In a characteristically circular bit of word play, Dromio of Ephesus paradoxically links Adriana’s “hot” mood to the food she has prepared for her husband, which has grown “cold.” Without stating so directly, Dromio’s paradox registers the marital difficulties that Antipholus and Adriana have faced:
She is so hot because the meat is cold;
The meat is cold because you come not home;
Cold food does not, of course, make one physically warmer; Dromio’s wordplay takes advantage of the different meanings that terms like “hot” and “cold” can convey to create a surprising verbal twist. By describing his master’s wife, Adriana, as “hot,” he foregrounds the metaphorical use of this word: hot-tempered, or in other words, angry. When he describes the food as “cold,” however, he is using the term in its most obvious and literal sense: the food is physically cold.
He continues to riff on the word “cold” in the next sentence, in which he attributes the cold food to his master’s absence from the family home. This paradoxical expression is in many ways typical of the mode of speech used by both Dromios throughout the play. The Dromios rarely speak in a straightforward manner, instead speaking in puzzle-like lines that repeat one word or idea in surprising ways.
Paradoxically, Antipholus of Syracuse claims that he must “lose” himself in his attempt to “find a mother and a brother” in Ephesus:
So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself
Antipholus of Syracuse has lived his whole life without having met his own mother or brother. For him, filling the gap left by the absence of his missing relatives has been a lifelong mission. In a surprising paradox, however, he notes that the very process by which he might finally unite his fragmented family into one “whole” might cause him to lose what he already has: his own sense of self.
There is some ambiguity in Antipholus’s claim that he might lose himself “in quest of” his family. On one level, his life is threatened: he has, after all, traveled illegally into an enemy city at the risk of death. At this point in the play, Antipholus of Syracuse acknowledges the difficulties and the dangers of his foolhardy mission. There is also a secondary sense in which he will “lose” himself in Syracuse: he must go undercover, carefully hiding his identity among the busy crowds of the city’s marketplace. In other words, he risks losing his own identity or sense of self.
There is a further irony of which he is not yet aware: while he knows that he will likely be executed by the authorities if he is caught, he does not yet know that his father has traveled to Ephesus in order to search for him and has been promptly caught and sentenced to death. Antipholus, then, has even more than to lose than he realizes, and in his quest to unite his family, he risks losing the only relative he has ever known.
