Dining out in Ephesus: Food in The Comedy of Errors

Author(s): Joseph Candido

Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 , Spring, 1990, Vol. 30, No. 2,
Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (Spring, 1990), pp. 217-241
Published by: Rice University

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/450515

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 SEL 30(1990)
ISSN 0039-3657

Dining Out in Ephesus:

Food in The Comedy of Errors
JOSEPH CANDIDO

I
In her fine introduction to The Comedy of Errors, Anne Barton
reiterates a familiar attitude toward Plautus's Menaechmi, calling
it "far less complex" than the Shakespearean apprentice piece for
which it nonetheless served as the major source. Plautus's drama
abounds with "simple and rigidly type-cast" stock characters, and
has little "object or concern other than to turn the normal world
upside down and to evoke laughter of a simple and unreflective
kind." 1 Clearly the critic who goes searching for profound comic
insight of a Shakespearean sort in Plautine imitations of Greek
New Comedy is inviting scholarly shipwreck. Yet despite the perils
involved, I should like to enter Shakespeare's play through
Plautus's, considering a rather prominent feature of The Men-
aechmi that, despite its farcical predictability and limited develop-
ment, appears to have quickened Shakespeare's comic invention as
he fashioned his drama.
It is possible that Shakespeare knew in manuscript William
Warner's 1595 translation of The Menaechmi, a lively and rather
faithful version of Plautus's play that contains some suggestive
verbal parallels to The Comedy of Errors.2 Warner forsakes the
tedious prologue of Plautus and begins instead (after a brief ten-
line "argument") with the play proper, specifically the long
introductory statement by the ever-hungry Peniculus, the parasite
of Menaechmus of Epidamnum. The speech is striking both for its
broad and conventional comic buffoonery on the subject of food,3

Joseph Candido is Associate Professor of English at the University of

Arkansas, Fayetteville. He is currently co-editing the New Variorum King
John.

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218 FOOD IN THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

and, perhaps less obviously, for what it implies about the

centrality of food and dining in helping to define social relation-
ships in the play. For the parasite, whose only object is the
exploitation of the unusually generous Menaechmus, food serves
as the ultimate tool of male friendship and social control. It
matters little to Peniculus that he is fettered by dependency; his
utter servility finds full contentment in the maintenance of a sort
of male umbilical cord ("belly bands" as one translator puts it)4
that ensures his version of survival:

If then ye would keep a man without all suspition of

running away from ye, the surest way is to tie him with
meate, drink and ease: Let him ever be idle, eate his belly
full, and carouse while his skin will hold, and he shall
never, I warrant ye, stir a foote. These strings to tie one by
the teeth, passe all the bands of iron, steele, or what metall
so ever, for the more slack and easie ye make them, the
faster still they tie the partie which is in them.... I meane
to visit [Menaechmus] at dinner: for my stomacke mee-
thinkes even thrusts me into the fetters of his daintie fare.
(p. 13)

No sooner is Peniculus's paean to sycophancy at an end than he

meets the irate Menaechmus, fresh from an argument with his wife
and determined to abandon "the madbraine scold" at home (p. 13).
The talk turns immediately to food. Just as Peniculus defines his
bond with Menaechmus in terms of the ties, strings, and fetters of a
shared meal in which by some strange rhetorical and psychological
alchemy friendship and the full belly serve as metaphors for each
other, Menaechmus articulates his alienation from his wife in
similar terms. His response to the reopening of a long-standing
marital breach is to exact a sort of culinary revenge that goes
beyond mere wayward belly cheer: "I mean to dine this day abroad
with a sweet friend of mine," Erotium (p. 14). Despite the fact that
Peniculus will make a third, the dinner is fraught with psycho-
logical and sexual significance. Erich Segal has shown, in a much-
criticized yet nonetheless useful book, how centrally The Men-
aechmi turns on the tension between Industria and Voluptas, or
what Freud would call the reality principle and the pleasure
principle.5 Segal has some instructive comments to make on the
composition of Menaechmus's proposed dinner, particularly as
the foods involved may suggest the psychological importance of
the feast to the angry husband:

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 JOSEPH CANDIDO 219

But the delicacies which Menaechmus orders and all food

"along those lines" were specifically forbidden to Romans
by the current sumptuary laws. These, according to Pliny,
forbade the eating of abdomnia, glandia, testiculi, vulvae,
sincipita verrina. Not only do these outward items figure
prominently on Menaechmus's bill of fare, but Plautus
plays with them verbally, concocting dishes like sincipita-
menta, and the comic patronymics glandionida and
pernonida. Apparently Menaechmus is savoring his words
in anticipation of the breaking-of-the-rules banquet.
(p. 48)

Thus Menaechmus's choice of V/oluptas over Industria is closely

bound up with a distinctly un-Roman release from responsibility
as represented visually on stage by the abandoned house and
further implied by his temporary absence from the offstage Mart.
But his choice of Voluptas also suggests a reckless holiday from
accepted social norms in which male dependency, marital revenge,
and iconoclastic behavior become embedded in banqueting. For
Menaechmus the forbidden meal signifies a powerful-if soon
disrupted-denial of wife, occupation, and responsibility that
crams self- and societal rejection into a voluptuous culinary
exercise with parasite and whore.
Part of the "uncomplicated" humor of The Menaechmi, of
course, involves the ludicrous errors produced when one twin is
confused with the other; and it is perhaps no coincidence that the
first blunder of this kind is made by Cylindrus the cook, who
mistakes the circumspect Menaechmus-Sociles for his more emo-
tional brother of Epidamnum. The episode plays rhetorical
sleight-of-hand with the tripartite association of courtesan, para-
site, and food, evoking each of the three in various relations to the
others. Warner's translation is particularly good at capturing the
scene's compact and suggestive bawdiness: "Thinke ye I have
brought meate inough for three of you? If not, ile fetche more for
you and your wench, and Snatchcrust your Parasite" (p. 19). And
when Erotium appears just afterwards, she addresses the man she
mistakenly supposes to be her Menaechmus in language that
cements the identification of the illicit feast with adultery. Her
sexually symbolic open door, in clear contrast to the shut house of
the nameless wife, affords the ultimate in romantic refuge for the
alienated husband:

Let the doore stand so, away, it shall not be shut.... C

the boord, put fire under the perfuming pannes, le

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220 FOOD IN THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

things be very handsome. Where is hee, that Cylindrus sayd

stood without here? Oh, what meane you sweet heart, that
ye come not in? I trust you thinke yourselfe more welcome
to this house then to your owne, and great reason why you
should do so. Your dinner & all things are readie as you
willed. Will ye go sit downe?
(pp. 19-20)

