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Syphilis and Trade: Thomas Starkey, Thomas Smith, The Comedy of Errors

As critics have increasingly noted, images of syphilis cast a long shadow over Shakespeare’s more mature drama, particularly the so-called problem plays of his dark middle period.¹ But what are we to make of the disease’s presence in an early, ostensibly sunnier work like The Comedy of Errors? The play brims with references to the pox, to the point where it becomes a virtual leitmotif. The Syracusian Dromio and Antipholus joke about its effects, especially the loss of hair, at some length in 2.2.83–93; they banter about the same symptoms again at 3.2.123; and Dromio quibbles on the “burning” mode of its transmission at 4.3.53–55.² The disease also operates throughout the play at a darker, more metaphorical level. It haunts Adriana’s extended lament about her own flesh being “strumpeted” by the “contagion” of her husband’s seeming adultery (2.2.143); its hereditary nature lurks in Balthasar’s assertion that slander can damage an “ungalled reputation” and “with foul intrusion enter in … For slander lives upon succession” (3.1.102–3, 105); and its effects can be recognized in Luciana’s memorable question to her Syracusian brother-in-law: “Shall, Antipholus, / Even in the spring of love, thy love springs rot?” (3.2.2–3). Johannes Fabricius, the leading scholar of syphilis in Shakespeare’s drama, has argued that the pervasive pathological imagery of the plays written in the period 1601–4—Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and Othello—points to Shakespeare’s having contracted the pox at some time around the turn of the seventeenth century.³ But any correlation one may attempt to draw between Shakespeare’s syphilitic imagery and his personal health is quite confounded by The Comedy of Errors, written when the playwright was in his presumably healthy twenties.

In this chapter, I offer a different strategy for decoding the syphilitic references of The Comedy of Errors—one that divulges neither the biographical details of Shakespeare’s life and pathologies, nor even the phenomenology of the syphilis epidemic in early modern England and Europe. I instead situate the play’s treatment of the disease within a broader constellation of discourses and structures of feeling that accompanied the enormous growth of international commerce in the sixteenth century. When Adriana attributes her husband’s seeming mental illness—one of the chief symptoms of syphilis—to “some love that drew him oft from home” (5.1.56), we can glimpse the playwright’s calibration of the pathological and the economic. Throughout The Comedy of Errors, the appetite that lures one away from “home,” whether domestic or national, is the necessary foundation of commerce: according to Luciana, men’s “business still lies out o’door” (2.1.11). For Adriana, by contrast, such appetite is rather the source of disease, as is shown by her earlier complaint that her husband’s pathological “ruffian lust” for women “out o’door” has left him (as well as her) syphilitically “possessed with an adulterate blot” (2.2.132, 139).

Adriana’s remarks entail a potential semantic confusion, however, concerning what she perceives to be the cause of her husband’s peregrinations and illnesses. Does the “love” that has led to his pathological alienation from “home” refer to his sexual and commercial appetite or to the objects of that appetite—the Courtesan and the exotic goods he covets? Does she believe his problem, in other words, to be internally generated or externally contracted? As I shall argue, this confusion resonates throughout The Comedy of Errors, and in a fashion that notably reproduces a disjunction endemic to premercantilist Tudor economic literature. In much the same manner as treatises like Thomas Starkey’s Dialogue Between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset (c. 1535) and Thomas Smith’s Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England (1581), the play vacillates between a traditional view of commerce as a subset of ethics in which the appetitive subject assumes moral responsibility for his or her transactions and an emergent conception of commerce as an amoral, global system to whose demands the subject and the nation have no choice but to submit. As Adriana’s ambivalent pathologization of her husband’s extradomestic “love” suggests, moreover, this disjunction significantly mirrors—and is partly grounded in—late sixteenth-century medical discourse. Replicating the contemporary swirl of controversy concerning the etiologies of epidemic illness, the play flip-flops between representing disease as an interior state that the patient can avoid through self-regulation of appetite and as an implacable, invasive force that overwhelms its hapless victim. In both economic and pathological spheres, then, the play stages a contest between individual agency centered on internal appetite and ineluctable subjection to external control.

