The shadows of two familiar texts loom behind Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors: Plautus’ Menaechmi, and St Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians. The Menaechmi introduces the action about to unfold on stage with a casual, knowing nod towards the workings of the theatre, at once wondrous and banal. Walls and boundaries dissolve. As Plautus’ Prologue explains:
If Plautus was a non-Roman Italian from Umbria, as some accounts suggest, he would have been particularly well positioned to understand that, in Rome’s fictional world of comoedia palliata (‘drama in a Greek cloak’), foreignness was interchangeable. It is not difficult, in a theatre, to take one city, one person, for another. One person’s ‘Athenish’ (‘atticissat’, l. 12) could easily become another’s ‘Sicilish’ (‘sicilicissitat’). But theatre pushes the limits of that interchangeability further. It is a space in which inhabiting another’s position, perspective and place – for better or for worse – is entirely possible:
St Paul writes of the dissolution of walls and boundaries too, although his concerns are of a different order. Our readings of Paul’s Epistle, when The Comedy of Errors is involved, hovers around descriptions of Ephesus as a city of ‘curious arts’ and magic (Acts 19.19), and Paul’s advice on household relationships, between husbands and wives, or masters and servants. But the Epistle to the Ephesians is also, and firstly, about a different kind of union, addressed to those whom early modern English usage would have deemed to be ‘spiritual’ as well as ‘temporal’ strangers, who were ‘aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and were strangers from the covenants of promise’:
This article begins with the discourse around strangers and aliens in the 1590s, and ends with The Comedy of Errors, whose first recorded appearance in 1594, I would suggest, offers a specific response to the severe backlash against such figures in early modern London – from the French and the Dutch, to the Jews and blackamoors. There is an established scholarly tradition that has examined the anxiety about immigrant communities that marked this period.Footnote 5 Such anxieties were by no means limited to or characteristic of London. The influx of migrant communities had been felt in other English towns and cities, including Canterbury, Norwich, Southampton and Colchester. Yet, as the notorious May Day unrest of 1517 attested, both the outbursts of popular unrest and state repercussions were particularly visible in London, where repeated waves of accusations against strangers allegedly taking up resources that belonged to local and ‘native-born’ communities had a history of erupting into violence. Jacob Selwood reminds us, however, that the critical debate surrounding the implications of the same ‘Evil May Day’ also illuminates ‘the difficulties inherent in asking quantitative questions about hostility towards strangers’. As he argues, ‘Attempts to gauge xenophobia all too often fall prey to binary thinking, emphasizing the presence or absence of violence and the rationality or irrationality of fear and stereotype’.Footnote 6 There are further elements that complicate the picture. The perceived threat of non-English immigrants was often entangled with crises brought on by heightened regional and parochial mobility. Lien Luu’s study of London trade and industry has shown that ‘strangers’ and ‘foreigners’, immigrants from abroad and English-born immigrants from elsewhere within the nation, were both equally attracted by London’s economic promise and accused of appropriating the local population’s livelihood, resources and charity.Footnote 7 At the same time, ostensibly clear-cut binaries of differentiation based on place of origin alone did not always prevail. Heavily populated urban areas like the city of London, as Andrew Pettegree and others have pointed out, also provided spaces where conflicting affiliations – such as those based on shared faith or craft, or practical conditions of living and working in close proximity – could complicate matters of identity and belonging.Footnote 8
In the light of that existing scholarship, I want to keep the Plautine and Pauline texts hovering in our memory, because they throw a raking light across both Shakespeare’s play and that backlash against strangers in early modern London. Paul’s text is an implicit presence behind numerous defences of English hospitality and charity that proliferate in the 1590s. It is also a critical presence, albeit largely ignored, behind the ‘mortal and intestine jars’ (1.1.11) with which The Comedy of Errors begins, as cities and their people are split by ‘enmity and discord’ (1.1.5), lives are threatened, and the value of individual human beings is reduced to a ransom of coins. Plautus’ seemingly light-hearted comedy with its fluid, shape-shifting city full of strangers, on the other hand, could be the stuff of citizen nightmares. It resonates with the unrest that plagued English towns and cities as the influx of strangers and foreigners coincided with another simultaneous development: the increasingly felt urgency to establish mercantile and diplomatic contact with the wider world. The basic contours of that tension were reflected on the stage throughout this period. To come home, only to find a stranger installed in your place, one who wears your face and speaks with your voice, is one version of that nightmare. The other, however, is to be that outsider. It is to know, to remember, or at least to understand, what it is like to arrive in a strange place, to have the identity and name you call your own held to ransom, and to be caught up in a web of misprision and obligations which you can neither control, nor escape.