But the visiting Menaechmus-no innocent himself who resolves

selfishly to "coozen" Erotium at dinner (p. 21)-will, unlike his
more magnanimous brother, allow no parasite to share his feast.
His explicit rejection of his brother's companion ("Ile neither staie
for him, nor have him let come in, if he do come" [p. 21]), gets
symbolically reenacted when he meets Peniculus after the dinner
with Erotium. Peniculus has become separated from Menaechmus
of Epidamnum in the course of the day's events, and when he sees
the now-sated likeness of his friend coming from Erotium's house
he mistakes him for the man he thinks has given him "the slip"
earlier in the day (p. 22). When Menaechmus the Traveler insults
Peniculus by claiming not to know him ("Away filthie mad
drivell, away: I will talke no longer with thee" [p. 23]), the parasite
determines to "make this same as unblest a dinner as ever
[Menaechmus] eate" (p. 23) by informing the wife of her husband's
supposed infidelities. Thus male dependency and marriage dissolve
at the hands of the unfed parasite and the selfish brother.
Menaechmus of Epidamnum returns from his day of business to an
ungrateful friend, to a faithless courtesan (Erotium has not only
mistakenly given the wrong brother dinner but also a cloak
belonging to Menaechmus's wife), and to a failed marriage:

Never in my life had I more overthwart fortune in one day,

and all by the villanie of this false knave the Parasite, my
Ulisses that works such mischiefs against mee his king. But
let me live no longer but ile be revengde uppon the life of
him: his life? nay tis my life, for hee lives by my meate and
drinke. Ile utterly withdraw the slaves life from him. And
Erotium shee sheweth plainly what she is: who because I
require the cloake againe to carrie to my wife, saith I gave
it her, and flatly falles out with me. How unfortunate am I?
(pp. 32-33)

Despite the ludicrous intervention on the part of the wife's father

to save the marriage (his stern admonitions to his daughter on

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 JOSEPH CANDIDO 221

female subservience and his attempted abduc

for enforced psychological treatment are o
remedy for the union. The play ends cynical
alienation rather than marital joy. In respons
Menaechmus of Epidamnum will follow hi
Syracuse, sell his "servaunts, household stuff
all"- even his wife if anyone is foolish eno
her" (p. 39).
As I have already noted, no one could claim that The Menaechmi
contains the tonal, psychological, or philosophical richness and
depth of Shakespeare's play. Anne Barton puts the matter with
characteristic succinctness when, in tracing the literary genealogy
of The Comedy of Errors, she observes that "between Menander's
Epitrepontes and Periceiromene and Shakespeare's play there
stretches not only an immense gulf of space and time but also the
fact of Christianity with its stress upon the inner life."6 Indeed,
one could easily argue that Shakespeare's play is at least as much
Pauline as it is Plautine. Yet despite the essentially farcical nature
of The Menaechmi-its stock characters, predictable action, and
broad humor-the play is clearly not without certain intimations
of comic seriousness and depth. There is, for example, in addition
to the implied psychological aspects of the episodes I have cited, a
vaguely Chaplinesque vulnerability in the reaction of Menaechmus
of Epidamnum when, after being rescued by his brother's servant,
who mistakenly takes him for his master, he replies: "On mine
honestie, I am none of thy maister, I had never yet anie servant
would do so much for me" (p. 35). Although the sad poverty of
human relationships is implicit both here and at other points in
The Menaechmi, the idea often recedes in the wake of the play's
broad and bumptious humor. But the intimation of a serious
comic concern, although only faintly urged in The Menaechmi,
would have been no less available to Shakespeare on that account.
I should like to suggest, then, that Shakespeare, in filling out his
Plautine model, seized upon the quietly implied idea of human
longing and its connection with food and dining, and that he took
what in Plautus had receded behind farce and pushed it into the
dramatic forefront of The Comedy of Errors.

II

C.L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler observe shrewdly that in

The Comedy of Errors "Shakespeare is marvelous at conveying a
sense of a world already there," and cite Dromio of Ephesus's first

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222 FOOD IN THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

words as illustrating the "routine tensions" of "daily, ordinary

life" that pervade the play:7

The capon burns, the pig falls from the spit;

The clock hath strucken twelve upon the bell:
My mistress made it one upon my cheek:
She is so hot, because the meat is cold.
(I.ii.44-47)

The passage is a fine indication of Shakespeare's early genius at

dramatic economy, for not only does it catch effortlessly the
rhythms of "a world already there," it also points to certain
rhetorical and psychological traits that bind the parted Anti-
pholuses and their Dromios together even as the two pairs of twins
remain comically at odds throughout much of the play. Dromio's
urgent concern over such matters as tardiness for dinner, the
condition of food, household plans gone awry, and the anger of
his mistress, is by no means exceptional in The Comedy of Errors,
for voiced attention to the seemingly unremarkable events of day-
to-day life occupy the two Antipholuses and their servants with
striking regularity. Listen to Antipholus of Syracuse as he first sets
foot in Ephesus:

Within this hour it will be dinner-time;

Till that, I'll view the manners of the town,
Peruse the traders, gaze upon the buildings,
And then return and sleep within my inn,
For with long travel I am stiff and weary.
(I.ii.1 1-15)

The banal itinerary of the tourist tends not to be fit matter for
Shakespearean romantic comedy, but in The Comedy of Errors bed
and board often come abruptly to the forefront of the action. We
are seldom unaware of people going to and from dinner or talking
about the comforts of food and home. It is perhaps natural enough
that the traveling Antipholus of Syracuse-whose sense of aimless
nonattachment is so resonantly conveyed by the metaphor of the
lone water drop seeking its fellow in the ocean (I.ii.35-38)-should
be attracted to the security and solidity implied by the shared meal.
He is, to be sure, an earnest seeker of dining companions, oddly
receptive, for example, to the sudden feast thrust upon him by
total strangers later in the play, and eager to make a dinner
engagement with the first native Ephesian he meets. We miss much

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 JOSEPH CANDIDO 223

in the play if we ignore the tentative yet deep longing for

connection behind his invitation to the anonymous Ephesian
merchant:

What, will you walk with me about the town,

And then go to my inn and dine with me?
(I.ii.22-23)

Coming as it does after Antipholus's admission of frequent "care

and melancholy" (I.ii.20), the remark suggests a yearning for the
personal and societal integration so sadly absent in the separated
twin. Instructive in this regard are the concluding lines of the
Ephesian Dromio's previously cited call to dinner, which both
elaborate on the servant's urgent request and place the longings of
the Syracusan visitor in a wider and more richly suggestive social
context:

