Mistaking her husband for his twin brother, Adriana is distraught at what she believes to be his complete abandonment of her, and she hyperbolically claims that that she will cry to death if he does not return to her:
ADRIANA
Since that my beauty cannot please his eye,
I’ll weep what’s left away, and weeping die.LUCIANA
How many fond fools serve mad jealousy!
Earlier in the play, in conversation with her unmarried sister who idealizes marriage, she was quick to dismiss her husband, Antipholus of Ephesus, and to criticize the institution of marriage in general. She complained of his tendency to be late, of his various bad habits, and of his attempts to control her. However, her tune quickly changes when she believes that he has actually left her for a mistress, though her sister is quick to point out that she is jumping to assumptions with little evidence. Indeed, Luciana responds calmly to her sister's increasing panic.
Adriana’s exaggerated language reveals a dramatic aspect of her personality which was not previously evident. Like many other characters in this farcical comedy, desperation causes her to act in a silly and absurd manner. Her speech here is full of trite and hyperbolic romantic clichés, such as the possibility of literally crying to death. Nonetheless, her excessive lamentations do demonstrate the serious emotional toll that the play’s mix-ups and misrecognitions are beginning to have on those caught up in the confusion.
Adriana lists Antipholus of Ephesus’s past hyperboles regarding his love for her, made during their courtship, in a scene that satirizes the conventions of romantic poetry. She recites:
The time was once when thou unurged wouldst vow
That never words were music to thine ear,
That never object pleasing in thine eye,
That never touch well welcome to thy hand,
That never meat sweet-savored in thy taste,
Unless I spake, or looked, or touched, or carved to
thee.
In a number of his plays, Shakespeare satirizes the sometimes excessively romantic poetry of his day, which imitated the Italian poet Petrarch in describing love as an overwhelming, maddening force that robs a person of their sense. Through Adriana’s recollection, we see the typical, exaggerated romantic cliches with which Antipholus had earlier wooed her: that nothing in the world could be enjoyable to him, for example, unless they came from her.
The banality of this romantic language is underscored by a somewhat unromantic reference to the carving and taste of meat, which awkwardly follows three lines complimenting Adriana’s own body. At this point in the play, Adriana has almost reached her breaking point, and her recitation of these obvious exaggerations suggests that she is desperate to win back her husband, even though there is in fact no real threat to their marriage.
Dromio of Syracuse uses hyperbolic language to exaggerate both the size and greasiness of the kitchen maid, Luce, who mistakes him for his brother, who is in fact her true husband. He says:
Marry, sir, she’s the kitchen
wench, and all grease, and I know not what use to
put her to but to make a lamp of her and run from
her by her own light. I warrant her rags and the
tallow in them will burn a Poland winter. If she lives
till doomsday, she’ll burn a week longer than the
whole world.
Dromio’s comedic exaggeration emphasizes his displeasure at finding that he not only has a “wife” in Ephesus (whom he has never met) but also that he considers her deeply unattractive and filthy. Her work in the kitchen has left her covered in “tallow,” or animal fat used in cooking. Dromio even suggests that the amount of grease on her clothes and body makes her so combustible that she would, upon the biblical “doomsday” when the world will be engulfed in flames, burn longer than the very earth itself. This is yet another instance of Dromio’s very flippant treatment of Christian theology, reflecting his frivolous personality and his role as a comedic “fool” in the play.