‘’Tis Not Our Native Country’
Mistrust of the stranger, of course, is nothing new on the London stage. Even in the early, anonymous Interlude of Welth and Helth (c. 1557), ‘aliaunts’ like Hance Bere-pot or War, the drunken Flemish gunner, were denounced by Remedy for their ability ‘with craft & subtleti [to] get/ englishme[n]s welth away’, and Ill-Will the Vice spoke with a mock Spanish accent (‘Me is un spanyardo compoco parlavere’).Footnote 9 In Ulpian Fulwell’s 1568 interlude, Like Will to Like, as Lloyd Kermode argues, Philip Fleming and his drunken friend (also predictably called Hance) acted as ‘overt indicator[s] of social fracture and alien decay’.Footnote 10 In George Wapull’s Tide Tarrieth No Man (1576), Paul’s Cross is the favoured haunt of Greediness, and Help assures Neighbourhood, a ‘straunger’, that his attempt to acquire a property could not have been better timed:
Despite the soon-to-be-outmoded style and abstraction of personifications, these are telling views from below. To attend to them is to attend to local, popular anxiety, which permeates urban encounters (drunken or otherwise), transactions (social and commercial), trade and craft.Footnote 12 We know that such anxiety and resentment become visible increasingly in the plays performed in the city during the 1580s and 1590s, such as Robert Wilson’s Three Ladies of London (1584), a play that has been much discussed in recent years for its representation of the stranger and the alien on the London stage.Footnote 13 As Lloyd Kermode has pointed out, when Hospitality is murdered by Usury in Wilson’s play, the action stands as an indictment of one kind of hospitality being rooted out by another.Footnote 14 Private, individual hospitality, closely associated with Englishness and traditional ties within the community, is depicted as a quality under threat. It is replaced by a particular form of urban, self-interested ‘liberalitie’ that benefits the outsider-interloper. In Wilson’s play, it is represented by the character of Lady Lucre and her relationship with her unscrupulous non-English partners-in-crime, such as the Italian merchant Mercadorus. Related tensions about the stranger’s position bubble under the exchange in the Maltese senate house when Barabas is summoned to the aid of the state in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta (1589/90). Barabas rejects the option of political and military involvement in his host nation because Jews ‘are no soldiers’ (1.2.50).Footnote 15 ‘Are strangers with your tribute to be taxed?’ (1.2.59) he demands, claiming civic immunity as a resident alien. He is reminded by an attendant knight that economic involvement nevertheless carries its own obligations: ‘Have strangers leave with us to get their wealth? / Then let them with us contribute’ (1.2.60–1).
