Searching for his twin brother in the bustling city of Ephesus, Antipholus of Syracuse describes himself using a simile suggesting that he's “like a drop of water” searching for another drop of water in a vast ocean:
I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.
Antipholus’s simile is rich with meaning. In imagining himself as a single drop of water in the ocean, he emphasizes the difference in scale between himself as a lone individual and the wider world, underscoring the difficulty of his task. The image he conjures is similar to that of a “needle in a haystack,” but in some ways it goes further than that cliché—when a droplet enters a larger body of water, after all, it disappears, losing its singularity and dissolving into a greater whole. Antipholus’s simile therefore suggests at once both the risk of losing himself in the attempt to reunite his family and the malleability of his identity. It’s a very appropriate simile for this play, then, in which identity is highly fluid and the distinctions between characters are porous and unclear.
