Epadamium because Syracusans are forbidden on pain of death from entering Ephesus (as revealed in the first scene). This is an early indication that the ordinary inhabitants of this town see the laws of the land as worthy of circumventing through falsehood and that these laws, by virtue of their harshness, make evasion particularly tempting.

But the degree to which prevarication is countenanced and even encouraged in this town is most apparent when Adriana’s sister Luciana criticizes the man she thinks is Adriana’s husband for his infidelities in such a way as to suggest that sleeping around secretly would be far preferable to doing it openly:

If you did wed my sister for her wealth,
Then for her wealth’s sake use her with more kindness.
Or if you like elsewhere, do it by stealth:
Muffle your false love with some show of blindness;
Let not my sister read it in your eye;
Be not thy tongue thy own shame’s orator;
Look sweet, speak fair, become disloyalty;
Apparel vice like virtue’s harbinger;
Bear a fair presence, though your heart be tainted;
Teach sin the carriage of a holy saint;
Be secret-false: what need she be acquainted?
What simple thief brags of his own attaint?
‘Tis double wrong to truant with your bed
And let her read it in thy looks at board.
Shame hath a bastard fame, well managed;
Ill deeds double with an evil word. (3.1.5-20)

This is quite an interesting plea. Luciana seems to consider it self-evident that it is far better to be secretly unfaithful and wicked while pretending to be good than to be openly depraved. That she feels no need to explain why this is preferable suggests that hypocrisy, in Ephesus, is understood to have its benefits.

These Ephesians, it appears, have not heeded the advice given to them by the apostle Paul to “speak every man truth with his neighbor,” to “be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive,” and to “Let no man deceive you with vain words: for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience. Be not ye therefore partakers with them.”

To be not a partaker in deception is the advice that much of Ephesian society, this play suggests, fails to follow. And Syracusan Antipholus, during his time in Ephesus, is more than once subjected to the temptation to repeat vain words and become involved in falsehood. In a world that encourages him to pretend to be someone he isn’t by telling him that he is that person, his honesty is put to the test.

Syracusan Antipholus has considerably more stage time than his brother, and commentators have often seen him as the more interesting Antipholus, but in many ways, he also appears to be the more moral of the two characters. As a case in point, his reaction to the advances of the courtesan in Act Four suggests that unlike his twin brother, for whom she mistakes him, Syracusan Antipholus is no fornicator! 

And yet this morally serious man risks losing himself in this land of illusion and deception. In saying goodbye to the merchant who has just encouraged him to lie about his country of origin, Antipholus says:

Farewell till then. I will go lose myself,
And wander up and down to view this city. (1.2.30-31)

He uses the same expression again ten lines later when reflecting more broadly on his conundrum:

So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself. (39-40)

While the expression seems innocent enough, these lines are more prescient than he realizes. Soon he will be morally compromised when the wicked world encourages him to partake in a lie.

Specifically, in the second act, he makes a decision about how he will attempt to navigate this haunted world of confusion. Adriana talks to Syracusan Antipholus, believing him to be her husband, and this, like so many other things in Ephesus, has the Syracusan feeling spooked. He wonders:

To me she speaks; she moves me for her theme.
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 offered fallacy. (2.2.187-192)

To “entertain the offered fallacy” probably seems like a reasonable strategy. It is the best way to avoid exciting suspicion or hostility (or being suspected of insanity). In fact, his resolve to go all in on the mysterious identity that is being conferred on him sounds enticingly heroic in the way he next expresses it:

“Am I in earth, in heaven or in hell?
Sleeping or waking? Mad or well advised?
Known unto these, and to myself disguised?
I’ll say as they say, and persever so,
And in this mist at all adventures go.” (2.2.218-222)

But this resolve to go along with the role that others expect him to fill and “say as they say” does not last long. In the very next act, when Lucianna rebukes him for not being a better husband to Adrianna, he cannot bring himself to go along with the claim that he is married to her:

Against my soul’s pure truth why labour you
To make it wander in an unknown field?
Are you a god? Would you create me new?
Transform me, then, and to your power I’ll yield.
But if that I am I, then well I know,
Your weeping sister is no wife of mine,
Nor to her bed no homage do I owe. (3.1.37-43)

Perhaps the reason for his inability or unwillingness to “entertain the offered fallacy” at this moment is the fact that doing so would require him to countenance an accusation that he knows to be false. If he accepted the identity of Adriana’s husband, he would also need to take ownership of the misdeeds that accompany this identity, and he knows that he would not do such things. His “soul’s pure truth” revolts at the idea of being associated with them, revealing the misguidedness of his attempt to play the role. 

