When the married Antipholis was denied entrance into his own house (those within supposing him to be already there), he had gone away very angry, believing it to be one of his wife’s jealous freaks, to which she was very subject, and remembering that she had often falsely accused him of visiting other ladies, he to be revenged on her for shutting him out of his own house, determined to go and dine with this lady, and she receiving him with great civility, and his wife having so highly offended him, Antipholis promised to give her a gold chain, which he had intended as a present for his wife; it was the same chain which the goldsmith by mistake had given to his brother.  The lady liked so well the thoughts of having a fine gold chain, that she gave the married Antipholis a ring; which when, as she supposed (taking his brother for him), he denied, and said he did not know her, and left her in such a wild passion, she began to think he was certainly out of his senses; and presently she resolved to go and tell Adriana that her husband was mad.  And while she was telling it to Adriana, he came, attended by the jailor (who allowed him to come home to get the money to pay the debt), for the purse of money, which Adriana had sent by Dromio, and he had delivered to the other Antipholis.

Adriana believed the story the lady told her of her husband’s madness must be true, when he reproached her for shutting him out of his own house; and remembering how he had protested all dinner-time that he was not her husband, and had never been in Ephesus till that day, she had no doubt that he was mad; she therefore paid the jailor the money, and having discharged him, she ordered her servants to bind her husband with ropes, and had him conveyed into a dark room, and sent for a doctor to come and cure him of his madness:  Antipholis all the while hotly exclaiming against this false accusation, which the exact likeness he bore to his brother had brought upon him.  But his rage only the more confirmed them in the belief that he was mad; and Dromio persisting in the same story, they bound him also, and took him away along with his master.

Soon after Adriana had put her husband into confinement, a servant came to tell her that Antipholis and Dromio must have broken loose from their keepers, for that they were both walking at liberty in the next street.  On hearing this, Adriana ran out to fetch him home, taking some people with her to secure her husband again; and her sister went along with her.  When they came to the gates of a convent in their neighbourhood, there they saw Antipholis and Dromio, as they thought, being again deceived by the likeness of the twin-brothers.

Antipholis of Syracuse was still beset with the perplexities this likeness had brought upon him.  The chain which the goldsmith had given him was about his neck, and the goldsmith was reproaching him for denying that he had it, and refusing to pay for it, and Antipholis was protesting that the goldsmith freely gave him the chain in the morning, and that from that hour he had never seen the goldsmith again.