Describing the harsh punishment that awaits Aegeon, the First Merchant personifies the sun that looks down upon Ephesus as “weary,” suggesting that nature itself is tired, both with the ongoing and senseless fighting between Syracuse and Ephesus and with the injustice of executing an innocent man:
This very day a Syracusian merchant
Is apprehended for arrival here
And, not being able to buy out his life,
According to the statute of the town
Dies ere the weary sun set in the west.
In many of Shakespeare’s plays, the natural world seems to respond to disorder in the human realm. In many of his tragedies, for example, comets fly through the night sky marking times of change, and eclipses warn of impending danger. Here, the merchant personifies the sun as “weary,” seemingly in response to its own role in bringing about Aegeon’s death. Aegeon has been given only one day to raise the funds necessary to secure his own ransom, and so the setting of the sun will otherwise mark the moment of his execution.
Though the merchant is himself a citizen of Ephesus, rival to that of Syracuse, he seems to sympathize with Aegeon’s plight, perhaps because they are both merchants. His lamentation suggests that the ordinary citizens of Ephesus have grown tired of the conflict between the two city states, which has claimed the lives of innocent people. The merchant, then, seems to project his own weariness upon the sun.
While Adriana anxiously awaits her husband’s return to their home, Luciana attempts to calm her sister down, personifying time as a boss or “master” who dictates how men live their lives.
LUCIANA
Good sister, let us dine, and never fret.
A man is master of his liberty;
Time is their master, and when they see time
They’ll go or come. If so, be patient, sister.
Luciana’s response here is nuanced. On one hand, she holds a deeply outdated view of the roles of men and women, suggesting that men are the masters of women in the same way that humans are the masters of animals. On the other hand, she notes that men are still not absolute masters of their own lives and that even they must submit to forces more powerful than themselves, such as time.
Luciana argues that while men, unlike women of the time, are able to come and go as they please, conducting their business out of the home and staying out late, ultimately they are still subject to time and will, sooner or later, return home where they belong. By personifying time in this manner, then, Luciana argues that neither men nor women are truly autonomous, acting without regard to any external influences. There are limits, in other words, to the freedom of both men and women.
In early modern poetry and drama, the abstract concept of time is often personified as a godlike figure, such as “Father Time.” In Act 2, Scene 2, Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse personify time as a god who grants different favors to different living things.
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE
Why is Time such a niggard of hair, being, as it is, so plentiful an excrement?DROMIO OF SYRACUSE
Because it is a blessing that he
bestows on beasts, and what he hath scanted men
in hair, he hath given them in wit
Antipholus wonders why Time is so selfish and greedy when it comes to gifting men with hair. As men get older, he laments, Time takes more and more hair from them but is nevertheless generous with a far less valuable commodity: excrement. Dromio picks up Antipholus’s personification and takes it further, stating that Time gives different blessings to different species. Time, Dromio points out, is perfectly generous in granting hair to beasts, which unlike men, do not bald with age. But, to compensate for this, he grants man “wit,” which continues to serve them even in old age. Soon after, however, Dromio offers yet another theory, which further advances this personification of Time:
Thus I mend it: Time himself is
bald and therefore, to the world’s end, will have
bald followers.
Time robs men of their hair, Dromio reasons, because “Time himself is bald." As a result, Time wants his followers to be bald too.
In counseling Antipholus of Ephesus against making a scene by arguing with his wife in view of the public, the merchant Balthasar personifies slander or gossip as an intruder who invades its subject’s life and home:
A vulgar comment will be made of it;
And that supposèd by the common rout
Against your yet ungallèd estimation
That may with foul intrusion enter in
And dwell upon your grave when you are dead;
For slander lives upon succession,
Forever housèd where it gets possession.
Slander, or a “vulgar comment,” will “enter” a person’s life and take up home in their reputation, strengthened by belief from the gullible masses or the “common rout.” Balthasar soothes Antipholus’s ego, insisting that gossip can adhere even to those whose “estimation” or reputation is unblemished. Not only must a person live with slander during their lifetime, Balthasar insists, but it will even continue to be “housed” within everyone’s memory of that person after their death. While an individual dies, slander “lives upon succession”—or, in other words, it stays alive as long as there is someone to repeat it.
Balthasar’s personification of slander emphasizes just how hard it is to shake off negative gossip and how long-lasting these dents to a person’s reputation can be. Balthasar is highly sensitive to social perception, realizing before Antipholus does that if others see that he has been locked out of his house, they will develop their own salacious theories, possibly even guessing that Adriana is having an affair.