Yet the strangers, the ones who are ‘not like us’, come in multiple confusing forms, and identifying them is no easy task. In The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (1590), the belated sequel to Wilson’s Three Ladies of London, it is not difficult to figure out who will win the hands of the three ladies. It is pretty much to be expected that, within the chivalric set-piece at its centre, the eponymous three Lords of London will be victorious over their Spanish rivals, three overtly inimical ‘strangers’ in language, clothing and behaviour. But that the claim of the Lords of London is stronger than even that of those of their own nation – the three Lords of Lincoln – is more of a surprise. Judge Nemo’s explanation that the superiority of their claim on the ladies rests on the fact that they are ‘Their countrimen, in London bred as they’ opens up a whole different layer of local and regional tensions about place and belonging.Footnote 16
Who is one’s ‘countryman’, after all? The proximity in legal and popular usage of the terms associated with external and internal migration (‘stranger’ or ‘alien’, and ‘foreigner’), the confusing status of the rights of birth and the rights of blood (jus soli and jus sanguinis), the legally endorsed fluidity of identity signified by processes of denization and naturalization turn identity into a shifting hall of mirrors where identifying or inhabiting the stranger’s place is often a matter, ultimately, of perspective.Footnote 17 Usury’s ‘parentes were both Jewes’, but like the Lords and Ladies, he was ‘borne in London’ too, and pleads with his confederates in this play not to betray their ‘native countrie’ (F4 r). ‘[He]re where I am, I know the government’, he declares, facing the prospect of a Spanish invasion, ‘here can I live for all their threatning, if strangers prevaile, I know not their lawes nor their usage’. Belonging, for him, emerges through familiarity with ‘usage’ – everyday practice, hostile or otherwise – which, in Usury’s case, is rooted firmly in the economic structure of the city of London. Worries about the stranger becoming familiar with such ‘usage’ and, in the process, making himself ‘at home’, however, inevitably is the other side of that coin.
The 1590s and the Stranger’s Case
The concerns that circulated in the public domain, as these plays acknowledged, focused repeatedly on a familiar cluster of issues. The disbursement of hospitality and charity was chief among them, but it was inflected by the problems inherent in the very definition of a ‘stranger’, and by expectations of reciprocity from strangers that simultaneously emphasized difference, and thus resisted possibilities of reciprocity. Each of these concerns formed part of the heated public discourse around strangers and aliens in the early 1590s, when The Comedy of Errors was written and performed.Footnote 18 One place where it is particularly noticeable is in the fractious Parliamentary debate about the Bill on strangers’ retailing of foreign merchandise in March 1593, itself the product of long-term simmering tensions in the city. The opening speech for the Bill against the strangers was made by Francis Moore of the Middle Temple, Counsel for the City of London. It set the tone of the discussion, by insisting that ‘Charity must be mixt with Policy; for to give of Charity to our own Beggaring, were but Prodigality’, and that the strangers’ ‘Priviledge of Denization is not to be allowed above the priviledge of Birth’.Footnote 19 In a later speech, Nicholas Fuller, himself the son of a successful London merchant, spoke of the ‘Exclamations of the City [that] are exceeding pitiful and great against these Strangers’. ‘It is no Charity to have this pity on them to our own utter undoing’, he claimed, ‘this is to be noted in these Strangers, they will not converse with us, they will not marry with us, they will not buy any thing of our Country-men’. Footnote 20 And in the penultimate speech of the proceedings, Sir Walter Raleigh would launch a three-pronged attack that is worth quoting at length:
Whereas it is pretended, That for Strangers it is against Charity, against Honour, against profit to expel them; in my opinion it is no matter of Charity to relieve them. For first, such as fly hither have forsaken their own King; … and here they live disliking our Church. For Honour, It is Honour to use Strangers as we be used amongst Strangers; And it is a lightness in a Common-Wealth, yea a baseness in a Nation to give a liberty to another which we cannot receive again. In Antwerp where our intercourse was most, we were never suffered to have a Taylor or a Shoemaker to dwell there.… And for Profit, they are all of the House of Almoigne, who pay nothing, yet eat out our profits, and supplant our own Nation.… [I]t cost her Majesty sixteen thousand pound a year the maintaining of these Countries, and yet for all this they Arm her Enemies against her. Therefore I see no reason that so much respect should be given unto them.Footnote 21