I shall argue that syphilis, a disease attributed by Shakespeare’s contemporaries variously to appetitive immoderation and to contact with infectious foreign bodies, offered the playwright a ready-made vocabulary with which to mediate the disjunctions of a commerce that draws one “oft from home.” The play’s references to the disease serve to condense disparate anxieties about unchecked individual appetite and the potentially deleterious fiscal effects of trade with foreign nations—anxieties, in other words, about both moral and systemic economies. In the process, The Comedy of Errors offers an important glimpse of the extent to which the evolving premercantilist discourses of pathology and economy were entwined, and indeed helped transform each other’s horizons of conceptual possibility.

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 not our hap been bad.

With her I lived in joy; our wealth increased

By prosperous voyages I often made

To Epidamium, till my factor’s death

And the great care of goods at random left

Drew me from kind embracements of my spouse … (1.1.36–43)

Again, Egeon’s transnational business is redolent of early modern commercial practice: as a foreign merchant, he relies on a local “factor,” or agent, to broker his transactions in Epidamium.¹⁰ But the critique of foreign trade that can be heard in this speech is not a fiscal one. Indeed, Egeon insists that “our wealth increased” as a result of his “prosperous voyages.” Rather, he believes his international business to be at fault because of the damage it has done domestically, to his wife and to his marriage. Commerce in Egeon’s life story thus entails what he considers to be a fatal error. The verb Shakespeare chooses here is revealing: Egeon’s “great care of goods at random left”—that is, his mercantile appetite for neglected foreign goods—“Drew me from kind embracements of my spouse” (emphasis added). This is a term that Shakespeare often uses to suggest perversion of “kind,” that is, natural, courses of action: it has a similar valence in Adriana’s remark about “some love that drew” her husband from home.¹¹ Moral rather than fiscal economy is brought into play here, in other words; the agent of immorality is Egeon’s appetite, which estranges him from his domestic as much as his national obligations.

In the Egeon story, then, Shakespeare articulates a highly ambivalent set of attitudes toward international commerce that serve to frame the details of the main plot. On the one hand, in the words of Solinus, commerce across national borders is a more or less innocent ensemble of “well-dealing” practices; on the other, it is viewed by the Duke of Syracuse as a potential threat to national health and by Egeon as a confirmed threat to domestic harmony. These negative assessments are informed by the ambivalences, in Adriana’s words, of a “love that drew him oft from home.” Is transnational commerce, as Egeon insists, a phenomenon born of the merchant’s potentially excessive appetite, perilous only to himself and his family? Or is it, as the Duke of Syracuse hints, an external force that potentially damages the nations with which it comes into contact? In other words, is commerce simply a matter of individual or domestic moral health that necessitates prudence on the part of the merchant alone? Or does it have a potentially pathological impact on the fiscal well-being of nations, and thus require the judicious intervention of sovereigns? Significantly, such questions resonate with those posed in English economic writing of the sixteenth century. If the age of English mercantilism proper is dominated by the “Four Ms”—Malynes, Milles, Misselden and Mun—the century of premercantilist English thought is represented by the “two Ss”—Thomas Starkey and Thomas Smith.

Premercantilist Commercial Pathology: The “Two Ss”

It should be reiterated, of course, that the notion of “the” economy as a nationally bounded system engaged in transactions with global trading partners and adversaries is a twentieth-century, post-World War II innovation. What we might want to call economic writing prior to 1600 is rarely about the economy in the modern sense of the word: Tudor English writers, secular as much as ecclesiastical, tended to regard commercial activity as a subset of Christian ethics divorced from any national or global context, involving mostly individual transactions spiced with the sins of covetousness and usury.¹²

This focus on individual morality, however, was increasingly challenged in the sixteenth century by emerging practices of economic nationalism. Henry VII’s victory in the War of the Roses resulted in the consolidation of central royal power at the expense of the feudal lords; the Protestant Reformation and the seizure of monastic properties by the crown further fueled a new ideology of the English nation-state in which not only religious and political but also economic power was centralized in the king.¹³ This development was partly inspired by a financial crisis: throughout much of his reign, Henry VIII suffered from a drastic shortage of money. The necessity of full state coffers became even more pressing as England contemplated invasion by hostile Catholic powers. England’s new religious nationalism, inspired by the break with Rome, was therefore accompanied by a worried economic nationalism, and writers supportive of the king looked for new ways to generate revenue and treasure.¹⁴ This task was made all the more vexed by the economic crises created by rampant inflation in the 1540s and 1550s and devaluation of the nation’s coin.¹⁵

