Act 4, Scene 2

The same.

[Enter ADRIANA and LUCIANA.]
Adriana
1004 Ah, Luciana, did he tempt thee so?
1005 Might'st thou perceive austerely in his eye
1006 That he did plead in earnest, yea or no?
1007 Look'd he or red or pale, or sad or merrily?
1008 What observation mad'st thou in this case
1009 Of his heart's meteors tilting in his face?
Luciana
1010 First he denied you had in him no right.
Adriana
1011 He meant he did me none; the more my spite.
Luciana
1012 Then swore he that he was a stranger here.
Adriana
1013 And true he swore, though yet forsworn he were.
Luciana
1014 Then pleaded I for you.
Adriana
1015 And what said he?
Luciana
1016 That love I begg'd for you he begg'd of me.
Adriana
1017 With what persuasion did he tempt thy love?
Luciana
1018 With words that in an honest suit might move.
1019 First he did praise my beauty, then my speech.
Adriana
1020 Didst speak him fair?
Luciana
1021 Have patience, I beseech.
Adriana
1022 I cannot, nor I will not hold me still;
1023 My tongue, though not my heart, shall have his will.
1024 He is deformed, crooked, old, and sere,
1025 Ill-fac'd, worse bodied, shapeless everywhere;
1026 Vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind;
1027 Stigmatical in making, worse in mind.
Luciana
1028 Who would be jealous then of such a one?
1029 No evil lost is wail'd when it is gone.
Adriana
1030 Ah! but I think him better than I say,
1031 And yet would herein others' eyes were worse:
1032 Far from her nest the lapwing cries, away;
1033 My heart prays for him, though my tongue do curse.
[Enter DROMIO OF SYRACUSE.]
Dromio of Syracuse
1034 Here, go; the desk, the purse: sweet now, make haste.
Luciana
1035 How hast thou lost thy breath?
Dromio of Syracuse
1036 By running fast.
Adriana
1037 Where is thy master, Dromio? is he well?
Dromio of Syracuse
1038 No, he's in Tartar limbo, worse than hell.
1039 A devil in an everlasting garment hath him;
1040 One whose hard heart is button'd up with steel;
1041 A fiend, a fairy, pitiless and rough;
1042 A wolf—nay worse, a fellow all in buff;
1043 A back-friend, a shoulder-clapper, one that countermands
1044 The passages of alleys, creeks, and narrow lands;
1045 A hound that runs counter, and yet draws dry foot well;
1046 One that, before the judgment, carries poor souls to hell.
Adriana
1047 Why, man, what is the matter?
Dromio of Syracuse
1048 I do not know the matter: he is 'rested on the case.
Adriana
1049 What, is he arrested? tell me at whose suit?
Dromio of Syracuse
1050 I know not at whose suit he is arrested, well;
1051 But he's in a suit of buff which 'rested him, that can I tell.
1052 Will you send him, mistress, redemption, the money in his desk?
Adriana
1053 Go fetch it, sister. This I wonder at,
[Exit LUCIANA]
Adriana
1054 Thus he unknown to me should be in debt.—
1055 Tell me, was he arrested on a band?
Dromio of Syracuse
1056 Not on a band, but on a stronger thing;
1057 A chain, a chain: do you not hear it ring?
Adriana
1058 What, the chain?
Dromio of Syracuse
1059 No, no, the bell; 'tis time that I were gone.
1060 It was two ere I left him, and now the clock strikes one.
Adriana
1061 The hours come back! that did I never hear.
Dromio of Syracuse
1062 O yes. If any hour meet a sergeant, 'a turns back for very fear.
Adriana
1063 As if time were in debt! how fondly dost thou reason!
Dromio of Syracuse
1064 Time is a very bankrupt, and owes more than he's worth to season.
1065 Nay, he's a thief too: have you not heard men say
1066 That Time comes stealing on by night and day?
1067 If he be in debt and theft, and a sergeant in the way,
1068 Hath he not reason to turn back an hour in a day?
[Enter LUCIANA.]
Adriana
1069 Go, Dromio, there's the money, bear it straight;
1070 And bring thy master home immediately.—
1071 Come, sister; I am press'd down with conceit-
1072 Conceit my comfort and my injury.
[Exeunt.]