In the end, the Bill was rejected by the House of Lords, despite being passed by the Commons. Over the next two months, through repeated letters to the city, the Elizabethan Privy Council recorded its concerns and increasing frustration with London’s inability to stem public demonstrations of dissatisfaction against strangers. Apprentices’ intentions to ‘attempt some vyolence on the strangers’ are noted on 16 April, and ‘certaine libelles latelie published by some disordered and factious persons in and about the cittie of London’ are mentioned in another report.Footnote 22 Its tone is worried, and understandably so, given that one such public libel threatened a purge of all strangers from the country: ‘Be it known to all Flemings and Frenchmen, that it is best for them to depart out of the Realm of England, between this and the 9th of July next. If not, then to take that which follows: for that there shall be many a sore stripe.’Footnote 23 In the weeks that followed, the Privy Council would have further occasions to worry about ‘divers lewd and malicious libells set up within the citie of London’, of which the best known is the verse libel that appeared on the wall of Austin Friars, the Dutch Church, in the middle of the night on 5 May.Footnote 24 This text has been much discussed due to the way in which its scattered references to ‘Machiavellian Marchant’ and ‘paris massacre’ implicated Christopher Marlowe and his plays.Footnote 25 Its equation of the guest-who-is-a-stranger with the stranger-who-is-an-enemy is predictable:
What is perhaps less predictable is the recalcitrant trick of the eye that the text effects at the same time. ‘That Egipts plagues, vext not the Egyptians more, / Th[a]n you doe us’ the libel claims, ‘then death shall be your lotte’.Footnote 27 But the comparison is an uncomfortable one, turning the native English subjects into the Egyptians of the Exodus, and the strangers into the chosen people of the Israelites, out to claim their rightful ‘home’.
‘Princes of Foreign Lands’
England’s relationship with strangers was also under discussion elsewhere. The ‘Comedy of Errors (like to Plautus his Menechmus)’ is thought to have been performed when ‘it was thought good not to offer any thing of Account’ after ‘Throngs and Tumults’ disrupted the revels organized by the members of Gray’s Inn on 28 December 1594, much to the annoyance of visitors from the Inner Temple.Footnote 28 At the mock enquiry held on the next night, the blame was laid squarely on ‘a Sorcerer or Conjurer’ who not only disrupted the embassy, but also ‘foisted a Company of base and common Fellows, to make up our Disorders with a Play of Errors and Confusions’ (p. 23).
The festivities of the fashionable young gentlemen of the London Inns of Court and its inset ‘Play of Errors’ would seem unlikely spaces for the accommodation of the debate around strangers. The revels wove an elaborate fiction about the imaginary ‘State of Purpoole’ and its Prince, which gradually took shape through multiple performances from December 1594 to March 1595. It is evident from its written account, the Gesta Grayorum (published significantly later in 1688), that these were performances rooted in their urban environment. There is the repeated roll-call of the Prince of Purpoole’s titles, which serve to beat the bounds of the city: ‘Duke of the High and Nether Holborn, Marquis of St Giles’s and Tottenham, Count Palatine of Bloomsbury and Clerkenwell, Great Lord of the Cantons of Islington, &c’ (p. 9). Elsewhere, there is evidence that the entertainment spilled repeatedly onto London’s streets and mimicked royal progresses and Lord Mayor’s processions (pp. 43, 55).
It is perhaps not surprising, in the circumstances, that stranger figures were acknowledged within the performances themselves, from ‘Lucy Negro, Abbess de Clerkenwell’ and her ‘Nunnery’ (p. 12), to the silent ‘Tartarian Page’, reminiscent of Ippolyta the Tartarian, whom Anthony Jenkinson procured for Queen Elizabeth from his travels (p. 57).Footnote 29 A few other discordant notes within the account also reflect the larger public debates about strangers’ rights. The Prince’s general pardon to the nation after his coronation excludes ‘All Merchant-Adventurers, that ship or lade any Wares or Merchandize, into any Port or Creek, in any Flemish, French, or Dutch, or other Outlandish Hoy, Ship, or Bottom’ (p. 18). Later, letters received by the Prince from his servants suggest a domain under assault. The letter from the ‘Canton of Knights-bridge’ reports ‘certain Foreigners, that sieze upon all Passengers, taking from them by force their Goods, under a pretence [of] being Merchants Strangers’, claiming that they have permission from the Prince to recoup their own lost merchandise (p. 48). From ‘the Harbour of Bride-well’ (p. 50), another innuendo-laden account reports a ‘huge Armado of French Amazons’ that holds ‘all sorts of People … in durance; not suffering one Man to escape, till he have turned French’ (p. 49).