Other factors contributed to the growing English awareness of and interest in national economy. Under the Tudors, English merchants and institutions wrested control of foreign trade from stranger merchants such as the Italian Lombards and the Hanseatic merchants of northern Germany; after the fall of Antwerp to Spain in 1576, new English joint-stock companies such as the Levant Company (chartered in 1581) and the East India Company (chartered in 1601) took control of the lucrative spice and silk trades, which had previously been dominated by the Portuguese.¹⁶ English merchants’ growing sense of themselves as players on the stage of global commerce also helped foster new perspectives among Tudor economic writers. In the decades following the London Merchant Adventurers Company’s reincorporation in 1565 as the Merchant Adventurers of England, English economic writers—many of them merchants themselves¹⁷—likewise displayed a stronger sense of national as opposed to merely individual or familial wealth, together with an understanding of the systemic processes by which it might be accumulated or squandered.

Early Tudor protodiscourses of national economy are most legible, and were most sophisticatedly expounded, when they intersected with medicalized discourses of the body and disease. In the late 1530s, Henry VIII’s political adviser Thomas Starkey penned a treatise titled Dialogue Between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset, in which he argued that the nation’s wealth was diminished by metaphorical diseases such as “consumption,” “palsy,” and “frenzy.”¹⁸ But in resorting to such analogies, Starkey found it hard to identify with any coherence the causes of England’s economic ills. On the one hand, the characters of his dialogue repeatedly excoriate the gluttonous appetites of English subjects in ways that reek more of the pulpit than of the mercantilist treatise. Pole, for example, attributes the nation’s economic woes at one point to “excess in diet … For this may be a common proverb: ‘Many idle gluttons make vittle dear’” (92). Similarly, he chalks up England’s problems to the sins of “idleness and sloth” (93). On the other hand, however, Starkey sometimes offers analyses that anticipate a more modern conception of economic pathology—that is, he permits his two characters to regard England’s ills as the product not of slipshod morality but of systemic problems that bedevil commerce with other nations.

The affliction of political “gout,” for example, is caused by excessive foreign trade: “if we had fewer things brought in from other parts, and less carried out, we should have more commodity and very true pleasure, much more than we have now; this is certain and sure” (96). Starkey’s suspicion of imports anticipates the mercantilist conviction that excessive consumption of foreign commodities depletes the nation’s treasure. Also like the mercantilists, he complains about the export of English raw materials such as “lead and tin,” which get converted into manufactures overseas, only to be retailed back to the English at higher prices (158). But Starkey does not share the mercantilists’ valorization of exports as a means of acquiring bullion; instead, as the above examples make clear, his economic goal is the self-sufficient commonwealth. And this ideal often leads Starkey to collapse his more systemic analysis into moral outrage about the English appetite for all things foreign: Pole attributes what he calls the body politic’s “palsy,” for example, to “all such marchands which carry out things necessary to the use of our people, and bring in such vain trifles and conceits, only for the foolish pastime and pleasure of man” (82).

Starkey’s conflicted paradigms of economic pathology delimit the conceptual horizons of subsequent sixteenth-century economic writing. On the one hand, his more medieval discourse of immoral appetite is replicated in the extensive body of Elizabethan literature bemoaning the unprecedented availability of sin-inducing foreign goods such as clothes, foodstuffs, spices, and drugs. In The Anatomy of Abuses (1583), for example, Philip Stubbes sought to locate the origins of economic pathology in the aberrant appetites of English subjects for such goods. Employing pointedly medical language, he offers a diagnosis of the body politic’s ills that points the finger of blame specifically at “three cankers, which, in processe of time, will eat up the common welth, if speedy reformation be not had … daintie fare, gorgious buildings, and sumptuous apparel.”¹⁹ This diagnosis sets the tone for much of Stubbes’s Anatomy of Abuses, in which individuals’ venal appetites for exotic luxury goods are seen as the cause of economic as much as moral pathology. But even as he pathologizes the foreign, Stubbes firmly locates both the causes and the remedies for England’s ills within England itself, or more specifically, within English people’s desires. Thus is the moral discourse of commonwealth aligned with a humoral discourse of internal balance and self-restraint.

