poor wife's goods and given them to his "sweet friend." The dinner he orders at Erotion's house has a noble and Shakespearian anachronism: "Some oysters, a mary bone pie or two, some artichokes and potato-rootes." Shakespeare himself introduces America into his Comedy of Errors, but he can hardly be said to have inferred the ancient knowledge of America from W. W.'s "potato-rootes."

From the Menæchmi, then, or from W. W.'s translation, or from an older English piece, Shakespeare took the germ of the Comedy of Errors; but he has gallantly added as much as he borrowed, has introduced new errors without end, and has reconciled all quarrels in a tender affection and sympathy. Here the opponent of the Advocatus Diaboli finds the strength of his case. You do not know how good, how Shakespearian the Comedy of Errors is till you have compared it with the Roman treatment of the same situation by Plautus. First, Shakespeare moves the scene from Epidamnus to Ephesus, and queer it is to read of an "Abbess" in the sacred city of Artemis. Then he makes the father of his first pair of twins, the Antipholi, still alive; he comes from Syracuse to Ephesus in his long search for his lost boys. But Syra cuse and Ephesus are on ill commercial terms; protection is so strict that if a citizen of one town appears in the markets of the other, he must pay a heavy fine or lose his life. The old father, Egeon, is in evil plight, and as he has neither the money nor the friend to lend it, he must die.

But first he tells the Duke of Ephesus his lamentable story. At Epidamnus his wife had borne him twin boys, and a poor mean woman" in the self-same inn also bore twins (the Dromios). These Ægeon bought; but he, his wife, and the two brace of twins were all shipwrecked. In drifting on the sea, they were severed. The mother, with one Dromio and one Antipholus, was taken up by one ship; the father, with his Antipholus and his Dromio, by another. When his twin came to eighteen years of age he started (with his Dromio) after the other brother, and never came back. Egeon has set out to find as many of them as he can, and has come at last to Ephesus, where he suffered, as we have seen, from the rancorous system of protection and the war of tariffs. The Duke of Ephesus is very sorry, and reprieves him for a day,

during which his younger and later lost son turns up in Ephesus, with his Dromio, pretending to be from Epidamnus to evade the protection laws, as before. And now the trouble begins, each Antipholus and each Dromio being taken for the other, and themselves taking either for each. I have no head for mathematics, "the low cunning of algebra" has never been mine, and I recoil from the attempt to disentangle the innumerable complications. The reader would be as puzzled as the writer by an attempt at close analysis. It is like the poem in which a lover who dwells in four-dimensioned space attempts to describe to his lady a dreadful dream in which he beheld a world in three-dimensioned space-our

own.

"Ah, in that dream-distorted clime,

These fatal wilds I wandered through, The boundaries of space and time Had got most frightfully askew. What is askew?' my love, you cry. I cannot answer, can't portray; The sense of everything awry

No language can convey

In the Comedy of Errors, with two sets of "doubles," and with these doubles not able to discriminate between their parallels in either group, with two Antipholi and two Dromios, similar, but dissimilarly situated, everything is, indeed, awry. Do not urge me to be more definite; it is not kind; it may quite shatter a brain which otherwise might last for years, and be moderately serviceable at light work. Even in looking at Mr. Abbey's drawings I feel a kind of hysterical emotion, a feverish frantic ambition to discern t'other from which, just as one is occasionally mad enough to cope with Bradshaw's Railway Guide, with the money article in the newspapers, with Lycophron's Cassandra, with the family system of the Australian blacks. Nobody should ask to be told the plot of the Comedy of Errors. In the play when acted it is not particularly perplexing to a person with fair mathematical ability: but a summary of it, as Sir Walter Scott's child friend, Pet Marjory, said of Nine times Nine, "is devilish." Let it be granted that either Antipholus equals either Menæchmus, and that the Dromios may, therefore, cancel each other for the present. We shall then study the relations of the Ephesian Antipholus to his wife, to his "sweet friend," and his mad

doctor, as compared with the similar relations of Plautus's Epidamnian Menæchmus to his wife, to Erotion, and to his mad-doctor. In these combinations, if we set aside the appearance of old Egeon, the father, lies such ethical interest as the Comedy of Errors can yield; nor, after all, is that slight; and, after all, it is not unworthy of Shakespeare.