Despite this, the overarching tone of the entertainments devised for the 1594 revels was studiedly global and cosmopolitan, shifting focus away from London – within which Purpoole had established its temporary, alternative sovereignty – to the world beyond. Its emphasis on international diplomacy and traffic reflected the ambitions of the Elizabethan state in post-Armada years. A nascent imperial vision was one part of it, and princely ‘Amity’ that united like-minded Christian princes against common enemies was another. They were both foregrounded strikingly in the revels of 3 January 1595, when the Grayans and the Templarians patched up their differences from the ‘Night of Errors’ with their emperors worshipping ‘lovingly, Arm in Arm’ at the altar of the Goddess of Amity (p. 25). In between, the court of Purpoole turned away from ‘the Plots of Rebellion and Insurrection, that those, His Excellency’s Subjects, had devised against His Highness and State’ (p. 51), to celebrate embassies both local and distant. If the ‘Templarians’ and their Turk-defying ‘emperor’ featured in one instance, the pleas of the Russian Tsar ‘Theodore Evanwhich’ (p. 44) featured in another, setting up the Prince as the ‘Bulwark of Christendom’ against the ‘Bigarian’ and ‘Negro’ Tartars challenging his authority (p. 46).
By the time the final entertainment devised by Francis Davison, the Masque of Proteus, was performed in the presence of Elizabeth I and the court at Shrovetide, the conflation of chivalric romance with a deliberately outward-looking political vision was clearly marked out. The Prince’s squire recounted the story of how the Prince wagered his own liberty, as well as the chance to control the Adamantine rocks that govern ‘the wild Empire of the Ocean’, by promising the sea-god Proteus that he would show him ‘a Power, / Which in attractive Vertue should surpass / The wond’rous force of his Iron-drawing Rocks’ (p. 63). The outcome of that wager was predictable, with Elizabeth’s attendance at the performance providing the conceit on which the narrative turned. In her presence, the squire’s verse could declare Proteus’ prize redundant, even as the Prince offered his services to the Queen and joined her noblemen in jousting:
The argument that Purpoole’s deferral to Elizabeth’s ‘attractive Vertue’ is hardly an unqualified submission has been made before. Richard McCoy and Martin Butler, for instance, have both read the performance of a chivalric compromise into the masque’s closing insistence that the ‘Arms of Men’ cannot be moved without the willing submission of ‘the Hearts of Men’ (Gesta Grayorum, ed. Greg, p. 64).Footnote 30 At the same time, however, this was the creation of young men waiting to enter the service of the state: the Gray’s Inn revels were not only attended on multiple occasions by Elizabeth I and her court, its report also notes gratefully how William Cecil, Lord Burghley, a former member of Gray’s Inn himself, sent the organizers £10 as an unsolicited token of his favour at the start of the festivities (p. 4).
