ABSTRACT
Images of syphilis, as critics have increasingly noted, 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 Errorsl The play brims with references to the pox, to the point where it becomes a virtual leitmotif: the Syracusan 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 its "burning" mode of transmission at 4.3.S3-5.2 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 Syracusan 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 suggested that the pervasive pathological imagery of the plays written in the period l6Ql-Q4-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.