The meat is cold, because you come not home:

You come not home, because you have no stomach:
You have no stomach, having broke your fast:
But we that know what 'tis to fast and pray,
Are penitent for your default to-day.
(I.ii.48-52)

Dromio's witty admonition points to serious matters that go

beyond a mere hunger for food and society; it posits a social reality
in which a genuine and strongly felt causal relationship exists
between the abandoned meal and intimate moral and marital
concerns. The five lines that take us from cold meat to implied
sinfulness ("your default to-day"),8 hinge on the assumption that
Ephesus is a place where social ceremonies matter, where the
wayward husband's suspected dining away ("having broke [his]
fast") has serious consequences for his relationship to wife and
home. Antipholus of Ephesus's absence has transformed his house
into the social equivalent of a spiritually unprofitable Lent,
imposing a penitential fasting on all its inhabitants and eliciting
from his wife a resentment that manifests itself in violence to her
servant and angry abstinence (I.ii.90).9
Before discussing the marital-and expressly sexual-
implications of the Ephesian husband's absence from dinner at
home, I should first like to review briefly the status of the midday
meal for Shakespeare and his audience. William Harrison in his
Description of England (1577, 1587) has much to say about the

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224 FOOD IN THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

importance of the noon dinner for Elizabethans, particularly since

this was the central and most elaborate meal of the day. Harrison's
moralistic digression on dining habits, although not explicitly
related to the action of Shakespeare's play, nonetheless indicates
the close relationship between social mores and social morality. He
disparages the frequent "odd repasts" of earlier times that included
"breakfasts in the forenoon, beverages or nuncheons after dinner,
and thereto reresuppers generally when it was time to go to rest," 10
preferring instead the more enlightened modern habit of eating
once, or at most twice, a day. Even this practice, however, is not
without the gluttonous abuse of "long and stately sitting at meat"
(p. 141): "For the nobility, gentlemen, and merchantmen,
especially at great meetings, do sit commonly till two or three of
the clock at afternoon, so that with many is an hard matter, to rise
from the table to go to Evening Prayer and return from thence to
come time enough to supper" (p. 141).
The "supper" to which Harrison alludes was a much lighter
evening meal that carried little of the formal or symbolic character
of the noon dinner. Lu Emily Pearson and Muriel St. Clare Byrne,
both of whom examine in some detail the richly allusive meanings
implicit in dinner at the home of a well-to-do Elizabethan, make
this point persuasively."1 Echoing Harrison, Pearson notes how
the noon meal could drag on almost to supper with only time for
evening prayer between; she then proceeds to underscore the
personal and social symbolism implicit in the long repast:
"cooking, like ornate architecture or elaborate dress or anything
else that might impress one's acquaintances with a display of
wealth, became a very important advertisement of a man's financial
status.... No one was ever expected to partake of all the dishes but
to eat and drink moderately by making a selection from the variety
so bounteously offered" (pp. 556-57).
Although Pearson here is describing a somewhat more elaborate
dinner than the family meal that Antipholus of Ephesus disregards
so casually in The Comedy of Errors, even the ordinary dinner
prepared for family alone was a matter of some culinary complexity
for the housewife. (At least three main dishes were usually served,
not including vegetables, bread, and drink, and Dromio mentions
capon and pig specifically.) Moreover, Adriana's Elizabethan
counterpart could have expected guests on short or no notice-
witness the fact that Antipholus of Ephesus approaches his house
with Angelo and Balthazar in tow-and her readiness in prepara-
tion would have been a sign of her domestic competence as well as

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 JOSEPH CANDIDO 225

her magnanimity as a hostess. Her social role-indeed her identity

as wife-was linked in some measure to her success at entertaining,
just as her husband's public reputation was linked to the affluence
of his board.'2 Along these lines Pearson notes that "even everyday
meals were served with due decorum in well-managed homes, and
the table was carefully set" (p. 565). Byrne further elaborates on
what she calls the "ceremony" observed for daily dinner in "a
well-to-do townsman's household":

a cloth was laid upon the table, and at every place was set a
trencher, a napkin, and a spoon. Wine, ale, and drinking
vessels, Harrison tells us, stood on the buffet, and the
servants filled a clean goblet or Venetian drinking glass
when any guest called for liquor. In the kitchen quarters
the butler took pains to chip the bread in order to remove
any cinders from the crust, and he also squared each piece
neatly before he set it on the board. Finally, the great salt-
cellar would be placed on the table, and with basin,'3 ewer,
and fine damask towel ready to hand for the diners'
ablutions, all was prepared.
(p. 30)

Clearly Antipholus of Ephesus's failure to come to dinner on time

is a repudiation of more than mere food; his absence from home is
the first step in the flouting of an accepted social ceremony that
helps define his identity as respected citizen and respectful husband.
It is surely no coincidence that in the course of the play he is
threatened with the loss of both of these socially and emotionally
vital aspects of the self. Reputation and marriage begin to dissolve
together when the wrong brother dines at home.'4
When viewed in this context Adriana's behavior assumes a
deeper and more richly suggestive character than the mere ragings
of a jealous housewife. Her determination to refrain from eating
despite the fact that her husband is two hours late (II.i.3) indicates
a serious attempt to maintain personal equilibrium and social
bonds in the face of heavy pressures.'5 Adriana is no mere jealous
shrew (her readiness to forgive later in the play is too often
slighted); rather she is a fiercely combative woman confronting
squarely the threat of an imperiled marriage and determined to
sustain meaningful ties despite social and personal threats to her
identity as wife and Lady. This is, oddly enough, a fact that her
didactic and self-assured sister fails to recognize. Luciana's smug
suggestion to "let us dine, and never fret" (II.i.6) implies an

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226 FOOD IN THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

indifference to her sister's emotional plight that reveals the severe

limitations of the unwedded woman's easy aphorisms about
marriage (II.i.15-25). Adriana knows better; her rhetoric wisely
acknowledges the heavy emotional toll exacted by her husband's
absence in terms lost on her sister:

His company must do his minions grace,

Whilst I at home starve for a merry look:

But, too unruly deer, he breaks the pale,

And feeds from home; poor I am but his stale.
(II.i.87-101; emphasis added)

