Commerce of Errors
Modern criticism of The Comedy of Errors has repeatedly focused on Shakespeare’s debts to classical Latin comedy source materials, specifically Plautus’s Menaechmi and Amphitruo, with a resulting emphasis on details of dramatic and poetic form.4 Though critics have noted the play’s oblique topical allusions to the problem of French royal succession (3.2.123–24) and the Spanish Armada (3.2.135–36), they have done so primarily to date The Comedy of Errors early in Shakespeare’s career, and hence to redouble attention to what evidence it may furnish about the young Shakespeare’s classical reading. How the play might engage its contemporary political and economic contexts, though, has been largely ignored.5
The impulse to quarantine The Comedy of Errors from such contexts is, however, a comparatively recent phenomenon. Earlier readers of the play were highly attentive to its commercial dimensions, if only critically so. In the introduction to his 1723 edition of Shakespeare, for example, Alexander Pope lamented that the playwright’s earliest works pandered to “Tradesmen and Mechanicks, ” a tendency that he saw reflected in those plays’ mercantile and artisanal characters.6 Pope had in mind not just the principals of The Merchant of Venice or the “rude mechanicals” of A Midsummer Night’s Dream but also the vast majority of characters in The Comedy of Errors, a play more rooted in the world of commerce than any other of Shakespeare’s. The dramatis personae reveals a slew of “Tradesmen and Mechanicks”: Egeon, a merchant of Syracuse; Balthasar, also a merchant; Angelo, a Goldsmith; First Merchant, friend to Antipholus of Syracuse; and Second Merchant, to whom Angelo is a debtor. Although they are not identified as merchants in the dramatis personae, the separated Antipholus twins are both engaged in commercial trade. If, moreover, one takes into consideration the sexual connotations of “trade”—which, I would argue, The Comedy of Errors actively encourages its readers and audiences to do—one might also add the Courtesan to the play’s list of “Tradesmen and Mechanicks.”
Shakespeare places this collection of characters in a pointedly mercantile setting. If the Rialto and its commerce provides an appropriate backdrop for The Merchant of Venice, Ephesus’s mart looms yet larger in The Comedy of Errors. Referred to no less than eleven times in the play, the Ephesian mart is not only the site of local commerce—the location, for example, of Antipholus of Ephesus’s purchase of a chain for the Courtesan, crafted by Angelo the Goldsmith. It is also a window onto the globe, offering consumers a variety of exotic commodities after the manner of the Ephesian Antipholus’s Turkish tapestry (4.1.104) or the Oriental “silks” that the tailor tries to sell to the bewildered Antipholus of Syracuse (4.3.8). The references to the mart, moreover, subtly align Ephesus with late sixteenth-century London and its own mercantile global connections: when Dromio of Ephesus summons his master “from the mart / Home to your house, the Phoenix” (1.2.74–75), the audience would have heard in “Phoenix” the name of a shop on London’s Lombard Street, the banking district in which bills of foreign exchange were transacted.7 Indeed, Ephesian commerce operates decisively in the register of the global. The merchant who has Angelo the Goldsmith arrested for defaulting on his debts, for example, does so because that merchant is “bound / To Persia, and want[s] guilders for [his] voyage” (4.1.3–4).
Most importantly, Shakespeare furnishes the play with an explicitly global mercantile framework unlike anything in his Plautine sources. Even as the story of Egeon contains coventional elements of romance—separation from and then reconciliation with his lost wife and children, in the manner of Pericles and Leontes—his is a tale that runs pointedly into the jagged rocks of international commerce.8 Egeon is detained in Ephesus and threatened with capital punishment, because of a trade war between that city and Syracuse. The Ephesian Duke Solinus’s opening speech to Egeon spells out the mercantile subtext of the play in no uncertain terms:
Merchant of Syracusa, plead no more.
I am not partial to infringe our laws.
The enmity and discord which of late
Sprung from the rancorous outrage of your duke
To merchants, our well-dealing countrymen,
Who, wanting guilders to redeem their lives,
Have sealed his rigorous statutes with their bloods,
Excludes all pity from our threatening looks.
For since the mortal and intestine jars
Twixt thy seditious countrymen and us
It hath in solemn synods been decreed,
Both by the Syracusians and ourselves,
To admit no traffic to our adverse towns.
Nay, more, if any born at Ephesus
Be seen at any Syracusian marts and fairs;
Again, if any Syracusian born
Come to the bay of Ephesus, he dies,
His goods confiscate to the Duke’s dispose,
Unless a thousand marks be levied
To quit the penalty and to ransom him. (1.1.3–22)
International commerce thus frames the play. It is, moreover, international commerce of a recognizably late sixteenth-century complexion. As in England and on the Continent, foreign goods are retailed at specially demarcated “marts and fairs”; business is transacted across national boundaries, not by barter, but by means of a cash economy in which a Dutch coin, the guilder, has currency; and the terms of foreign exchange are organized around a standard denomination of weight in early modern western Europe, the mark.9 Furthermore, foreign trade enters into the orbit of national sovereignty, as is witnessed by the warring dukes’ attempts to control it through “statutes.”
For all its mercantile subject matter, however, Duke Solinus’s speech cannot be said to lend expression to a truly mercantilist conception of national economy—an ostensibly amoral (if self-interested) system of national wealth production that requires the intervention of the sovereign or the state to assure a healthy balance of foreign trade and maintenance of bullion reserves. Such a conception was to be fully articulated in England only in the economic treatises of the mercantilists in the early seventeenth century. Rather, the relationship between government and commerce is imagined by Solinus as being necessitated by transnational political “enmity and discord” rather than by any fiscal imperative to produce or maintain national wealth. Unless the Ephesian state’s harsh edict against visitors from Syracuse—that any Syracusian discovered in Ephesus must pay a thousand marks upon pain of death—is implausibly interpreted as a canny tariff designed to boost the reserves of the state coffers, there is no discourse here of Ephesian national economy. Nevertheless, the conditions for such a discourse are discernible in Solinus’s speech, although national economy emerges here more as a Syracusian than an Ephesian concern. Whereas the Ephesians have placed a ban on all Syracusians in retaliation for grievances against Solinus’s “well-dealing countrymen,” the Syracusian duke seems to have targeted his anger specifically at Ephesian merchants. Foreign trade with Ephesus, for reasons that are never disclosed, is regarded by Syracuse’s sovereign as injurious to his nation’s health.
The potential dangers of foreign trade are again invoked in Egeon’s account of his estrangement from his wife. But here, the injury is registered at a personal rather than national level:
In Syracusa was I born, and wed
Unto a woman, happy but for me,
And by me, had