anged from his wife Adriana, not enjoying the fruitful state of marriage that must be the lot of comic characters. They are all awash in a capitalist society of business and bonds, with little room for generosity but much for the Officer, debtors' prison, and harsh laws against Syracusan foreigners that even the Duke cannot overturn. Here St. Paul enters the fray, with the prescriptions of his Epistle to the Ephesians (!): "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.... Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it.... So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself." (Eph. 5:22, 25, 28). Through Luciana's philosophy and Aemilia's revelation of Adriana's shrewishness, The Comedy of Errors shows, in a more dilute form, the same philosophy of mutual and cooperative subjection that Shakespeare is to explore more fully in The Taming of the Shrew a few years later. Without the structure and society a family yields, a Shakespearean character is lost amidst the riot and chaos of civilization: sour Jaques abandoning the Arden weddings, ascetic Malvolio bound in the dank cellarage, mad Lear wandering the heath, Leontes pining for his lost Hermione. Comedy of Errors is prologue and experiment for dramatic families to come. ...