III
When Adriana finally locates the man she believes to be her
Antipholus, her first instinct is to reestablish old connections by
clarifying the proper relationship of husband to wife. Her moving
speech on the mystical Christian notion that the married couple
are one flesh evokes longingly an earlier stage of her marriage
when identities were stable and rooted securely in the simple
ceremonies of everyday life:

The time was once, when thou unurg'd wouldst vow

That never words were music to thine ear,
That never object pleasing in thine eye,
That never touch well welcome to thy hand,
That never meat sweet-savor'd in thy taste,
Unless I spake, or look'd, or touch'd, or carv'd to thee.
(II.ii. 113-18)

Adriana's suggestive use of the Syracusan brother's earlier image of

"a drop of water in the breaking gulf" to define marital insepa-
rability (II.ii.126) further implies her sense of identification with
the man before her, particularly as he represents-in an almost
literal sense-the younger and more innocent version of her
husband.'6 Her urgent invitation to the Syracusan twin can thus be
seen symbolically as a psychologically necessary act of marital
renewal; Adriana's desire for the earlier and untainted version of
her husband is symbolically fulfilled as she enacts with the
younger twin the meaningful social ceremony that defines for her
the basis of a stable marriage. Speaking, looking, and touching-
the characteristic intimacies of romantic love-fuse curiously in
her mind with carving. Moral realignment and marital recommit-

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 JOSEPH CANDIDO 227

ment both meet for the anxious wife in the ordered normalcy of the
shared meal:

Come, come, no longer will I be a fool,

To put the finger in the eye and weep,
Whilst man and master laughs my woes to scorn.
Come, sir, to dinner. Dromio, keep the gate.
Husband, I'll dine above with you to-day,
And shrive you of a thousand idle pranks.
Sirrah, if any ask you for your master,
Say he dines forth, and let no creature enter.
(II. ii.203-10)

The episode is rich with implication. Anthropologists such as

Mary Douglas and Claude Levi-Strauss have painstakingly detailed
the close association of food with sexual longings and sexual
identity.17 Douglas, in particular, has probed how in various
cultures "sexual and gastronomic consummation are made equiva-
lents of one another by reasons of analogous restrictions applied to
each" (p. 71), a phenomenon with obvious implications for the
marital identity of the couple.'18 Similarly, Adriana's renewed
enthusiasm for dinner with the man she thinks is her husband
appears to include such psychological concerns. Despite the fact
that Luciana will accompany the pair, theirs will be a rather
private meal, "above," symbolically located in the living quarters
upstairs rather than in the more public business quarters below.
Moreover, the exclusivity of the meal is further underscored by
Adriana's (unintentionally ironic) instructions to Dromio to tell
all callers that her husband dines away, and by her explicit order to
the servant to "play the porter well . . . let none enter, lest I break
your pate" (II.ii.211, 218). Clearly there is more at stake here for
Adriana than the rearrangement of a disturbed afternoon. Her
private family meal serves as a convenient social vehicle for the
larger issue of forgiveness, and her insistence on privacy meta-
phorically links confidential family matters with the equally
confidential regenerative power of the confessional: "Husband, I'll
. . . shrive you of a thousand idle pranks." Even Luciana seems to
sense what the renewed meal means symbolically for her sister;
there is a note of urgency as well as impatience in her enjoinder to
the puzzled guest: "Come, come, Antipholus, we dine too late"
(II.ii.219).
The arrival of the real husband, of course, throws all into
confusion; but as is so often the case in The Comedy of Errors, it is

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228 FOOD IN THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

a confusion that abruptly forces characters to clarify identities and

locate priorities. As Antipholus of Ephesus approaches his house
with Angelo and Balthazar, he exudes a settled complacency with
the verities of his mercantile and male-oriented world. He is late
for dinner, and although he knows that Adriana "is shrewish
when I keep not hours" (III.i.2), he believes that the remedy for her
discontent lies in the protective duplicity of his friend the
goldsmith: "Say that I linger'd with you at your shop / To see the
making of her carcanet, / And that to-morrow you will bring it
home" (III.i.3-5). Antipholus's crass gift of the necklace (which in
anger he later transfers to the Courtesan) illustrates the immense
psychological gap that separates his materialist notion of marriage
from Adriana's loftier attitude of Christian idealism. For the
inattentive husband, whose response to marital drift is to placate
his wife with costly trinkets, the midday meal carries none of the
deep-seated marital or sexual significance that it does for Adriana.
Indeed, there is every indication that Antipholus sees the dinner as
an exclusively male concern, an occasion for refined humanist
discourse on the relationship of food to friendship, but little more.
Any thought of the neglected wife disappears under the somewhat
precious and over-embroidered male niceties that precede Anti-
pholus's discovery of the locked door:

E. Ant. Y' are sad, Signior Balthazar, pray God our

cheer
May answer my good will and your good welcome here.
Balth. I hold your dainties cheap, sir, and your
welcome dear.
E. Ant. 0, Signior Balthazar, either at flesh or fish,
A table full of welcome makes scarce one dainty dish.
Balth. Good meat, sir, is common; that every churl
affords.
E. Ant. And welcome more common, for that's nothing
but words.
Balth. Small cheer and great welcome makes a merry
feast.
E. Ant. Ay, to a niggardly host and more sparing guest:
But though my cates be mean, take them in good part;
Better cheer may you have, but not with better heart.
But soft, my door is lock'd; go bid them let us in.
(III.i. 19-30)

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 JOSEPH CANDIDO 229

The stark reality of Adriana's shut door, carrying as it does the

same sexual implications as that of the angry wife in The
Menaechmi, turns Antipholus's dinner of male friendship and
ostentation into a marital crisis. By virtue of his denied access to
home and wife, the Ephesian brother comes to experience precisely
the same feelings of alienation and sexual doubt that he has so
casually inflicted upon his wife. But the confusion here produces
more than mere psychological tit-for-tat. Antipholus's isolation
outside the locked house functions symbolically to define the
spiritual divorce he has already produced while at the same time
literalizing ominously the ends to which his neglect will lead. In
this sense the Ephesian brother joins Adriana, his twin, Egeon,
and Aemelia in experiencing the anxieties of isolation and
nonattachment, with the significant difference that in his case he
alone is to blame. There is a fine irony to the fact that while
Antipholus suspects Adriana with another man, his real rival for
his virtuous wife is the earlier and idealized image of himself as
represented in his younger brother. Adriana does love another
man-the Antipholus she so longingly evokes as she recalls what
her husband once was, the Antipholus she believes she is restoring
at dinner in her upstairs room. In an almost literal sense, then, the
Ephesian brother is in conflict with himself, thus embodying, in
another more resonantly suggestive form, the self-division that is
everywhere in the play.'9 As Balthazar wisely points out, Anti-
pholus's unseemly attempts to break into his own house in full
view of others is really a senseless act of violence to self:

Have patience, sir, 0, let it not be so!