In the winter of 1594, it is possible to read their fictional representation of England’s relationship with the wider world as a construct at least partially shaped and approved by the state, an imaginative response to the Parliamentary debate about the Strangers’ Bill and its attendant unrest, in which the other two Inns of Court had been so closely involved.Footnote 31 ‘How have We been honoured with the Presents of divers Princes, Lords, and Men of great Worth; who, confident in our Love, without Fear or Distrust, have come to visit Us’, the Prince of Purpoole had exclaimed in the course of the revels; ‘What Concourse of all People hath been continually at Our Court, to behold Our Magnificence!’ (p. 52). His dismissal of the ‘few tumultuary Disorders’ and ‘ill-guided Insurrections’ (p. 52) of the people of his own state, conspiring to force attention away from that global recognition, was perhaps only half in jest. Now, at the revel’s conclusion, that argument for the state’s policy towards strangers at the level of international politics turns the feared influx of immigrants into a ‘pilgrimage’ received by England and its Queen:
In Ephesus
What then, against such a backdrop, are we to make of the bustling port city at the crossroads of global traffic where the action of The Comedy of Errors takes place? Performed, if not commissioned specifically, for the Gray’s Inn revels, this ‘play of Errors and Confusions’ presented by ‘a Company of base and common Fellows’ provided a different rationale, I would suggest, for the entertainment of strangers. Its exploration of a stranger’s rights and place is distinct both from imperial ambition and statecraft on the one hand, and from the city and ‘tumultuary Disorders’ of its native-born population on the other.
From its emphasis on jus soli in controlling the movement and rights of strangers, to the pervasive obsession with reciprocity in what Wilson’s Usury might have called its ‘usage’, Ephesus resonates with the concerns we have seen already, but its handling repeatedly exposes the shifting sands on which those concerns are based. Take hospitality, for instance, which in Ephesus is always a matter of reciprocal transaction. Like Raleigh, who had reminded the 1593 Parliament that it is ‘baseness in a Nation to give a liberty to another which we cannot receive again’, Solinus’s opening speech in Act 1, Scene 1, reminds Egeon that the ‘rancorous outrage of your Duke / To merchants, our well-dealing countrymen /… / Excludes all pity from our threat’ning looks’ (1.1.6–10). Later, Antipholus of Syracuse’s generous invitation to dinner is turned down by the Merchant of Ephesus in favour of an invitation from ‘certain merchants / Of whom I hope to make much benefit’ (1.2.24–5). Even sexual liaisons turn into bilateral exchanges of a more material kind: ‘Give me the ring of mine you had at dinner, / Or for my diamond the chain you promised’, demands the Courtesan from the puzzled Syracusian Antipholus (4.3.68–9).
That last also illuminates the way in which the Ephesian conception of reciprocity is defined in material terms. The emphasis that The Comedy of Errors places on commodities and the circulation of things is well known. As with the doubling of characters, this is Plautine comedy with added extras. Plautus is satisfied with making one knowing joke about comoedia palliata (the term often used for Roman comedy derived from Greek New Comedy) by making a palla (‘cloak’) his main instrument of confusion. Shakespeare swaps it for a chain and adds a rapidly expanding list to it for good measure. ‘Mart’ and ‘money’ occur more times here than in any other play; currency is specified (‘marks’, ‘ducats’, ‘angels’, ‘guilders’, ‘sixpence’); chains, rings and purses change hands and necks and get stuffed into desks covered with Turkish tapestry; ‘fraughtage’ and ‘stuf’ is put on board ships and taken off again. That emphasis on the material props is often read as the play’s questioning of what constitutes personal identity, since confusion occurs when things go astray. But the problem in Ephesus is not that these material markers change hands, but that their transmission is expected to be bound by a strict framework of reciprocal exchange within the community, moving from person to person only along a pre-determined route. The emphasis on ‘credit’ is a useful shorthand for that dynamic. There is no room for rootless, creditless strangers in this economy.Footnote 32 Their appearance destabilizes Ephesian ‘usage’ fundamentally, and both public and domestic relationships fall apart as a result: wife becomes ‘that woman’ (5.1.198), husband turns into ‘[d]issembling villain’ (4.4.101), client becomes ‘wretch’ (5.1.27).
