Abstract
On January 28, 1594, the Gray’s Inn Christmas revels hit a snag. An evening of entertainment put on by the prince of Purpoole to entertain his guest, Frederick Templarius, the ambassador from the Inner Temple, dissolved into chaos. Put simply, the audience refused to stay in their seats. The account of the revels describes the following:
When the Ambassador was placed, as aforesaid, [beside the prince of Purpoole] and that there was something to be performed for the Delight of the Beholders, there arose such a disordered Tumult and Crowd upon the Stage that there was no Opportunity to effect that which was intended.1
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Notes
Desmond Bland, ed., Gesta Grayorum: or The History of The High and Mighty Prince Henry Prince of Purpoole, English Reprints 22 (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1968), 31. All subsequent quotations from the revels are from this edition, incorporated into the text.
As Philip Finkelpearl points out, revelling was a term used in the period to refer to a whole range of activities, such as singing, dancing, making music, and performing various rituals associated with communal life in the inns, which would take place at a number of points throughout the year such as, for example, the Readers feast. Philip J. Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in His Social Setting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 32–34.
For discussion of the revels, see also Desmond Bland, ed., introduction to Gesta Grayorum; A. Wigfall Green, The Inns of Court and Early English Drama (London: Oxford University Press, 1931)
Michelle O’Callaghan, The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modem England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Paul Raffield, Images and Culture of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Margaret Knapp and Michal Kobialka, “Shakespeare and the Prince of Purpoole: The 1594 Production of The Comedy of Errors at Gray’s Inn Hall,” Theatre History Studies 4 (1984): 70–81. On Shakespeare’s stagecraft in The Comedy of Errors and in particular his use of space as it influenced the role of the audience, see Jennifer Low, “Door Number Three? Time, Space, and Audience Experience in The Menaechmi and The Comedy of Errors” in Chapter 4.
Reginald J. Fletcher, ed., The Pension Book of Gray’s Inn (London: Printed at the Chiswick Press and published by order of the Masters of the Bench, 1901), 1:87.
On Crew, see Maija Jansson, “Sir Thomas Crewe (1566–1634),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Tiffany Stern, “Taking Part: Actors and Audience on the Stage at Blackfriars,” in Lnside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage, ed. Paul Menzer (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2006), 35–53, esp. 48.
On the pervasive, and sometimes indiscriminate, use of the term “theatricality” in studies of Renaissance England, see Thomas Postlewait, “Theatricality and Antitheatricality in Renaissance London,” in Theatricality, ed. Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 90–126.
William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, ed. Charles Whitworth, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5.1.237–40. All subsequent references to the play will be to this edition. Parenthetical references are to act, scene, and lines and are incorporated into the text.
Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 40–45. Palfrey and Stern are using the term part in the sense of the written piece of paper that an actor would be given including his (and only his) speeches and cues.
Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 99–100. See also Erika T. Lin, “‘Lord of thy Presence’: Bodies, Performance, and Audience Interpretation in Shakespeare’s King John” in Chapter 6. As Lin explains, the process of “personation” involved actors becoming “physical incarnations” of the characters they were playing.
Charles Henry Hopwood, ed., Middle Temple Records (London: Published by the Order to the Masters of the Bench, 1904), 1:303–4. The episode is discussed in Finkelpearl, John Marston, 40. Again, there is a clear analogy with the “fiction-reality axis” that Bergeron identifies in Elizabeth I’s royal entry in Chapter 7.
For biographical information on William Holt, see Wilfrid R. Prest, The Rise of the Barrister: A Social History of the English Bar, 1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 370.
On the relationship between leisure and pedagogy at the inns, see O’Callaghan, The English Wits, 23–27. On the revels as an opportunity to master the arts of courtly display, see also Douglas Lanier, “‘Stigmatical in Making’: The Material Character of The Comedy of Errors,” in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays, ed. Robert S. Miola (New York: Routledge, 2001), 299–334, esp. 319–21.
Edward Waterhouse, Fortescutus Illustratus (London: 1663), 546.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006), 3.2.99–100.
Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), 75–76. See also Peter Hyland’s discussion of the relationships between actors and their roles in “Face/Off: Some Speculations on Elizabethan Acting,” Shakespeare Bulletin 24, no. 2 (2006): 21–29.
For important recent work on legal modes of thought in The Comedy of Errors, see Cormack, “Comedy of Errors” and Lorna Hutson, “The Evidential Plot: Shakespeare and Gascoigne at Gray’s Inn,” in The Intellectual and Cultural World of the Early Modern Inns of Court, ed. Jayne Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, and Sarah Knight (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming), and Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), esp. 147–57.
For readings of The Comedy of Errors in the specific context of the Gesta Grayorum, see also Maureen Godman, “‘Plucking a Crow’ in The Comedy of Errors,” Early Theatre 8, no. 1 (2005): 53–68; Lanier, “‘Stigmatical in Making,’” 322–23
Robert S. Miola, “The Play and the Critics,” in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays, ed. Robert S. Miola (New York: Routledge, 2001), 1–51, esp. 28–29.
Eamon Grennan, “Arm and Sleeve: Nature and Custom in The Comedy of Errors,” Philological Quarterly 59, no. 2 (1980): 150–64.
Arthur Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 26.
Laurie Maguire, “The Girls from Ephesus,” in The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays, ed. Robert S. Miola (New York: Routledge, 2001), 355–91, esp. 382.
Thomas Middleton, “The Triumphs of Integrity,” ed. David M. Bergeron in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 11. 309–10. See also Peter McCullough’s discussion of Donne’s play on brotherhood in his sermon at the funeral of Sir William Cokayne. “Preaching and Context: John Donne’s Sermon at the Funerals of Sir William Cokayne” in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, ed. Peter McCullough, Hugh Adlington, and Emma Rhatigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
As Robert S. Miola notes, the phrase “comedy of errors” soon became a common expression. “The Play and the Critics,” 4. See also John Munro, ed., The Shakespeare Allusion Book, 2 vols (London: Humphrey Milford, 1932).
Cormack draws attention to the way in which the fit between Shakespeare’s play and the “Night of Revels” is so neat that there is a strong suggestion that the disruption on Innocent’s Night was itself a staged event. “Comedy of Errors.” See also Ann Hurley, “Interruption: The Transformation of a Critical Feature of Ritual from Revel to Lyric in John Donne’s Inns of Court Poetry of the 1590s,” in Ceremony and Text in the Renaissance, ed. Douglas F. Rutledge (London: Associated University Presses, 1996), 103–22. As Hurley points out, the 1597–98 Middle Temple revels feature a comparable interruption when the embassy from Lincoln’s Inn have to leave abruptly because there is not enough room. See Benjamin Rudyerd, Le Prince D’Amour or The Prince of Love (London, 1660), 88.
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© 2011 Jennifer A. Low and Nova Myhill
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Rhatigan, E.K. (2011). Audience, Actors, and “Taking Part” in the Revels. In: Low, J.A., Myhill, N. (eds) Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558–1642. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118393_9
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