By contrast, Starkey’s occasional attempts to understand national economic pathology as a systemic rather than moral problem are more fully realized in the important treatise A Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England (1581), which Henry William Spiegel has characterized as proleptically “tinged by the preconceptions of the mercantilists.” This treatise is of uncertain authorship; long attributed to the politican John Hales, the evidence would suggest instead the hand of Sir Thomas Smith.²⁰ A statesman and professor of law at Cambridge, Smith was also the author of a historical treatise on the value of Roman money, and many of the concerns in the latter work find fuller elaboration in the Discourse. Smith seeks to lend economic thought a prestige that it had not hitherto enjoyed, declaring it a branch of “Philosophy Moral.”²¹ At times, Smith’s brand of moral philosophy can sound like Stubbes’s. Warning against the appetitive sins of conspicuous consumption, he reminds his readers that “excesses [of clothing and food] were used in Rome a little before the decline of the Empire, so as wise men have thought it the occasion of the decay thereof.… I pray God this realm may beware by that example, especially London, the head of this empire” (82). Yet by theorizing the role of money in a nation’s economic fortunes, Smith frequently suggests amoral explanations of the problems wrought by the growth of international commerce.

Written like Starkey’s treatise in dialogue form, Smith’s analysis pits a Doctor against a variety of characters, each of whom have somewhat different notions of the body politic’s ills and their etiologies. The Knight, sympathetic to the Doctor, argues:

hereunto we have searched the very sores and griefs that every man feels, so to try out the causes of them; and the causes once known, the remedy of them might soon be apparent.… we have thus much proceeded as to the finding out of the griefs—which as far as I perceive stands in these points: viz., dearth of all things though there be scarcity of nothing, desolation of counties by enclosures, desolation of towns for lack of occupation and crafts. (32)

As this passage suggests, Smith is less inclined than either Stubbes or Starkey to locate the English economy’s pathologies in moral or appetitive problems. It is instead systemic “sores and griefs” that occupy his attention. The most important of these, the Doctor goes on to argue, is the overvaluation of English currency, which has led to terrible inflation (“dearth,” a term that in the above passage means dearness rather than scarcity). This diagnosis, however, involves a strange medley of moral blame and systemic analysis. When the Doctor attributes inflation to “the debasing or rather corrupting of our coin and treasure” (69), he sees this “sore” as partly the result of individual greed: money loses value because covetous people selfishly clip coins. On the other hand, Smith also presents the devaluation of English coin as the consequence of global commerce, including the flooding of European markets with American gold and silver (149). This more systemic brand of analysis is evident also in his claim that “we have devised a way for strangers not only to buy our gold and silver for brass and to exhaust this realm of treasure but also to buy our chief commodities in manner for naught” (69).

In the process, Smith comes very close to articulating the mercantilist theory of the balance of trade with other nations. Indeed, unlike Starkey, Smith rejects the notion of the self-sufficient nation: it was only “in such a country as Utopia” that one could “imagine” there to be “no traffic with any other outward country” (105). But for Smith as for Starkey, there remains confusion over the causes of economic pathology; it is sometimes the product of venal sin, sometimes the consequence of systemic economic problems. By calling for judicious fiscal “remedies” implemented and policed by the national sovereign (Starkey, 142; Smith, 95), however, both writers anticipate not only the mercantilist discourse of national English economy but also its distinctively pathological register.

