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Shakespeare understood his business pretty well; though, if I had been he, I would have put in more of those light and graceful touches which hit us where we live, and make the whole world kin." "Like the Dromios, or the Carriers in Henry Fourth." "Or the Gravediggers; they are more to your purpose.
And now these riddling errors, which had so perplexed them all, were clearly made out. When the duke saw the two Antipholuses and the two Dromios both so exactly alike, he at once conjectured aright of these seeming mysteries, for he remembered the story Aegeon had told him in the morning; and he said these men must be the two sons of Aegeon and their twin slaves.
"The Dromios are off, I hear," said George, turning to Marian Tweetyman; "we shall all be there soon. En avant, the Forsytes! Roll, bowl, or pitch! Who's for a cooler?" Aunt Juley gurgled, George was so droll! Should Hester get Timothy's map? Then he could show them all where they were. At a sound from Timothy, interpreted as assent, Aunt Hester left the room.
And now these riddling errors, which had so perplexed them all, were clearly made out. When the duke saw the two Antipholuses and the two Dromios both so exactly alike, he at once conjectured aright of these seeming mysteries, for he remembered the story Ægeon had told him in the morning; and he said, these men must be the two sons of Ægeon and their twin slaves.
These two Dromios evidently enjoyed meeting, and nothing could be more amusing than their accounts of various instances in which each had been mistaken for the other. Each had a rich vein of humor, and both presented the details of these occurrences with especial zest. Another American, of foreign birth, was not quite so charming.
Diana held the reins. The whip was an ornament, as the plume of feathers to the general officer. Lady Dunstane's ponies were a present from Redworth, who always chose the pick of the land for his gifts. They joyed in their trot, and were the very love-birds of the breed for their pleasure of going together, so like that Diana called them the Dromios.
I should say, perhaps, that the grounds were so thoroughly lighted with electricity that they were as bright as day; the lamps being so carefully distributed that there were, practically, no shadows. Presently, on the bank of a miniature lake near the farthest wall, we came upon three women and a man. "The Dromios," said one of the women. "Satan's Twins," laughed another.
On either side of her a Hayman boy, his lean, taciturn, hungry face turned towards his plate, ate his mutton steadily. These two, Giles and Jesse, were so alike and so inseparable that they were known as the Dromios. They never talked, and seemed always completely occupied in doing nothing. It was popularly supposed that they were cramming for an important examination.
Thus such a plot as that of the Menaechmi was by no means the sheer impossibility which Shakespeare made it by attaching indistinguishable Dromios to his indistinguishable Antipholuses. To reduplicate a coincidence is in fact to multiply it by a figure far beyond my mathematics. The term logic is often very vaguely used in relation to drama.
But to the utter astonishment of Ægeon, his son denied all knowledge of him, as well he might, for this Antipholus had never seen his father since they were separated in the storm in his infancy; but while the poor old Ægeon was in vain endeavouring to make his son acknowledge him, thinking surely that either his griefs and the anxieties he had suffered had so strangely altered him that his son did not know him, or else that he was ashamed to acknowledge his father in his misery; in the midst of this perplexity, the lady abbess and the other Antipholus and Dromio came out, and the wondering Adriana saw two husbands and two Dromios standing before her.
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