One of syphilis’s more visible secondary symptoms undergoes such conversion in The Comedy of Errors. Alopecia—the loss of hair, eyebrows, eyelashes, and beards—was among the most commonly joked about side-effects of the disease, and in a fashion that usually drew attention to its foreign provenance: “the French Razor shaues off the haire of many of thy Suburbians,” Westminister tells London in Thomas Dekker’s Dead Tearme;39 “Some of your French crowns have no hair at all,” remarks Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1.2.100). The symptoms of alopecia are twice referred to in The Comedy of Errors. In act 2, scene 2, the Syracusian Dromio and Antipholus joke at length about the loss of hair:
S. DROMIO
There’s no time for a man to recover his hair that grows bald by nature.
S. ANTIPHOLUS
May he not do it by fine and recovery?
S. DROMIO
Yes, to pay a fine for a periwig and recover the lost hair of another man.
S. ANTIPHOLUS
Why is Time such a niggard of hair, being, as it is, so plentiful an excrement?
S. DROMIO
Because it is a blessing that he bestows on beasts, and what he hath scanted men in hair he hath given them in wit.
S. ANTIPHOLUS
Why, but there’s many a man hath more hair than wit.
S. DROMIO
Not a man of those but he hath the wit to lose his hair.
S. ANTIPHOLUS
Why, thou didst conclude hairy men plain dealers without wit.
S. DROMIO
The plainer dealer, the sooner lost. Yet he loseth it in a kind of jollity. (2.2.71–88)
In pathologizing sexual and commercial “dealings” for the reckless sake of “jollity,” Dromio—like Greene—invokes syphilis to represent the loss of financial as much as corporeal health, each of which is interchangeably figured as hair throughout this exchange. Alopecia has no international freight here. But Dromio develops the international, and specifically French, metaphorical possibilities of alopecia later in the play. While his extended conceit of the kitchen-wench as a globe conjures up a somewhat generic pathological vision of the depletion of national wealth, the economic sicknesses he imagines acquire at one point a specifically syphilitic dimension. In response to Antipholus of Syracuse’s question about the location of France, Dromio replies that it is “In her forehead, armed and reverted, making war against her heir” (3.2.123–24). Shakespeare, as numerous commentators have noted, refers in this quip to the Catholic League’s opposition to Henri of Navarre, the temporarily Protestant “heir” apparent to the throne in the late 1580s and early 1590s. But for all its political topicality, the remark is notable just as much for how it meshes with Dromio’s larger, global vision of commerce. Dromio’s pun on French “heir”/“hair” invokes alopecia partly to stigmatize the kitchen-wench’s lust for him as syphilitic (she is balding) but also to bemoan the potentially communicable pathologies of nations. Within Dromio’s analogy, therefore, syphilis operates simultaneously as an individual appetitive disorder and a systemic, transnational illness.
Lurking in Dromio’s jokes about alopecia is a complex network of associations that can be discerned in other plays written by Shakespeare in the 1590s. In Titus Andronicus, for example, the depreciation of national wealth is likewise linked to the loss of hair. Titus’s daughter Lavinia is subtly positioned throughout the play as Roman money by means of an elaborate, sustained series of images and analogies. Initially cast as “Rome’s rich ornament” (1.1.55), she is later characterized as a “changing piece” (1.1.314) whose face value depreciates when she refuses marriage to the Emperor Saturninus. Later, at Aaron the Moor’s urging, she is raped and mutilated—or, in Aaron’s words, “washed and cut and trimmed” (5.1.95). This remark entails an extraordinarily elaborate pun. Each of Aaron’s verbs is a term from the discourse of barbers, which helps sets up the association between “barber” and “barbarian” that some of the play’s critics have noted. But these verbs all have a second, economic meaning: to “wash” referred to the sweating of gold or silver coins with acid; “cut” and “trim” were slang for the illegal clipping of coins.40 The metaphorical loss of hair in Titus Andronicus is thus implicitly associated with the depreciation of coins’ value and the depletion of national wealth. The discursive overlap of barbering, devalued national currency, and syphilis is made explicit by Harry in Henry V: “it is no English treason to cut French crowns, and tomorrow the King himself will be a clipper” (4.1.227–29). Once again, the customary associations of alopecia with the French permits Shakespeare to employ the symptoms of syphilis as figures for the vicissitudes of international transactions—although in this case, of course, Harry’s aggressive “clippings” of “French crowns” are designed to improve rather than damage the health of the English body politic.
Amid these hairy tangles of commerce and disease, it is worth keeping in mind the homophonic possibilities of the “Errors” in The Comedy of Errors’s title, which exceed even those of the more frequently discussed “Nothing” in Much Ado About Nothing. “Errors” was pronounced by Elizabethan Londoners in much the same ways as “hours”; the pun is apposite because of Shakespeare’s uncustomary observation in The Comedy of Errors of the dramatic unity of time, which renders the play literally a “comedy of hours.” But “Errors” participates within an even more suggestive homophonic chain that points in the direction of syphilis. This is, after all, a comedy of whores (the Courtesan and those other “light wenches” who “burn”), a comedy of heirs (the two Antipholuses who, like their father Egeon, do business “out o’door”—as a result of which one of them runs the quasi-hereditary risk of himself contracting his father’s seemingly fatal sentence), and a comedy of hairs (those natural corporeal and commercial resources that are potentially depleted by a love, in both senses of the term, that “draws one oft from home”).41 The syphilitic subtext implied by the homophonic possibilities of the play’s title is not, however, simply comic. It also discloses powerful structures of feeling pervasive in late sixteenth-century England: Shakespeare’s “comedy of hairs” lends partial expression to, even as it attempts to assuage, deep-seated contemporary anxieties about a world in which the foreign body has increasingly come to rival the appetite as the origin of corporeal and commercial pathology.
The Syphilitic Economy
The Comedy of Errors is not merely a fantasy of pathology. It depicts also the pathology of fantasy itself—whether Adriana’s delusions when speaking about her husband’s illnesses or Dromio’s when speaking about the kitchen-wench’s. Both delusions are, of course, fueled by fatal perceptual errors and confusions of identity. But, as I have suggested, these pathological fantasies nonetheless reveal a great deal about the structures of feeling that accompanied the exponential growth of foreign trade in the latter half of the sixteenth century and the concomitant pressure placed on notions of “home.” Each delusion lends expression to the same virulent fear—that by going abroad, men will forever change the homes they have left, partly because of their diseased mercantile appetites, but also because of the dangerous foreign forces to which they might expose themselves and, by contagious transmission, their homes. What The Comedy of Errors offers, then, is a compromise formation, one that mediates between a residual moral discourse of appetitive economy and an emergent systemic