Herein you war against your reputation,
And draw within the compass of suspect
Th' unviolated honor of your wife.

If by strong hand you offer to break in

Now in the stirring passage of the day,
A vulgar comment will be made of it;
And that supposed by the common rout
Against your yet ungalled estimation,
That may with foul intrusion enter in,
And dwell upon your grave when you are dead.
(III.i.85-104)

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230 FOOD IN THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

Although the irate husband finally departs "in quiet" (III.i.107),

he hardly departs emotionally intact; self-rebellion and self-
loathing, not just revenge, drive Antipholus to dinner at the
Courtesan's.
The two separate dining experiences of the two identical twins
stand in sharp contrast to each other; yet they also reflect each
other in curious ways. For Antipholus of Ephesus the dinner with
the Courtesan contains many of the same psychological elements
as that planned by his Plautine counterpart in The Menaechmi.
Just as Menaechmus of Epidamnum's choice of Voluptas over
Industria involved a rejection of his wife for male companionship
and dinner with Erotium, the Ephesian twin invites his male
friends to dine with him at the Courtesan's where he will bestow
the necklace "for nothing but to spite my wife" (III.i. 118).
Obviously Antipholus's rebellious dinner, at which the material-
istic sign of his weak marital commitment is to change hands,
represents the moral opposite of Adriana's feast of reconciliation.
Perhaps less obvious, however, is the way in which the younger
Antipholus's behavior at Adriana's dinner unwittingly parallels
the unfaithfulness of his brother. As the symbolic embodiment of
the younger version of his Ephesian twin, Antipholus of Syracuse
reenacts his brother's behavior by forsaking the woman who has
welcomed him to the feast and turning his romantic attention to
another. In professing love for Luciana he sounds strangely like an
only slightly exaggerated version of his older brother:

Your weeping sister is no wife of mine,

Nor to her bed no homage do I owe:
Far more, far more, to you do I decline.
(III ii.4l-43)

And later, when alone, he finds an even more distinctly "Anti-

pholan" mode of expression:

She that doth call me husband, even my soul

Doth for a wife abhor. But her fair sister,
Possess'd with such a gentle sovereign grace,
Of such enchanting presence and discourse,
Hath almost made me traitor to myself.
(III.ii. 158-62)

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 JOSEPH CANDIDO 231

Something very close to this attitud

similar rhetoric) lies behind the Ephes
the "wench of excellent discourse, / P
yet, too, gentle" (III.i.109-10), at whos
whom he will give his wife's necklace. A
rejected by her husband.

IV

Adriana's broken banquet fails to produce its desired ends, but it

nonetheless sets in motion a process of moral and social realign-
ment that continues to the end of the play. Critics have generally
tended to overlook the rejected wife's response to her failed dinner,
particularly her remarks upon hearing that at the meal her
supposed husband has tried to woo Luciana:

He is deformed, crooked, old, and sere,

Ill-fac'd, worse bodied, shapeless every where;
Vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind,
Stigmatical in making, worse in mind.

Ah, but I think him better than I say,

And yet would herein others' eyes were worse:
Far from her nest the lapwing cries away;
My heart prays for him, though my tongue do curse.
(IV.ii. 19-28)

The division here between heart and tongue, feeling and saying
focuses upon yet another pair of forceful oppositions embedded in
singleness. Adriana's acknowledgement of her inner divisions no
only reflects the outer and more obvious tensions involved in
relationships like twinship, sisterhood, marriage, and friendship;
it also points implicitly to a means of finding concord in discord.
Adriana is a frequent object of others' criticism-her husband,
sister, and mother-in-law are only the most vocal examples-yet
despite it all she remains the most fully responsive and synthetic
character in the play, preferring finally in a crisis to labor at
forgiveness rather than to ease into recrimination. If her first
significant act of synthesis is her attempted dinner, her second is
her readiness to forgive her husband despite its apparent failure.

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232 FOOD IN THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

Her recognition of her own divided response to the supposed

infidelity of her husband-outward rage and inward love-and her
determination to act charitably in the face of it, implies the wise
acceptance of a psychological duality in her self and in her
husband that is symbolically represented in the two identical yet
separate twins. The gold she gives to ransom her Antipholus is the
surest sign of her clear-sighted resolve to meet rejection with
forgiveness despite warring inner tensions: "Go Dromio . . . bring
thy master home immediately. / Come, sister, I am press'd down
with conceit- / Conceit, my comfort and my injury" (IV.ii.63-66).
When the younger Antipholus rejects the Courtesan as his older
brother should have ("I conjure thee to leave me and be gone"
[IV.iii.67]), his behavior ratifies symbolically the process of marital
reconciliation that Adriana's charity has begun. But the younger
Antipholus's behavior is more than merely symbolic; it also has
the practical effect of eroding the Ephesian brother's newly formed
relationship with the Courtesan. After being turned away by
Antipholus of Syracuse (whom she takes for the Ephesian twin),
the Courtesan does an emotional about-face in order to recoup the
day's financial losses. Her blatant self-concern-in clear contrast to
Adriana's charity-only heightens the emotional poverty of her
makeshift meal with the wayward husband:

My way is now to hie home to his house,

And tell his wife that, being lunatic,
He rush'd into my house, and took perforce
My ring away. This course I fittest choose,
For forty ducats is too much to lose.
(IV.iii.92-96)

But even Adriana, despite her strenuous attempts to sustain and

revivify her marriage, is hardly guiltless of marital neglect. Like
her husband, she must endure a harsh public embarrassment that
airs private wrongs and forces her to confront squarely her share in
the weakened relationship. Her sister's earnest yet commonplace
strictures on the superiority of husband to wife (II.i. 15-25) pale
beside the withering-and more imperiously authoritative-
criticism of the Abbess. Unlike Luciana, who relies on traditional
and essentially Pauline notions of marriage to upbraid her sister,
the Abbess turns her criticism inward to the intimate day-to-day
activities of bedroom and kitchen that Adriana sees as her special

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 JOSEPH CANDIDO 233

province. The Abbess is, ironically, not nearly as concerned with

theological and religious matters as she is with the practical
goings-on inside Adriana's household. In this sense she sounds far
less like a cloistered sister than like the concerned mother-in-law
that she is. Here is the Abbess just after she learns, from Adriana
herself, of the wife's frequent and public criticisms of her husband:

And thereof came it that the man was mad.

