mentary payment to 'another company of players which were appointed to play the same day'. On All Saints 1614 and both Candlemas and All Saints 1615, the players are specified to have been the King's men.[1] From the other Inns the story is more fragmentary. The devices for the famous Gray's Inn Christmas of 1594-5, reported in the Gesta Grayorum, were mainly due to the fertile imagination of the lawyers themselves. In addition to the continuous burlesque of state ceremonies in the court of Purpoole and the mask sent to Whitehall at Shrovetide, they included a special show of Amity for the reception of the ambassador of Templaria on January 3. But this had its origin in the disorders of an earlier revel on Innocents' Day, when the confusion was so great that the Inner Temple men left in dudgeon, and the show then intended was not given. To supply its place, 'a Comedy of Errors (like to Plautus his Menechmus) was played by the players. So that night was begun, and continued to the end, in nothing but Confusion and Errors; whereupon, it was ever afterwards called, The Night of Errors.' On the following day there was a trial, and a supposed sorcerer or conjurer was arraigned on the charge amongst others 'that he had foisted a Company of base and common Fellows, to make up our Disorders with a Play of Errors and Confusions'.[2] Similarly the Middle Temple in 1597-8 varied their own fooling with plays on 28 December and 2 January, which from the absence of details in the narrative were probably supplied by professional actors.[3] And this house, too, must have been accustomed to keep Candlemas with a play, for a note of February 1602 in John Manningham's diary makes mention of Twelfth Night as given 'at our feast'.[4] The same practice, known as the Post Revels, prevailed at Lincoln's Inn. Here the notices are of an earlier date, and preserve the memory
- ↑ Ch. xxiii, s.v. Beaumont; Inderwick, Inner Temple Records, i. lxv, 219; ii. xlix, 23 sqq., 56, 64. A payment of 20s. 'to the players' at the Christmas of 1615 was probably, in view of the amount, for musicians. The earlier account-books are not preserved. On the plays, not necessarily professional, of the 1561-2 Christmas, cf. ch. xxiii, s.v. Brooke.
- ↑ Gesta Grayorum (M. S. R.), 22, 23. R. J. Fletcher, The Pension Book of Gray's Inn (1901), prints entries of payments for 'the play at Shrove-tyde' 1581, of which nothing more is known, and 'the play in Michaelmas terme' and 'the Tragedie' in 1587-8, in which year the Inn gave Catiline at home before Lord Burghley on 16 Jan. (M. S. C. i. 179) and The Misfortunes of Arthur at court on 28 Feb. Gascoigne's Supposes and Jocasta were both produced at Gray's Inn in 1566-7. The Inn was to have entertained the Duke of Bracciano with 'shewes' at Christmas 1600-1, but he left too soon (Chamberlain, 99; Camden (tr.), 535).
- ↑ B. Rudyerd, Memoirs, 12, 13. The ascription of these revels to 'the Christmas of 1599' in Mediaeval Stage, i. 416, is an error; cf. p. 169.
- ↑ Manningham, 18.
