Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Adaptations; Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Stories, plots, etc. -- Juvenile literature
Adriana stopped this melancholy procession, and cried out to the
duke for justice, telling him that the abbess had refused to
deliver up her lunatic husband to her care. While she was
speaking, her real husband and his servant, Dromio, who had got
loose, came before the duke to demand justice, complaining that
his wife had confined him on a false charge of lunacy, and
telling in what manner he had broken his bands and eluded the
vigilance of his keepers. Adriana was strangely surprised to see
her husband when she thought he had been within the convent.
Aegeon, seeing his son, concluded this was the son who had left
him to go in search of his mother and his brother, and he felt
secure that this dear son would readily pay the money demanded
for his ransom. He therefore spoke to Antipholus in words of
fatherly affection, with joyful hope that he should now be
released. But, to the utter astonishment of Aegeon, his son
denied all knowledge of him, as well he might, for this
Antipholus had never seen his father since they were separated in
the storm in his infancy. But while the poor old Aegeon was in
vain endeavoring to make his son acknowledge him, thinking surely
that either his griefs and the anxieties he had suffered had so
strangely altered him that his son did not know him or else that
he was ashamed to acknowledge his father in his misery--in the
midst of this perplexity the lady abbess and the other Antipholus
and Dromio came out, and the wondering Adriana saw two husbands
and two Dromios standing before her.
And now these riddling errors, which had so perplexed them all,
were clearly made out. When the duke saw the two Antipholuses and
the two Dromios both so exactly alike, he at once conjectured
aright of these seeming mysteries, for he remembered the story
Aegeon had told him in the morning; and he said these men must be
the two sons of Aegeon and their twin slaves.
But now an unlooked-for joy indeed completed the history of
Aegeon; and the tale he had in the morning told in sorrow, and
under sentence of death, before the setting sun went down was
brought to a happy conclusion, for the venerable lady abbess made
herself known to be the long-lost wife of Aegeon and the fond
mother of the two Antipholuses.
When the fishermen took the eldest Antipholus and Dromio away
from her, she entered a nunnery, and by her wise and virtuous
conduct she was at length made lady abbess of this convent and in
discharging the rites of hospitality to an unhappy stranger she
had unknowingly protected her own son.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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