Furthermore, he is quite infatuated with Lucianna and cannot help telling her so. This would be incredibly wrong were he actually Adrianna’s husband. And unsurprisingly, at the end of the play, when all is set right, he reminds her of his suit, which must certainly appear to her in a very different light now that she knows he spoke the truth when he said he was not her sister’s husband:

What I told you then
I hope I shall have leisure to make good,
If this be not a dream I see and hear. (5.1.374-376)

Lucianna does not answer, but her earlier claim that he had wooed her with “words that in an honest suit might move” is encouraging, considering that it is now possible to see that the suit was honest. (4.2.14-15)

When compared with his master, Syracusan Dromio seems to have fewer scruples about living a lie. In the famous “locked door scene” where Syracusan Antipholus dines in his twin brother’s house with Adriana and Luciana while his twin brother furiously tries to get in, Dromio has no reservations about acting as the porter of a house that is not his own (and which he has never even seen before), while holding the door against its actual inhabitants. And he plays the role with gusto! In fact, the only time Dromio seems to object to his false identity is when “the kitchen wench” (the other Dromio’s wife) is trying to embrace him. He even claims at one point that he likes it well enough in Ephesus that if it were not for her, he might stay and become a witch himself.

But, significantly, the most open and unequivocal endorsement of entertaining the offered fallacy comes from the conjurer Dr. Pinch. When Ephesian Antipholus asks Ephesian Dromio to vouch for the fact that they did not dine at home and that when they tried to the doors were locked against them, Dromio vouches for all of this. Adriana then asks Pinch if it is “good to soothe him in these contraries?” (4.4.80). Pinch replies, “It is no shame: the fellow finds his vein / And yielding to him, humours well his frenzy” (81-82). It is fitting that Shakespeare would have his most morally suspect character promote the idea of benevolent lying.

In the fifth act, it is Adriana rather than Antipholus who learns a lesson about dabbling in deception by pretending to be other than what she is. After Syracusan Antipholus and Dromio find sanctuary in the church, and Adriana reveals to the Abbess that her husband is suffering from madness and that he has been lascivious of late, the Abbess suggests that this lasciviousness must be Adriana’s fault because she must not have chastised him sufficiently for his behavior. When Adriana defends herself by claiming she did indeed chastise him, the Abbess supposes she did not do so frequently enough or publicly enough. When Adriana pushes back against this accusation, insisting that she could not have been more persistent or strident in her rebukes, the Abbess completely changes her argument and now claims that it is precisely because of these rebukes that Antipholus has acted the way he has.

This, of course, seems rather unfair. Adriana, according to this logic, is damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t. Luciana, perceiving the injustice of this accusation, defends her sister, testifying that Adriana “never reprehended him but mildly, / When he demeaned himself rough, rude and wildly.” (5.1.87-88) 

But when she asks Adriana why she does not answer the accusation, the latter has nothing further to say in her own defense, because as she puts it, the Abbess “did betray me to my own reproof.” (90)

Adriana realizes that she is trapped, not because the Abbess’s last accusation was necessarily fair, but because her own previous remarks rendered her position untenable. If Luciana’s assessment that Adriana has been too mild rather than too harsh in response to her husband’s womanizing is accurate (and earlier scenes suggest that it is), then Adriana was lying when she claimed otherwise. Now that she has lied in order to defend herself from one accusation, she is no longer in a position to assert the truth when the opposite accusation is made.

It is easy to see why Adriana had been tempted to lie in response to the Abbess’s rebuke just as it is easy to see why Syracusan Antipholus was initially tempted (and tried) to pretend to be the person he was incorrectly being identified as, but in both instances, the play demonstrates the wisdom of resisting this temptation.

Such misguided dissembling on the part of Adriana, Syracusan Antipholus, and Syracusan Dromio is brought further into focus by its contrast with the honesty of Egeon, who appears only in the opening and closing scenes of the play. When the Duke asks him why he left his home and came to Ephesus, Egeon’s response is the simple and earnest truth, even though it gives him great pain to tell it. Performances of the play often have the other characters on stage act increasingly touched and moved as he tells the story of his sons and how they were separated as children following a shipwreck. And it is the Duke’s pity for Egeon’s situation, earnestly revealed, that makes him decide to give Egeon the opportunity to raise money for his release.

In the final scene of the play, when both Antipholuses and both Dromios are finally on stage at the same time, the Duke slowly begins to piece things together out loud with the help of Egeon, but he is still unable to tell the Antipholuses apart. He says to Syracusan Antipholus, “Antipholus, thou cam’st from Corinth first,” to which the latter replies, “No, sir, not I; I came from Syracuse” (5.1.361-362). Owning his nationality so unequivocally is a bold move considering that he says this standing just a few feet away from a man who had been sentenced to death earlier that day for being from Syracuse, but by this point in the play, he has clearly come to see the folly of dissembling. By contrast, his less moral twin brother never openly acknowledges his birthplace or parentage after initially claiming not to recognize his father, though it is unclear whether he is being evasive because he is ashamed (as Egeon suggests) or he actually doesn’t remember.

It has often been noted that the word “error” in the play’s title once had much broader connotations than it does in the present century, particularly moral connotations as exemplified by its use in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596). Thinking of the play’s title in this light helps us see that the play is not merely a brilliant farcical comedy but a deeply moral play about the allure of dissembling in a harsh, unjust, hypocritical, and confusing world. And this allure, as the play shows, can be great. The first time that Syracusan Antipholus is advised to lie, it is because the truth with respect to his land of origin, were it known, could result in a death sentence. Yet Shakespeare’s greatest sympathy is clearly with Egeon whose truthfulness in this land of cozenage is his salvation and ultimately the salvation of his sons.

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