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Notes

TLN 1009rhetorical device
“his heart's meteors tilting in his face”
Adriana asks Luciana to read Antipholus's shifting emotions as though they were celestial signs battling across his face. 'Meteors tilting' applies the image of jousting knights to the streaks of light that Elizabethans thought fought one another in the sky; 'tilting' means jousting, and the face is the sky where competing passions — guilt, desire, defiance — clash and are legible to a close observer.
TLN 1024archaic vocab
“deformed, crooked, old, and sere, Ill-fac'd, worse bodied, shapeless everywhere”
Adriana attacks the husband she believes has just courted her own sister. 'Sere' means withered or dried-up — the word for dead leaves or parched vegetation. 'Stigmatical in making' means marked at birth with deformity, as though branded; 'making' = physical form, the way one was made. The outburst is the jealous flip side of love: Adriana demolishes the man she actually loves to assert she does not care.
TLN 1032cultural context
“Far from her nest the lapwing cries, away”
The lapwing (a ground-nesting bird) was proverbial for crying and fluttering far from its nest to lure predators away from its eggs — feigning alarm in the wrong place to protect what it truly cares about. Adriana applies the image to herself: her mouth curses, but her heart prays for him. She is like the lapwing, making noise far from where her real feelings are hidden.
TLN 1038archaic vocab
“Tartar limbo, worse than hell. A devil in an everlasting garment hath him; One whose hard heart is button'd up with steel”
Dromio describes the arresting officer in a cascade of terrifying images. 'Tartar limbo' means the outermost prison of Tartarus — the lowest pit of classical hell — so 'worse than hell' is the hyperbolic claim that a sergeant's custody is hotter than Hades itself. The 'everlasting garment' and 'button'd up with steel' describe the sergeant's buff leather coat, a thick ox-hide jacket worn by officers that resisted a sword-cut and was almost impossible to tear. Elizabethan audiences recognised 'the buff' as immediately as a modern audience would recognise a police uniform.
biblical St Paul's Ephesus: magic and marriage
TLN 1043archaic vocab
“A back-friend, a shoulder-clapper, one that countermands The passages of alleys, creeks, and narrow lands; A hound that runs counter, and yet draws dry foot well”
Clues that the man Dromio describes is a sergeant empowered to make arrests. A 'back-friend' is a false friend who stabs you in the back — but also one who claps you on the back to arrest you; a 'shoulder-clapper' is slang for a sergeant, who seized his quarry by tapping the shoulder. 'Countermands the passages of alleys' means he blocks the lanes to cut off escape. 'Runs counter' is a hunting term for a hound running backwards on the scent, yet 'draws dry foot' means tracking unerringly by the footprint — a sergeant who runs the wrong way still catches you.
TLN 1055wordplay
“arrested on a band? Not on a band, but on a stronger thing; A chain, a chain”
Adriana asks whether her husband was arrested on a 'band' — a legal bond or written obligation, the standard Elizabethan word for a formal debt-instrument. Dromio corrects her: not a band (a piece of paper) but a chain — the gold chain the goldsmith Angelo gave to Antipholus of Syracuse by mistake, and for which Antipholus of Ephesus now stands accused of non-payment. The pun works because a band ties a man legally, while a chain ties him physically, and both words name what holds him.
TLN 1060rhetorical device
“It was two ere I left him, and now the clock strikes one. The hours come back”
Dromio spins a sustained comic conceit: the clock has gone backwards (from two to one) because Time itself is in debt and runs from the sergeant like any debtor — 'Time is a very bankrupt, and owes more than he's worth to season.' The hours retreat out of fear; Time is a thief who steals the hours by night and day; and being both a debtor and a criminal, Time has excellent reason to turn back when a sergeant appears. The passage builds on the central crisis (arrest for debt) by making even abstract Time subject to the same comic law.