Comedy of Eros

A mercantilist paradigm of national economy was not yet coherently available to Shakespeare in the early 1590s, of course. But he did have access to the two very different, medicalized notions of moral and systemic economic pathology that preceded it. The ambivalences that characterize Starkey’s and Smith’s conceptions of economic ills and their causes resonate with the questions raised by The Comedy of Errors concerning the nature and consequences of international trade. As we have seen, the framing story of Egeon entails conflicted conceptions of transnational commerce. Is it healthy or is it pathological? Does it fall into the orbit of individual and domestic moral economy, or is it the bedrock of amoral systemic economy? The play’s main plot also poses such questions. Like the economic literature of the sixteenth century, it does so by means of a sustained embodiment and pathologization of notions of commerce. And like Starkey’s treatise in particular, the main plot embodies commerce in two very different ways: it makes visible both the appetitive bodies of individual merchants or consumers and the global trading bodies constituted by nation-states. In the process, Shakespeare reproduces two radically different paradigms of pathology.

First, like Starkey, Shakespeare employs throughout The Comedy of Errors a broadly Galenic conception of physiology, according to which unchecked appetite leads to incontinence, humoral disarray, and sickness.²² Dromio of Syracuse, for example, remarks that his master needs to avoid dry food to suppress his tendency to choler (2.2.61–62). With greater medical rigor, the Abbess attributes the Ephesian Antipholus’s frenzy to “unquiet meals,” which “make ill digestion; / Thereof the raging fire of fever bred, / And what’s a fever but a fit of madness?” (5.1.74–76). Nell the kitchen-wench, that “mountain of mad flesh” (4.4.154), represents the play’s most over-the-top incarnation of pathological appetite. Predating the copiously perspiring pig-wench Ursula of Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair by some twenty years, her unrestrainedly sweaty desire for Dromio is characterized as a species of grotesque incontinence: “She sweats; a man may go over shoes in the grime for it” (3.2.103–4). Each of these remarks stigmatizes not appetite, however, but its excess. As Michael Schoenfeldt has reminded us in his invaluable study of early modern physiology, moderation rather than repudiation of appetite was the basis of Galenic moral economy.²³ If the discourse of appetite in The Comedy of Errors embodies any notion of economy, then, it would appear to be at the level of the individual, (im)moral subject rather than of the amoral nation.

Shakespeare nevertheless attends to the issue of the individual appetite in a fashion that serves to foreground the links between domestic pathology and national economy. Adriana’s observation about the transgressive “love that drew” Antipholus “oft from home” invokes national as well as domestic “homes,” inasmuch as the referent of her remark—unknown to her, of course—is just as much her seafaring Syracusian brother-in-law as her wayward Ephesian husband. In fact, “home” is a particularly charged and slippery word throughout the play. It acquires importance in the first act not just because of Egeon’s own diagnosis of his turpitude in straying from his Syracusian “home” in pursuit of goods but also because of Solinus’s question to him: “why thou departedest from thy native home?” (1.1.29). As we have seen, departure from domestic and “native” homes is for Egeon the basis of both successful commerce and familial grief. This tension recurs in Adriana and Luciana’s first scene. While Luciana insists that men’s “business still lies out o’door” (2.1.11), Adriana bewails her husband’s absence from “home.” His extradomestic “business” quickly begins to acquire associations of adulterous appetite: “unruly deer, he breaks the pale and feeds from home” (2.1.99–100). The alignment of commercial and sexual appetite is continued throughout the main plot. When Luciana says of Antipholus of Syracuse that he “swore … he was a stranger here,” Adriana replies, thinking that her sister is speaking of her husband, “true he swore, though yet forsworn he were” (4.2.9–10). Adriana’s quibble carries a lot of signifying weight: the “stranger” is simultaneously an adulterer and a merchant traveler, thereby aligning once again the domestic and the “native” home, as well as the appetitive subject’s desires for extramarital relations and foreign goods. If the discourse of the appetite that “draws one oft from home” works to pathologize the individual’s relation to his or her domestic space, therefore, it can nonetheless simultaneously disclose his or her potentially unhealthy international transactions.

