Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama

FOUR Shakespeare’s Comic Actaeon and the Turn to Tragedy

FOUR Shakespeare’s Comic Actaeon and the Turn to Tragedy The Comedy of Errors shares with the Henry IV plays a concern with Protestant manliness underwritten by allusions to Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, but it significantly deals more directly with men’s dependency on women for their self-definition. As R. A. Foakes in the Arden edition observes, “Shakespeare altered the tone of his Latin sources considerably, not merely by putting an emphasis on marriage and courtship, rather than on the husband ’s relations with a courtesan, but also by giving his play a certain Christian colouring, and developing ideas of sorcery and witchcraft.”1 The Pauline context is established not only through Shakespeare’s deliberate transfer of the setting from Epidamnum (as in Plautus) to Ephesus, the significance of which is critically corroborated by “exhortations [in Ephesians] on the relations of husband and wife and master and servant which have a bearing on the action of the play,” but also through the account of Paul’s visit to Ephesus in Acts 19, where the city is clearly associated with pagan (and thus demonic) magic, an association repeatedly emphasized in Shakespeare’s imagery. Shakespeare therefore adds not only a “Christian colouring” to his play, but also a signi ficant classical one, since Ephesus was famous in Roman times as the site of the temple of Diana, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Considering that magical (specifically bestial) 131 132 Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama transformation, and the image of the ass, are important within the play, The Comedy of Errors resembles Faustus (and anticipates A Midsummer Night’s Dream) in its treatment of Christian manliness within the context of the Actaeon myth. Since the repeated suggestions of witchcraft and demonic influence in the play are, of course, contained by the audience’s knowledge that there is indeed a “reasonable” explanation for all the confusions endured by the characters, it is in part the ideological agenda of this comedy, like the history plays of the second tetralogy, ultimately to dismiss or undercut magical belief. Nevertheless, the play treats seriously the mystery, even religious mystery, of human identity. While critics interested in the context of the Christian allusions are careful to avoid directly allegorical readings, it is possible to read the play as a kind of psychological allegory: the two sets of twins point to the theme of self-division, loss, separation, and the regaining of selfknowledge . Foakes distinguishes between the two characters of Antipholus. Antipholus of Syracuse displays a more uncertain sense of self, more psychologically and spiritually dependent; he “arrives in Ephesus with a feeling that in searching for his mother and brother he has lost his identity”:2 I to the world am like a drop of water That in the ocean seeks another drop, Who, falling there to find his fellow forth, (Unseen, inquisitive) confounds himself. So I, to find a mother and a brother, In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself. (1.2.35–40) Foakes in a note to this passage cites H. F. Brooks’s observation that “images of water or melting connected with dissolution of reality or loss of identity recur in Shakespeare’s work and seem to spring from deep feelings.” Such imagery and meaning is certainly not limited to Shakespeare; we are dealing with a kind of archetype whose exact derivation (perhaps Neoplatonic) is Shakespeare’s Comic Actaeon and the Turn to Tragedy 133 probably impossible to trace, although there are interesting similarities between such imagery in Shakespeare and the Hermetic myth of origins: “the man broke through the vault and stooped to look through the cosmic framework...Nature smiled for love when she saw him...for in the water she saw the shape of the man’s fairest form and upon earth its shadow. When the man saw in the water the form like himself as it was in nature, he loved it and wished to inhabit it; wish and action came in the same moment, and he inhabited the unreasoning form.”3 It is certainly significant that, in searching for his alter ego (brother), Antipholus of Syracuse appears to lose himself in the all-embracing mother. The suggestion of the overpowering female is surely significant, and similar imagery recurs in Adriana’s attempt to convince the mystified man that she is really...