The Menæchmus of Plautus treats his wife not only like a profligate, but like a person hopelessly mal élevé. He gives away her trinkets and dresses to his "dear mouse," as the Elizabethan translator calls Erotion. But Plautus, I think, intends us to understand that Menæchmus has been goaded to this excess by the irritating and perhaps originally causeless jealousy of his wife. Having been long accused, he determines to deserve his wife's lectures, as the other Menæchmus feigns to go mad because mad he is everywhere styled. If this idea be correct, Menæchmus is merely bent on "taming his shrew," as the old translator says, quoting the title of the Taming of the Shrew in its earlier form, published in 1594 (the translation is of 1595). Now great latitude was permitted of old to the husband with a shrewish wife, as ducking-stools prove. Still Menæchmus, in Plautus, goes too far even for the patience of the wife's father. The old father, in Plautus, exactly holds Dr. Johnson's theory, and a startling theory it sounds to us: "Wise married women don't trouble themselves about infidelity in their husbands." Johnson was not only a religious but a good man; yet Boswell-no pattern-was staggered by the Doctor's ethics. Boswell says, with equal truth and sense, that "a husband's infidelity must hurt a delicate attachment, in which a mutual constancy is implied with such refined sentiments as Massinger has exhibited in his play of The Picture." He quotes, indeed, a counter-statement of the great Doctor's; yet, years later, Johnson repeated his original observation. The truth is that Boswell was, comparatively, a Liberal, while the Doctor's Toryism on this point dated from pagan antiquity; from the morals of Plautus and of that republican Rome when a wife was in manu mariti: her husband's chattel.

When we turn to Shakespeare's treatment of this question, we first observe that the jealousy of womankind is all but absent from his dramas. Here he shows his inevitable artistic tact. A man's jea

lousy is tragic, like that of Othello or Leontius, or it is comic, like that of Ford in the Merry Wives. It is an affair of Don Garcie de Navarre, on one hand, or of George Dandin on the other. But the jealousy of a woman in modern society may be neither dignified and terrible enough for tragedy, nor grotesque and humorous enough for comedy; it is bitter, shrill, ugly, a deathless torment, a poison and perversion of nature; too mean for tragedy, too hateful for comedy. In the old comedy, the Restoration comedy, the luckless husband is a standing though cruel joke. The luckless wife no man nor woman laughs at. Yet she does not fit with tragedy unless she be an empress or a queen, say an Amestris or an Eleanor, who can give her passion a tragic scope, and indulge it with a full cup of revenge. This may, at least, be offered as an explanation; or perhaps others may say that of all passions feminine jealousy is most remote from the sympathy of men, and that it is the men who write the plays.

Shakespeare, unlike Plautus, has tempered the spectacle of Adriana's greeneyed and watchful rage by placing a sweeter-tempered sister, Luciana, beside her. A man is master of his liberty," says this good-humored wench, when the married Antipholus does not come home in time for dinner, and when, as Dromio cries (to the wrong brother) :

"The capon burns, the pig falls from the spit, The clock hath strucken twelve upon the bell; My mistress made it one upon my cheek: She is so hot, because the meat is cold." The shrew, he adds, "will score your fault upon my pate"; aud he has some of my mistress's marks upon my shoulders." For Adriana is not only jealous, she is a termagant. Adriana will not listen to Luciana's

"Self-harming jealousy!-fie! beat it hence." Adriana replies.

"Unfeeling fools can with such wrongs dispense.

ADRIANA. "O, bind him, bind him! let him not come near me."

Act IV., Scene IV.

Act V., Scene 1.

How comes it now, my husband, O! how comes it,
That thou art then estranged from thyself?
Thyself I call it, being strange to me,
That, undividable, incorporate,

Am better than thy dear self's better part.
Ah, do not tear away thyself from me;
For know, my love, as easy may'st thou fall
A drop of water in the breaking gulph,
And take unmingled thence that drop again,
Without addition or diminishing,

As take from me thyself, and not me too.