The venom clamors of a jealous woman
Poisons more deadly than a mad dog's tooth.
It seems his sleeps were hind'red by thy railing,
And thereof comes it that his head is light.
Thou say'st his meat was sauc'd with thy upbraidings:
Unquiet meals make ill digestions,
Thereof the raging fire of fever bred,
And what's a fever but a fit of madness?
Thou say'st his sports were hind'red by thy brawls:
Sweet recreation barr'd, what doth ensue
But moody and dull melancholy,
Kinsman to grim and comfortless despair,
And at her heels a huge infectious troop
Of pale distemperatures and foes to life?
In food, in sport, and life-preserving rest
To be disturb'd, would mad or man or beast:
The consequence is then, thy jealous fits
Hath scar'd thy husband from the use of wits.
(V.i.68-86)

The speech links two important domestic responsibilities that

went hand-in-hand for the Elizabethan housewife, preparing food
and ministering to the sick. Popular handbooks of the day such as
Sir Hugh Plat's Delightes for Ladies (1608) repeatedly spelled out
this dual responsibility.20 Plat's four-part discourse takes up such
matters as "The Arte of Preseruing," "Secrets in Distillation," and
"Cookerie and Huswiferie," concluding with a detailed section on
powders, ointments, and home cures that the good housewife
would need to know in order to perform her domestic duties
successfully. Here one can find remedies for problems such as
yellow teeth, chilbains, pimpled or burned skin, bodily bruises of
various sorts, and almost any other commonplace malady of the
day. Implicit in Plat's book, particularly its final section, is a
recognition of the important role of the housewife as custodian of
domestic order and ease. In addition to her skill in the preparation

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234 2 FOOD IN THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

of food (the largest part of the book consists of recipes), the

resourceful mistress of an Elizabethan house was expected to
produce medical results like that which relieved one "M. Foster an
Essex man and an Atturney of the Common pleas" of an inflamed
face: "Qvilt bay salt well dried & powdered, in double linnen
sockes of a prettie bignesse, let the patient weare them in wide hose
and shooes day and night, by the space of fourteene daies, or till he
be well: euerie morning and euening let him dry his sockes by the
fire and put them on againe" (p. 93). It is presumably Adriana's
inattentiveness to details such as these to which the Abbess alludes
when she speaks of the "huge infectious troop / Of pale distemper-
atures and foes to life" that characterize the wife's disordered
household. Adriana should have paid more attention to Thomas
Tusser, whose earnest Points of Huswifery, United to the Comfort
of Husbandry (1573), also sees attention to food and physic as dual
but hardly separate concerns for women like Adriana. Tusser's
advice could almost serve as a shorthand introduction to some of
the key critical issues in The Comedy of Errors:

Good huswives provide, ere an' sickness do come,

Of sundry good things, in her house to have some:
Good aqua composita, and vinegar tart,
Rose-water, and treacle, to comfort the heart.
Cold herbs in her garden, for agues that burn,
That over strong heat, to good temper may turn.
(p. 274)

Use mirth and good word,

At bed and at board.
Provide for thy husband, to make him good cheer,
Make merry together, while time ye be here.
At bed and at board, howsoever befall,
Whatever God sendeth, be merry withall.

No brawling make,
No jealousy take.
No taunts before servants, for hindering of fame,
No jarring too loud, for avoiding of shame.
(p. 266)21

Tusser's cautionary advice could hardly be more apt in Adriana's

case. The wife's defense of her jealous accusations is the virtual
textbook antithesis of Tusser's admonitions:

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 JOSEPH CANDIDO 235

It [suspected philandering] was the copy of our conference:

In bed he slept not for my urging it;
At board he fed not for my urging it;
Alone, it was the subject of my theme;
In company I often glanced it;
Still did I tell him it was vild and bad.
(V.i.62-67)

Adriana has indeed acted well in trying to refashion her broken

noon meal into a dinner of forgiveness for her supposed husband,
but absent from her notion of the shared meal is her own penitence
for past wrongs. Now, for the first time, we sense why her husband
may have been late for dinner in the first place, for he had little
reason to expect anything like the calm repast it was his wife's duty
to supply. As the Abbess so pointedly says: "his meat was sauc'd
with thy upbraidings: / Unquiet meals make ill digestions."
Adriana's repeated unquiet meals have provided more sustenance
for Antipholus's "raging fire of fever" and "moody and dull
melancholy" than they have for his physical and emotional well-
being. Adriana has, in short, forsaken the role of hostess and healer
that it was her marital duty to perform. To her credit, however, she
responds to this open expose of her shortcomings, as she always
does to a crisis, with admirable clear-sightedness. Her reaction to
the Abbess's scathing public denunciation would have made
Tusser proud:

I will attend my husband, be his nurse,

Diet his sickness, for it is my office,
And will have no attorney but myself,
And therefore let me have him home with me.
(V.i.98-101)

Adriana's suggestive "Diet his sickness" indicates a clear psycho-

logical commitment to her twin responsibilities as purveyor of
meals and overseer of home remedies. Implicit in her response is
the full acceptance of her role as custodian of the day-to-day
activities that ensure marital harmony and household ease. In this
sense Adriana becomes the willing secular equivalent of the
Abbess, the mistress of a religious household, whose "wholesome
syrups, drugs, and holy prayers" are "the charitable duty" of her
order (V.i. 104-107). Religious mother-in-law and secular wife
merge psychologically in a mutual determination to ensure "food,

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236 FOOD IN THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