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 Wolsey had attempted to infect Henry VIII with syphilis by breathing on him; as the physician Peter Lowe wrote in 1596, the pox was believed to be contracted by “receiving the breath of such as are infected, and by sitting on the priuie after them, & sometimes by treading bare-footed on the spettle of those which haue been long corrupted.”³¹

These accounts of the disease’s contagiousness, which owe more to Hippocratic miasma theory than to humoral medicine, were accompanied by something of a crisis in the Galenic establishment. Even the usually indomitable Andrew Boorde was forced to conclude that his beloved Galenic authorities were incapable of shedding much light on syphilis: “The Grecians can nat tell what the sicknes doth meane wherfore they do set no name for this disease for it did come but lately into Spayne & Fraunce and so to vs.”³² Notably, Boorde’s account of this new disease’s transnational migrations resonates with the customary early modern names for syphilis. Sixteenth-century syphilographers were repeatedly fascinated by how the various national names for the disease chronicled its epidemic spread across national as well as corporeal borders. Ruy Diaz de Isla remarked in his Tractado Contra El Mal Serpentino (published in 1539):

The French called it the Disease of Naples. And the Italians and Neapolitans, as they had never been acquainted with such a disease, called it the French Disease. From that time on as it continued to spread, they gave it a name, each one according to his opinion as to how the disease had its origin. In Castilia they call it Bubes, and in Portugal the Castilian Disease, and in Portuguese India they call it the Portuguese Disease.³³

In England, syphilis was dubbed the Spanish sickness, the French pox, or the Neapolitan disease; as on the Continent, therefore, the pox in all its nomenclatural guises was overwhelmingly understood to originate elsewhere, to reside in and be transmitted by foreign bodies that had infiltrated bodies politic and natural.

The perception of the foreign provenance of syphilis and of its transmission from nation to nation coincided with the emergence of radically new etiologies of disease in general. As I noted in Chapter 1, the Veronese physician Girolamo Fracastoro—who gave syphilis its name—proposed a new, ontological model of disease as a seed transmitted over a distance from body to body. Fracastoro developed this model to explain the plague, not the pox, for which he was inclined to regard astrological influences as primarily responsible.³⁴ Nevertheless, his understanding of disease as a determinate foreign particle rather than a state of imbalance found a number of significant counterparts in the corpus of sixteenth-century English literature on syphilis. Writing of the illness in 1596, for example, the surgeon William Clowes offers what looks uncannily like a microbiological account of infection: “the disease is taken by externall meanes … Any outward part being once infected, the disease immediately entreth into the blood, and so creepeth on like a canker from part to part.” Still, even Clowes could fall back on a residual religious, appetitive description of the illness when he needed to; elsewhere in the same treatise, he writes, “I pray God quickly deliuer vs from it, and to remoue from vs that filthy sinne that breedeth it, that nurseth it, that disperseth it.”³⁵

As Clowes’s vacillation makes clear, syphilis tended to be regarded as neither a univocally appetitive nor a univocally invasive disorder, but both simultaneously. Its bivalent etiology is evident in the The Comedy of Errors’s references to the pox, many of which conflate residual Galenic and emergent ontological understandings of the disease. Take, for example, Dromio’s quibble about the syphilitic nature of prostitutes: “It is written, they appear to men like angels of light; light is an effect of fire, and fire will burn; ergo, light wenches will burn” (4.3.53–55). The colloquialism “burn,” widespread in Elizabethan England, implies not only a humoral conception of syphilitic infection—recall von Hutten’s remarks about “burnt blood”—but also an invasive one. This pathological bivalence is enabled by the grammatical confusion embedded in the verb, which can be read both intransitively (light wenches will burn in and of themselves) and transitively (light wenches will burn others).³⁶ The indeterminacy of “burn” finds a striking counterpart in Luciana’s question to her brother-in-law: “Shall … / Even in the spring of love, thy love-springs rot?” (3.2.2–3). Again, if read intransitively, “rot” works to demonize the excessive appetite; if read transitively, it draws attention to the communicable nature of Antipholus’s condition. In similar fashion, Adriana’s remarks about her own afflictions suggest that she considers them to stem simultaneously from syphilitic appetite and external contagion:

I am possessed with an adulterate blot;

My blood is mingled with the crime of lust;

For if we two be one, and thou play false,

I do digest the poison of thy flesh,

Being strumpeted by thy contagion. (2.2.139–43)

The tension between appetitive “crime of lust” and communicable “contagion” is developed in her subsequent speech concerning the relationship between husband and wife. Here she enlarges on a standard metaphor in unexpected fashion:

Thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine,

Whose weakness, married to thy stronger state,

Makes me with thy strength to communicate.