Yet, within the world of the play, that emphasis on material reciprocity has no affective counterpart. ‘Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall, / And by the doom of death end woes and all’, Egeon begins (1.1.1–2). His resignation offers much more than the Duke had expected, so he chooses to ignore it altogether (‘Merchant of Syracusa, plead no more’, 1.1.3). ‘I have some marks of yours upon my pate, / Some of my mistress’ marks upon my shoulders, / … / If I should pay your worship those again, / Perchance you will not bear them patiently’ (1.2.82–6), says Dromio of Ephesus. His wordplay, light-hearted as it is, illuminates the chasm that separates master and servant in Ephesus, made wider by the fact that he is addressing the wrong man. But the most striking acknowledgement is Adriana’s, even as she wonders about her sister’s exemplary patience:
It is within this space, where a closed legally and commercially determined framework of human transactions appears to have replaced the fluidity of all affective connection, that Antipholus of Ephesus is a model citizen, ‘[o]f credit infinite, highly beloved’ (5.1.6) – a choice of phrase which itself is another example where potential for material reciprocity, ‘credit’, supersedes and determines the affective in Ephesus. When he finds himself barred from his home, his response is striking. ‘What art thou that keep’st me out from the house I owe?’ (3.1.42), he exclaims, eschewing the one word, ‘home’, which otherwise recurs pointedly and frequently throughout the play, in favour of material ownership. Only a greater danger stops him from claiming his property with a crowbar. A ‘vulgar comment will be made of it’ (3.1.101), warns his merchant companion, Balthazar, assuming that human interest in another’s business is naturally prurient. And the result of it, ‘slander’ (line 106) seems to be like the troublesome strangers of London: it ‘may with foul intrusion enter in / And dwell upon your grave when you are dead. / For slander lives upon succession, / For ever housed where once it gets possession’ (3.1.104–7).
Antipholus of Ephesus’s perspective, however, is not one with which we are invited to align ourselves. One of the clear changes that Shakespeare makes to his Plautine source is the switch of emphasis and focus from the ‘native’ brother in The Menaechmi (who begins the action in the play) to the ‘stranger’ father and twin, with whom the action of Shakespeare’s play begins, and through whose eyes we are invited to look at the workings of Ephesus for the first two acts. Verbal, affective resonances keep opening doors for these strange visitors from the moment Solinus, listening to Egeon’s account, admits that he would surrender to pity ‘were it not against our laws – / Which princes, would they, may not disannul – ’ (1.1.142–3). Later in the action, it is Adriana, Shakespeare’s adaptation of Plautus’ nameless Matrona (‘Wife’), the representative of the home and of domestic life, who repeatedly generates such resonances. Fundamental human connections beyond national boundaries echo in Antipholus of Syracuse and Adriana’s shared imagery of water-drops in speaking of the bonds between brother and brother, husband and wife (in 1.2.35–6 and 2.2.129–30). Elsewhere, lament about the ‘defeatures’ of time that inscribe themselves on the vulnerable human body, connect her to Egeon. ‘Hath homely age th’alluring beauty took / From my poor cheek? /… / … Then is he the ground / Of my defeatures’ (2.1.88–97), says Adriana about Antipholus of Ephesus’s neglect, while ‘careful hours with time’s deformèd hand, / Have written strange defeatures in my face’ (5.1.299–300), says Egeon, when he thinks his son is denying acquaintance. These are the only two instances of the word being used in a play by Shakespeare. The extent to which the ‘native’ and ‘stranger’ figures are rendered interchangeable affects even the most resistant of Ephesus’s citizens. ‘I came from Corinth’, says Antipholus of Ephesus in what seems a redundant piece of belated exposition (5.1.367). That this trajectory, coupled with his birth in Epidamnum, makes him at most a stranger-denizen who has gained residence, wealth and a wife through service and the Duke’s patronage would not have been lost on the play’s first audience.