sport, and life-preserving rest" for the separate Antipholuses in

their care.
V
It is frequently observed that the last act of The Comedy of
Errors, while suggesting some degree of familial reorientation and
renewal, stops short of a full affirmation of marital harmony. This
is essentially the view of Alexander Leggatt, who, in an allusive
and sensitive essay on the play, points out that there is no explicit
reconciliation between Adriana and her husband, leaving the final
state of their marriage "an open question." For Leggatt the idea of
reconciliation in marriage is not utterly dismissed "but it is quietly
placed in the background, and no great hopes are pinned on it."22
This is true enough, for at the end of the play we have no actual
nuptial rite or even the symbolic evocation of one as we sometimes
do in Shakespearean comedy. Instead the emphasis here is on the
unification of an old family (even its younger members are old
enough to have grown apart) rather than on the earnest hope for
beginning a new one. But this is not to say that The Comedy of
Errors is without its own significant-and characteristic-comic
closure. When the multiple confusions are finally resolved, the
Abbess invites the assembled company into her dwelling for a
dining experience of a very different sort from those we have seen
earlier in the play. This will be a "gossips' feast" (V.i.406), that is,
a baptismal banquet at which the whole family assembles to
welcome with joy a new member into a social and religious
community. As such, it is a time for reestablishing old bonds and
reaffirming one's commitment to a set of moral and religious
values that impart spiritual significance to the activities of daily
life.23 It is a mended and more comprehensive version of the failed
dinners of Adriana and the Courtesan, containing as it does the
security and shared spiritual objectives theirs so obviously lack. At
the Abbess's feast, in sharp contrast to the dinners planned by
Adriana and the Courtesan, participants exist in a stable and
recognizable relationship to each other. Indeed, the whole purpose
of a baptismal gathering is to ratify collectively the stabilization of
one's identity, for it is the baptismal act that fixes a new creature
once and for all with a name that denotes both who he is and what
one hopes he will become. The Abbess's feast is thus an attempt to
reach backward-symbolically at least-to Egeon's and Aemelia's
experience with their twin infants on the mast, to begin time again
at the key moment when the sacramental stability of a double
christening can cancel the psychological division of family ship-

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 JOSEPH CANDIDO 237

wreck. Perhaps the surest sign of the need for such stability is the
obvious personal and social chaos produced by twin brothers with
identical names, a consequence that would have been impossible
at their joint baptism. Aemelia is at some pains to rectify this
problem, at least in psychological terms; and if we cannot see her
insistence upon the banquet in the Abbey as a determination
literally to re-name her sons, we surely recognize the event as a fit
occasion for her to clarify (and codify) who and what they are.24
Just as in sacramental terms baptism must precede marriage, so
too a clear and secure notion of self must precede the hope of
marital harmony. It is this process of reclamation that Aemelia
begins at her gossips' feast inside the Abbey, a family banquet on
which all other feasts-with whatever social, moral, or psycho-
logical meaning they may acquire-so heavily depend. After so
long marital grief, Aemelia's family needs nothing more than the
spiritual nativity and personal stability conferred by the sacrament.
It is this need that they ratify in the play's final and most joyously
comic banquet.

NOTES

'The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 80. All references to The Comedy of Errors are to
this edition. See also Timothy Long, "The Calculus of Confusion: Cognitive
and Associative Errors in Plautus's Menaechmi and Shakespeare's Comedy of
Errors," Classical Bulletin 53 (1976):20-23. Long discusses the different
categories of error in both plays, finding Shakespeare's representation of
experience more complex and true to life than Plautus's.
2Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols.
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 1:3-4, discusses the probability
that Shakespeare knew Warner's translation and cites some verbal resem-
blances between the two works. See also R.A. Foakes's Arden edition of The
Comedy of Errors (London: Methuen, 1962), pp. xxv-xxvi. Both Bullough
and Foakes point out that although Shakespeare possibly knew Warner's text
and may have borrowed from it, he also had enough Latin to consult
Plautus's original; indeed, whatever borrowing that occurred could have been
Warner's (Foakes, p. xxvi). I quote from Warner's version throughout because
it is relatively faithful to Plautus and because of its possible connection with
Shakespeare's play. Citations of The Menaechmi are to Bullough's edition of
Warner's text. Recently T.S. Dorsch has challenged the whole idea of any
connection between Warner's translation and Shakespeare's play. In his
edition of The Comedy of Errors (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988),

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238 FOOD IN THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

he argues that "no direct connection between Warner and Shakespeare has
been established" (p. 9), and attributes the purported verbal parallels between
the two works to coincidence or to separate recollection by Warner and
Shakespeare of the same literary sources.
30n the Parasite in Greek comedy and this character's association with
food, see Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), p. 175. The comic device of the hungry servant
is, of course, a common one on the Elizabethan stage as well, and no doubt
the result of Plautine influence. Lyly's Campaspe and Sappho and Phao both
contain examples of the type, as does The Taming of the Shrew, a play
roughly contemporaneous with The Comedy of Errors.
4Paul Nixon, trans., Plautus, 5 vols. The Loeb Classical Library (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1917), 2:373.
5Erich Segal, Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus, 2nd edn. (New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 43-51. Subsequent references to Segal's
book are noted parenthetically.
6The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 81.
7C.L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler, The Whole Journey: Shakespeare's
Power of Development (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986), p. 68. See
also E.M.W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Early Comedies (New York: Barnes &
Noble, 1965), pp. 54-55, and Marvin Felheim and Philip Traci, Realism in
Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies (Washington: Univ. Press of America,
1980), pp. 14-15.
8So glossed in The Riverside Shakespeare (p. 85) and in other texts.
However, some editors, like Foakes, gloss "default" simply as "offence" or
"fault" (p. 15).
9For an impressive examination of the connection between food and sexual
aggression in Shakespeare see Janet Adelman, "'Anger's My Meat': Feeding,
Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus," in Shakespeare: Pattern of
Excelling Nature, ed. David Bevington and Jay L. Halio (Newark: Univ. of
Delaware Press, 1978), pp. 108-24. See also the Ephesian Dromio's remarks at
I.ii.82-90.
'0William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. Georges Edelen
(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1968), p. 140. Subsequent references to Harrison
are noted parenthetically.
'1Lu Emily Pearson, Elizabethans at Home (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,
1957); M. St. Clare Byrne, Elizabethan Life in Town and Country (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1926). Subsequent references to both works are noted
parenthetically.
'2Note, for example, the following lines from Ben Jonson's "To Penshurst,"
in which the poet praises the hospitality of Sir Robert Sidney, Viscount Lisle,
and his wife Barbara Gamage:

That found King James when, hunting late this way

With his brave son, the Prince, they saw thy fires
Shine bright on every hearth as the desires
Of thy Penates had been set on flame
To entertain them; or the country came
With all their zeal to warm their welcome here.
What (great, I will not say, but) sudden cheer
Didst thou then make 'em! and what praise was heaped