If aught possess thee from me, it is dross,

Usurping ivy, brier, or idle moss,

Who, all for want of pruning, with intrusion

Infect thy sap and live on thy confusion. (2.2.173–79)

The gendered images of host and dependent work highly ambivalently here. The “stronger state” of the husband-elm makes the tree the source of the wife-vine’s welfare; yet when the vine is “usurped” by other creepers, the elm is no longer the patriarchal origin of health but the vulnerable victim of contagious disease. Terms like “intrusion” and “infection” anticipate the discourse of contagious foreign bodies even as they work to pathologize the Ephesian Antipholus’s appetitive “confusion.”

In The Comedy of Errors, syphilitic pathology mediates the bivalent depredations of not just sexual activity, however, but commerce too. To understand how, one needs to consider the metaphorical uses to which syphilis was put in early modern nonmedical literature. Given its ready associations with prostitution, which was repeatedly lambasted for depleting men’s pockets as well as health, the disease’s commercial connotations were unavoidable. Hence in Measure for Measure, Lucio’s quibbles about prostitution insistently link sexual and commercial trade:

LUCIO

Behold, behold, where Madam Mitigation comes! I have purchased as many diseases under her roof as come to—

2ND GENTLEMAN

To what, I pray?

LUCIO

Judge.

2ND GENTLEMAN

To three thousand dolours a year.

1ST GENTLEMAN

Ay, and more.

LUCIO

A French crown more. (1.2.41–47)

Lucio’s monetary puns on the symptoms of and names for syphilis (“dolours/dollars,” “French crown”) figure the disease as a form of wealth that paradoxically entails a simultaneous depreciation of bodily and financial resources. This recalls Dromio of Syracuse’s pathological vision of Spain acquiring American “rubies” and “carbuncles,” which deplete rather than augment its treasure. Lucio’s association of venereal and financial illness is also a feature of the cony-catching literature of the 1590s which, as Martine Van Elk has suggested, provides an important set of co-texts for The Comedy of Errors.³⁷ In A Disputation Between a Hee and a Shee Conny Catcher (1592), Robert Greene links the effects of visiting prostitutes not just to the pox’s wasting of the body but also to the loss of wealth. The harlot’s customers, he argues, “fish for diseases, sicknesse, sores incurable, vlcers bursting out of their ioyntes, and slat rhumes, which by the humor of that villainie, lept from Naples into Fraunce and from Fraunce into England.” Just as importantly, her customers also “aime … at the losse of goods, and blemish of their good names.”³⁸ Greene’s account of the effects of syphilis is in certain respects commensurate with humoral and moral pathology: he fingers the unchecked carnal appetites of the harlot’s customers as the source of their sundry ills, whether corporeal or financial. But his observation about the international trajectory of the disease, redolent of Ruy Diaz de Isla’s account of the global etiologies of syphilis, invokes a broader canvas for his depiction of commercial pathology. The foreign origins of the pox, evident also in Lucio’s remark about “a French crown more,” facilitate the metaphorical conversion of its pathological effects into commercial afflictions of the body politic acquired from not just diseased appetites but also contacts with other nations.

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 discourse of global trade. This compromise might be termed a syphilitic economy. It entails a protodiscourse of national economy in which the body politic is imagined, like the natural body that appears in the writing of sixteenth-century syphilographers, to be doubly vulnerable to internal and external threats. The syphilitic economy therefore anticipates even as it falls short of the more sophisticated mercantilist paradigms of commerce and nation that were to emerge in the early seventeenth century.

