However, The Comedy of Errors does not offer audiences solely the appetitive pathologies of Galenism. Elsewhere it provides glimpses of a quite different conception of disease: as an external, implacable force that invades its hapless victim. The latter is by no means coherently articulated in the play—and indeed, an exogenous conception of disease as an invading foreign body was far from systematically expounded at that time by physicians, let alone by Shakespeare himself. Rather, we find in The Comedy of Errors a patchwork ensemble of invasive pathologies figured in the language of possession or incursion. When Dr. Pinch attempts to exorcise Antipholus of Ephesus, for example, he regards his patient’s condition as a pathological one, terming it “his frenzy” (4.4.81). Inasmuch as Dr. Pinch’s proposed cure entails expelling the satanic foreign body “housed within this man” (4.4.54), he notably avoids conceiving of Antipholus’s affliction as a product of endogenous appetite or humoral imbalance. In this, he is not alone among the play’s characters: Balthasar likewise characterizes slander as an exogenous disease that will “with foul intrusion enter in” (3.1.103).
For all the vagueness with which it is articulated elsewhere in the play, however, the notion of disease as an intruding force appears with some clarity in the play’s presentation of economic pathology. The extended set piece in which Dromio of Syracuse compares the body of sweaty Nell the kitchen-wench to the globe involves a conception of both corporeal and economic pathology that is recognizably closer to the modern paradigm of the invasive, communicable condition. Even as he pours scorn on what he regards as Nell’s excessive appetite, Dromio imagines an embodied global system of circulation and exchange in which differentiated, sick national economies potentially infect each other. In the process, he develops the implications of Solinus’s corporeal metaphor concerning “the mortal and intestine jars / Twixt thy seditious countrymen and us” (1.1.12–13). Like Solinus, Dromio distinguishes between nations while locating them in a unitary, if pathologized, global trading body. Although he begins his extended metaphor in a comic vein, identifying Ireland with the bogs of Nell’s buttocks (3.2.117–18), his explanation of how various countries fit into her global corpus economicum becomes increasingly complicated. Take, for example, his ingenious anatomization of Spain and its relationship to the Americas:
S. ANTIPHOLUS
Where Spain?
S. DROMIO
Faith, I saw it not, but I felt it hot in her breath.
S. ANTIPHOLUS
Where America, the Indies?
S. DROMIO
O, sir, upon her nose, all o’er embellished with rubies, carbuncles, sapphires, declining their rich aspect to the hot breath of Spain, who sent whole armadoes of carracks to be ballast at her nose. (3.2.129–36)
Spain can thus be distinguished by the volume of precious materials it has acquired from the Americas. But Spain’s “hot” blasts of breath, and the double meanings of “rubies” and “carbuncles” as inflammations and boils, work together to create an unimistakeably pathological frame of reference for Dromio’s account of international trade. In the process, Shakespeare arguably acknowledges one of the greatest economic disasters of the late sixteenth century. Spain had considerably augmented its volume of specie thanks to its New World commercial activities, particularly its mining of silver and precious jewels; yet, as Thomas Smith had argued, the large influx of bullion into the state’s coffers had paradoxically depreciated its actual wealth by prompting a spiraling crisis of inflation.24 Dromio’s remarks about Spain support such an explanation by styling its economic ills as a product not of individual pathological appetites but of contact with American goods that have infected and consumed it. Hence even as Dromio’s extended analogy draws on a humoral understanding of disease as an endogenous state (the global trading body incarnated by the kitchen-wench is, like her, internally disordered), it nevertheless pivots on a vision of contagious transmission of ills across national borders.
The two divergent notions of economic pathology visible in The Comedy of Errors—either a largely domestic condition stemming from an individual failure to regulate and moderate the internal appetite or a communicable disorder resulting from transactions between nations—are, I believe, integral to the play’s presentation of syphilis. Shakespeare’s treatment of the disease in this play is quite different from that of his later works; The Comedy of Errors’s often jocular references to the pox starkly contrast the much more bitter images of venereal disease one finds in Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet, or Timon of Athens. So why did Shakespeare keep invoking syphilis in this early comedy? It is, I shall argue, a disease that permitted him to mediate the striking conflict that we have witnessed, not only in English premercantilist economic writing, but also in Adriana’s attribution of her husband’s illness to “some love that drew him oft from home”: namely, the competing convictions that ills proceed either from unfettered individual appetites or from systemic contamination by external forces. Which is correct? The late sixteenth-century discourses of syphilis offered Shakespeare a vocabulary that allowed him, if only provisionally, to answer: both.
Comedy of Hairs
To understand syphilis’s meanings and—perhaps more importantly—its mediating power in The Comedy of Errors requires an understanding of the sixteenth-century discourses of the disease and, in particular, the debates, scholastic and popular, religious and lay, about its etiology. More than any other illness of the period, it prompted considerable uncertainty about the form and provenance of disease in general.
Syphilis was broadly considered to be a disease of the sinful or excessive appetite. This was certainly the religious explanation of the illness as early as its first epidemic outbreaks in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In 1519, the London clerical reformer John Colet told the youth of his parish that “the abhominable great pockes” resulted from “the inordinate misuse of the fleshe.”25 The religious demonization of the syphilitic appetite often derived support from humoral theory: more than a century after Colet’s sermon, John Abernathy remarked—in terms that freight the moral and the pathological—that “This burning lust spendeth the spirits and balsame of life, as the flame doth waste the candle: Whereupon followes corruption of humors, rotting of the marrow, and the joynts ake, the nerves are resolved, the head is pained, the gowt increaseth, & of times (as a most just punishment) there insueth that miserable scourge of harlots, The french Pockes.”26 With this assessment, Abernathy in large part echoes those Galenists of the sixteenth century who attributed syphilis to humoral disarray. The German physician Ulrich von Hutten, for example, was convinced that “this infirmite cometh of corrupt, burnt, & enfect blode.”27 The Scottish Galenist Andrew Boorde likewise attributed the disease to humoral overheating in prostitutes: “This impedyment do the come whan a harlot … doth stand ouer a changyng dyshe of coles into the whiche she doth put brymstone and there she doth parfume her selfe.”28
In a way that no previous disease had, however, syphilis tested the age-old assumption that illness was simply an internal, appetitive state. Although Galenic humoral theory acknowledged the existence of contagious diseases, it was often at a loss to account for their transmission, inasmuch as it regarded disease not as a determinate thing that invades the body but as a state of imbalance within it.29 Yet syphilis’s enormous contagiousness was what most compelled and horrified people: “The frenche pockes is a perilous and wonderfull sykenes,” wrote William Horman in 1519, “for it infecteth only with touchynge.”30 As long as syphilis’s contagiousness was believed to be confined to acts of sexual intercourse, the unbridled, intemperate appetite could remain the disease’s putative origin. But many people feared that syphilis might be communicated by other, nonvenereal means to unsuspecting and even chaste victims, thereby raising the possibility that it was an invasive, amoral disease rather than a condition of the immoral appetite. Rumor had it, for instance, that Cardinal