At Westminster Abbey in the plague-ridden spring of 1593, the speakers arguing the cause of the strangers had repeatedly emphasized the benefits that accrued, both material and otherwise, from reciprocity. ‘This Bill should be ill for London, for the Riches and Renown of the City cometh by entertaining of Strangers, and giving liberty unto them’, warned Sir John Woolley; ‘Antwerp and Venice could never have been so rich and famous but by entertaining of Strangers, and by that means have gained all the intercourse of the World.’ And, although ‘our Charity unto them must not hinder or injure our selves’, Robert Cecil would say in the final speech, it ‘hath brought great Honour to our Kingdom, for it is accounted the refuge of distressed Nations, for our Arms have been open unto them to cast themselves into our Bosoms’.Footnote 33 But the speech that has perhaps attracted most attention – not least because of its resemblance to Hand D’s plea for the ‘stranger’s case’ in the revisions to the roughly contemporaneous Book of Sir Thomas More – is a striking leap of the imagination that conflates the guest and the host, the supplicant and the benefactor. ‘In the days of Queen Mary’, Henry Finch asserted, ‘when our Cause was as theirs is now, those Countries did allow us that liberty, which now, we seek to deny them. They are strangers now, we may be strangers hereafter. So let us do as we would be done unto’ (507).Footnote 34
It is worth pausing on this assertion for a moment, because it opens up a hall of mirrors with which Finch’s early modern audience would have been deeply familiar. Paul’s reminder of universal Christian brotherhood and the breaking down of walls of division was a commonplace in homilies and sermons about charity and hospitality in the period, but two other passages from the Bible were equally likely to be cited. The first is from Exodus 22.21: ‘Moreover, thou shalt not do injury to a stranger, neither oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.’ The second is from Leviticus 19.33–4: ‘And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with you, shall be as one of your selves, and thou shalt love him as thy self: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.’ What both the Bible and Finch are advocating is a trick of the mind and the eye – one that suggests that a host could easily have been or become a stranger-guest, and vice versa. It is a conflation inherent in the word itself, deriving as it does from Old French ‘(h)oste’ and Latin ‘hospes’, which meant both ‘host’ and ‘guest’.
Opposition to strangers, as we have seen in the 1593 debate, extracts from this a disquieting reductio ad absurdum of the very idea of hospitality, when the guest takes over and becomes a host himself. ‘Hospes’ turns into ‘hostis’ – stranger, certainly, but also ‘public enemy’ – an imaginative leap that Raleigh makes in his Parliamentary speech when his diatribe against strangers who live in England ‘disliking our Church’ turns quickly into an accusation of treason (‘they Arm her Enemies’). The resolution that The Comedy of Errors offers, as such, depends ultimately on a comically literal theatrical depiction of the Pauline message, even as it uses the Plautine acknowledgement of the theatrical space to effect it. In the Dutch Church libel of 1593, the over-crowded, fraught spaces of the city of London had produced the seemingly inevitable slide of the guest who is a stranger, into the stranger who is an enemy. In the revels of Gray’s Inn in 1594, the young men behind its entertainments had attempted to provide a defence of such risky hospitality, subsuming the local concerns of the city to visions of imperial ambition and international diplomacy. What we have in Shakespeare’s play, instead, is a response built around a comic reversal of that paranoia. The two figures – native and stranger – whose lives get entangled in the bustle of a port city really do turn out to be brothers united by blood. The space of the theatre makes it possible for them to exemplify overtly what scripture would have us take on faith about human connection. ‘They are strangers now, we may be strangers hereafter. So let us do as we would be done unto’, Henry Finch had asked the London MPs at the 1593 debate on behalf of strangers, but that is a difficult imaginative leap. There is, at the end, no need for such a leap of faith in the city of Ephesus. Instead, there is just a step, as the two Dromios ‘walk in’ (5.1.422) together – strangers, brothers, strange likenesses (‘Me thinks you are my glass and not my brother’, 5.1.420). Like the working of theatre itself, it is at once momentous, wondrous, and yet everyday.