In his later, bitter plays, Shakespeare was to return to syphilis as a metaphor with which to lament the reduction of all human activity to the carnal desires occasioned by global trade. The Comedy of Errors is not, however, the bleak play that Troilus and Cressida or Timon of Athens is. It seeks to effect a reconcilation between the two sets of twin brothers, and in the process to disabuse Adriana of her delusions about sick appetite and foreign contagion. In doing so, the play ends up vindicating the transnational quests of the characters: Egeon is spared death and reunited with his family, Antipholus of Syracuse is reconciled with his long-lost brother, and the two Dromios leave the stage arm in arm. By the conclusion of The Comedy of Errors, then, “business out o’door” is no longer a challenge to the domestic; rather, it is the deus ex machina that ensures its miraculous reintegration. If the globe is initially condensed by Dromio into the diseased body of the kitchen-wench, it is at play’s end refashioned as one happy, healthy, transnational family. Importantly, this reconfigured globe also necessitates a subtly transformed pathology.

The Abbess is doubly instrumental in this transformation. First she identifies the origin of the Ephesian Antipholus’s malaise; then, having suggested a cure for her son, she takes her place as mother and wife in Egeon’s reconstituted family. The language of syphilis might seem to reverberate in her diagnosis and cure, inasmuch as her understanding of Antipholus’s ills similarly mediates invasive and appetitive understandings of disease. On the one hand, she attributes Antipholus’s frenzy to his being constantly scolded by his wife, comparing his affliction to an exogenous condition such as rabies: “The venom clamors of a jealous woman,” she asserts, “Poisons more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth” (5.1.69–70). Yet even as the Abbess reproaches Adriana for corrupting Antipholus with her “venom clamors,” she also models her son’s illness as a melancholic disorder residing in his diseased, humorally imbalanced appetite:

Thou sayst his meat was sauced with thy upbraidings.

Thereof the raging fire of fever bred,

And what’s a fever but a fit of madness?

Thou sayst his sports were hindered by thy brawls.

Sweet recreation barred, 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, or sport, and life-preserving rest

To be disturbed would man or beast. (5.1.73–84)

As much as the Abbess may reproduce the mediated disjunctions of syphilitic economy visible elsewhere in the play, her diagnosis entails a subtle but significant adaptation of that economy. Antipholus’s is an affliction acquired not from a desire for foreign luxury goods that draws one “oft from home” but from disharmony within it. It is not appetite per se that is at fault, therefore, nor its objects; rather, it is the excessive restraints imposed on Antipholus’s appetite that have made him humorally and morally sick. In accordance with Galenic and Christian ideals of temperance, therefore, the Abbess’s cure is designed to permit if not unimpeded appetite for the extradomestic, then at least its moderate exercise.

Because the Abbess’s advice to Antipholus is expressed in what seems to be an entirely moral or medical register, it is easy to overlook how it also has significant economic implications. I have argued that the play repeatedly recasts the domestic/extradomestic opposition in commercial terms, thereby allowing Antipholus’s “business out o’door” to function as a catchphrase for both adultery and foreign trade. The Abbess’s medical advice—that Adriana minister to her husband’s health by giving him liberty to indulge in extradomestic “recreation”—works to transform his bivalently sexual and commercial “business out o’door” from a pathogenic into a prophylactic measure. With this counsel, therefore, she provides a retroactive justification less for his sexual truancy than for his mercantile activity in the agora and, more specifically, in the sphere of transnational commerce. The latter can now become a safeguard of rather than a challenge to the health of individual, family, nation, and globe.

But a powerful residue of anxiety lingers in Adriana’s fantasies of syphilitic infection as well as the Abbess’s Galenic solution to them, a residue that was to acquire an even more pathological strength in Shakespeare’s problem plays. In those works, syphilis is the inexorable reality of a world in which commercial appetite is rampant and health a cruel dream; the pox, in other words, has become the stuff of horror. In the earlier Comedy of Errors, syphilis remains a nightmare from which one can still wake up, health and humor—in both senses of the word—intact. What this play shares with Shakespeare’s later work and the mercantilist writing of the early seventeenth century, however, is a profound investment in the language of disease as a means of figuring new economic objects. In the next chapter, I turn to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, in order to show how its pathological imagery resonates with an early mercantilist lexicon of infection that helped figure a growing economic phenomenon: the alienability of money and identity across national borders.