COMMENTS By SHAKESPEAREAN SCHOLARS THE PURPOSE OF THE PLAY The comedy appears to be an amusing satire on man's power of observation and recognition. The accidental resemblance of two pairs of twins, suffices to put almost a whole town into confusion. Life, itself, is conceived, so to say, as a great and many-jointed mistake, encountered by ignorance and blunders in all possible forms. Hence at the very outset we find the life of the father of the two twin brothers in danger, owing to an ignorance of the Ephesian law a secondary motive of the action which might otherwise appear a mere superfluous appendage. Hence Adriana's unreasonable jealousy of her husband, which again is but a mistake and gives rise to further mistakes. Hence the perpetually increasing complication, which in time deprives all the dramatic characters of their proper consciousness, and which accordingly is not solved till the two pairs of twins stand face to face, although the possibility of two such pairs of twins being confounded is sufficiently obvious. Under the cloak of the comic we have striking evidence of the, in reality, very serious experience in life, that human knowledge and ignorance dovetail into one another and are mixed up together; that it is very easy for that which we suppose ourselves to know most surely and most distinctly, to turn out erroneous and delusive. The wife mistakes her husband, the master his servant, and the servant his master, the sister-in-law her brother-in-law, the friend his friend, and finally even the father his son. In this way the simplest, most natural and most important fundamental relations of life become a chaotic complication and dispute. We are shown how quickly everything becomes confused and perverted, as soon as one of the laws of life—a perfectly external and apparently unimportant law-is broken by a freak of nature, as soon as but the difference of the outward form-by means of which the perception of the senses distinguishes one individual from another—is destroyed. The psychological improbability, spoken of above, is introduced into this general confusion and complication like an integral part of the whole. I mean to say that the fact of Antipholus of Syracuse being bewildered by the strange things that befall him his forgetting his own intention, his losing sight of the aim and object of his journey and overlooking just that with which he himself stands in obvious relationagrees perfectly with the meaning of the play, as well as with the bold and strongly-marked outlines in which the young poet has sketched his picture.-ULRICI, Shakspeare's Dramatic Art. ÆGEON Still more significant is, finally, the story of Egeon, which envelops the whole comic plot. It is probably Shakespeare's invention, and betrays the same instinct for accumulated effects and drastic contrasts. He had quadrupled the intricacies of the imbroglio by doubling the two lost Antipholuses with a second pair of twins; he quadruples the excitement of the final recovery by doubling them with a pair of lost parents, who at the same time recover their children and each other. And the foreboding of tragic harms which habitually overhangs for a while the early comedies, is here graver and more protracted than either in A Midsummer-Night's Dream or The Two Gentlemen. Valentine's banishment and Hermia's destination to a nunnery or death arouse no serious suspense; but Ægeon is a pathetic and moving figure, whose story-a masterpiece of Shakespeare's early narrative-strikes a note at the outset with which the subsequent action is in somewhat too marked dissonance for ripe art.-HERFORD, The Eversley Shakespeare. ADRIANA Shakespeare has depicted jealousy both from its tragic as well as from its comic side, in "Othello," in "The Winter's Tale," and in "The Merry Wives;" but nowhere in his works has he portrayed a jealous woman, except Adriana in "The Comedy of Errors," ii. 1, and v. 1, who gets the worst of it. Is this accident, or may it not rather intimate that, according to the ideas of the time, jealousy was justified in the man, but not in the woman?-ELZE, William Shakespeare. The penance for marrying a fortune, in forfeiture of conjugal subordination and the independence dear to man, is a frequent theme and evidently founded on conjugal facts in ancient society;-for aught I know the facts may be the same in modern. At any rate the modern play makes excellent use of the hint; Adriana, like the wife of Menæchmus, brought a wealthy dowry to her husband, and with it the complementary temper of excessive require ments My wife is shrewish when I keep not hours. At her first appearance she is fretful and peevish at his want of punctuality, and suspicious of the cause, which, in truth, as presently appears, was nothing more than a service and attention intended for herself "to see the making of a carcanet," designed as a present for her. Her husband, on the other hand, enraged at being so inexplicably shut out of his own house, disregards the sober counsel of Balthazar, and is as little practised as his wife to assume a reason and wait for an explanation, and hastily revenges himself by making a bachelor's party at the house of the courtezan; and though the extravagance is evidently as harmless as such an imprudence might be; for, I know a wench of excellent discourse, Pretty and witty, wild, and yet too, gentle, are not the words of a sensualist, and there is no trace whatever of want of affection on his part, and we give full belief to his protestation, he still puts himself by the imprudence no less in the wrong than his wife by her fretfulness, and we are left at liberty to enjoy the fun that arises out of their troubles and disasters. Still Adriana, with all her shrewishness, is very affectionate-nay, very amiable, and she gives an earnest of her future improvement in considerateness, by abstaining from public outbreak against her husband's hostess. Her coolness in this respect requires perhaps more explanation than it receives, but that it is accepted by us as at once proof and admission that she had no serious ground for complaint, and was conscious how far she had herself to blame.-LLOYD, Critical Essays. The wife herself and her sister are studied with a care and minuteness which the action certainly did not require. In the change from Plautus' "Mulier," who rails at her husband with only too good reason, to Shakespeare's Adriana, who torments him with doubts at bed and board, and is ready to die in despair at the loss of his love because he refuses to come home to dinner, we see the change from pragmatical to psychological drama, from the comedy of intrigue to the comedy of character, of which otherwise there is not in this play very much. And Luciana brings us altogether into the atmosphere of lyric love which pervades The Two Gentlemen and the greater part of A Midsummer-Night's Dream, and is half seriously disparaged in Love's Labor's Lost.-HERFORD, The Eversley Shakespeare. When we read Adriana's speeches, we cannot wonder that Antipholus of Ephesus, a pleasure-loving young gentleman, as we see later on, often seeks his pleasure away from home. Such a woman, be she ever so fair and charming, is not fitted to chain a man to the domestic hearth. On the contrary, she turns his home into a hell by her cross and peevish jealousy, which he avoids as often and as long as he can, seeking outside the peace and quiet his wife will not permit him to enjoy.-LEWES, The Women of Shakespeare. PINCH Pinch the conjuror is also an excrescence not to be found in Plautus. He is indeed a very formidable anachronism "They brought one Pinch, a hungry lean-fac'd villain, A thread-bare juggler and a fortune-teller; This is exactly like some of the Puritanical portraits to be met with in Hogarth.-HAZLITT, Characters of Shakespeare's Play. SIMILARITY TO THE COMEDIES OF THE The color of the old Roman drama is still strongly reflected upon the double twins-they are such masters and such slaves as we are familiar with in the comedy of the ancients, Greek as well as Latin; and, notwithstanding the indications of Christian date, the Abbess and her priory, Pentecost, the protestation on the faith of a Christian, and so forth, the imagination attires them, and requires that they should be attired in representation, in the more uniform costume of classical times, that best lends itself to the misapprehension of identity. The same remark applies to Ægeon, and perhaps Solinus the Duke, yet not so absolutely. Angelo and Balthazar, on the other hand, and also Adriana and her sister, are of true Italian parentage, and might be encountered on the Rialto at Venice at any time, or in the shadows of Palladian architecture at Padua, |