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 JOSEPH CA N DIDO 239

On thy good lady then! who therein reaped

The just reward of her high housewifery;
To have her linen, plate, and all things nigh,
When she was far; and not a room but dressed
As if it had expected such a guest!
(lines 76-88)
'3Pearson discusses a further "ceremonial" aspect of Elizabethan dining
regarding the basin: "If different ranks were not represented at table, one
basin was frequently used for a small company, two or three washing their
hands at the same time, but if guests of various ranks were present, there must
be one basin for each rank, and music between courses. Sir Francis Drake, for
example, liked to live up to his rank even at sea, and besides observing the
usual decorum, he had his meals served with the sound of trumpets and other
instruments" (p. 565).
'4The confusion brought about by two sets of identical twins allows
Shakespeare to enrich his play in subtly expressive ways. For example, when
Antipholus of Syracuse is called to dinner (mistakenly) by the Ephesian
Dromio, the Syracusan twin's reaction both expresses his own confusion and
restates the actual attitude of the brother for whom he is mistaken: "Hang up
thy mistress! I know not thy mistress, out on thy mistress!" (II.i.67-68), and "I
know ... no house, no wife, no mistress" (II.i.71). For an influential study of
the way in which the Antipholan twins reflect psychological aspects of each
other, see Barbara Freedman, "Egeon's Debt: Self-Division and Self-
Redemption in The Comedy of Errors," ELR 10 (1980):360-83.
'5For a provocative study of the fasting of medieval women and its
usefulness as a means of criticizing, manipulating, educating, or converting
family members, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The
Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1987), particularly chapters 6 and 7 (pp. 189-244).
'6The question of the relative ages of the two Antipholuses is a vexed one,
since Egeon's comments in I.i on the issue seem to contradict each other.
Many editors note Shakespeare's apparent confusion regarding which twin is
the elder and, like Foakes, contend that "such conflict in details is not
uncommon in Shakespeare and is not noticed on the stage" (p. 9). Addressing
the problem critically, Patricia Parker has demonstrated how the "rhetorical
crossing" in the relevant passage (I.i.78-85) indicates that the Syracusan twin
is consistently referred to as the younger; see "Elder and Younger: The
Opening Scene of The Comedy of Errors," SQ 34 (1983):325-27. Parker's
assumption is shared by most critics; see particularly Freedman (p. 368);
Tillyard (p. 567); and Ralph Berry, Shakespeare's Comedies: Explorations in
Form (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 28-29. The idea is implied
if not expressly stated by Robert Ornstein, Shakespeare's Comedies: From
Roman Farce to Romantic Mystery (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1986),
p. 30; and by Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London:
Methuen, 1974), pp. 6-7.
'7Mary Douglas, "Deciphering a Meal," Daedalus 101, 1 (Winter 1972):61-81;
Levi-Strauss, The Origins of Table Manners. Introduction to a Science of
Mythology, 3 vols., trans. John and Doreen Weightmann (New York: Harper
& Row, 1978), passim, but particularly 3:54-59 where Levi-Strauss discusses
the myth of the "clinging woman" which has certain curious analogies to the

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240 FOOD IN THE COMEDY OF ERRORS

relationship between Antipholus of Ephesus and Adriana. See also, Kurt W.

Back, "Food, Sex and Theory," Nutrition and Anthropology in Action, ed.
Thomas K. Fitzgerald (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1977), p. 31; and Peter Farb
and George Armelagos, Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), pp. 4-5; 97-103.
'8Farb and Armelagos note that "At marriage celebrations in northern
Europe during the Middle Ages, it was considered an important moment
when the couple ate together" (p. 5).
'9See particularly Freedman's essay mentioned above, and Berry (p. 176).
Also of interest in this regard is William C. Carroll, The Metamorphoses of
Shakespearean Comedy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 68-77.
20Sir Hugh Plat, Delightes for Ladies, ed. G.E. Fussell and Kathleen
Rosemary Fussell (London: Crosby Lockwood & Son, 1948); all references to
Plat's work are to this edition and are noted parenthetically. See also Pearson,
pp. 213, 403, 409, and 413. Of interest too are the remarks of George Herbert in
A Priest to the Temple or, The Country Parson (1652) where the necessary
characteristics of a good parson's wife are set forth in some detail. Herbert lists
three separate qualities that such a woman must possess, among them
expertise in "curing, and healing of all wounds and sores with her owne
hands; which skill either she brought with her, or he [the parson] takes care
she shall learn it of some religious neighbor." See The Works of George
Herbert, ed. F.E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 239.
21References to Thomas Tusser are from Five Hundred Points of Good
Husbandry . . . together with A Book of Huswifery, ed. William Mavor
(London: Lackington, Allen, 1812). Also of interest is George Walton
Williams, "Shakespeare's Metaphors of Health: Food, Sport, and Life-
Preserving Rest," JMRS 14 (1984):187-202; and Owsei Temkin, "Nutrition
from Classical Antiquity to the Baroque," in Human Nutrition: Historic and
Scientific, ed. Jago Galdston (New York: International Univ. Press, 1960),
pp. 78-97. Temkin points out that the concept of "diet" comprised not only
food and drink "but also work, sleep, climate of the home, emotions, and
sexual life, i.e., what the medieval doctors came to call the six res non-
naturales, the six 'non-naturals'" (p. 83).
22Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London: Methuen,
1974), pp. 9, 18.
23In Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare's Language of Gesture (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), David Bevington discusses the theatrical
centrality of the banquet in several Shakespearean plays, most notably
Macbeth, Timon of Athens, Titus Andronicus, and Troilus and Cressida,
where the "ceremony of feasting represents not so much God's gift of charity"
as a failed ritual of reincorporation that presents a "disillusioned view of
lifeless artificiality" (p. 159). As Bevington notes, the "violence and hypocrisy"
underlying banqueting in these plays serves importantly to heighten its moral
opposite-the "regular form and sense of hospitable order" that a communal
feast implies (pp. 159-60). For an elaboration of the idea of inverted feasting in
Macbeth, see G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme: Further Interpretations
of Shakespeare's Tragedies Including the Roman Plays (London: Methuen,
1951), ch. 5 (particularly pp. 134-41).
24Elizabethan and Jacobean comedies, of course, abound with concluding
banquets (actual or proposed) as symbolic of social harmony and renewal.
Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew comes instantly to mind (but see

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 JOSEPH CANDIDO 241

Bevington's modifying remarks here [p. 159]), as do The Two Gentlemen of

Verona, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and even the end of The Merchant of
Venice, where, although "It is almost morning" Lorenzo sees Portia and
Nerissa as dropping "manna in the way of starved people" (V.i.294-95). The
disappearing banquet in The Tempest is far too richly allusive to be discussed
here, but bears mentioning, as does the proposed feasting at the end of
Cymbeline (V.v.483). All references to Shakespeare here are to The Riverside
Shakespeare. Suffice it to say that the motif of the concluding harmonious
banquet is so pervasive as to appear in plays as diverse as Peele's Old Wives'
Tale, Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday, and Jonson's Every Man in His
Humor and, most notably, Bartholomew Fair.

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