The Comedy of Errors, V.i., by C. G. Playter, for Boydell.

Like the other play settings in this cultural grouping there is an intersection of backgrounds into a vague eastern Mediterraean pre-Christian setting. Syracuse was a great center of classical Greek culture, being associated with Plato and Theocritus, and Antipholus of Syracuse carries some of classical Greek rationality to Ephesus. As in the cities in the Levant of Pericles, Ephesus is probably selected by Shakespeare because it figures in the Acts of the Apostles as a major pagan site associated with magic and the bizarre, as Antipholus of Syracuse claims: "There's none but witches do inhabit here." (III.ii.155). The city was associated with the cult of Diana to which the play's "abbess" therefore seems best affiliated (not with a Christian cross, as in this engraving) - like Emilia in Two Noble Kinsmen. The misfortune of Adriana in being solicited by two husbands matches the wife of a Greek general in the Amphitryon of Plautus, who, though a Roman playwright, was following Greek comedy in the vein of Menander. Picture engraved by Charles Gauthier Playter (died 1809), & designed by John Francis Rigaud for John Boydell's "Shakespeare Gallery." Picture from the UCB Shakespeare Program.