Читать книгу A Life of William Shakespeare with portraits and facsimiles - Sir Sidney Lee - Страница 68

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At the close of 1594 a performance of Shakespeare’s early farce, ‘The Comedy of Errors,’ gave him a passing notoriety that he could well have spared. The piece was played on the evening of Innocents’ Day (December 28), 1594, in the hall of Gray’s Inn, before a crowded audience of benchers, students, and their friends. There was some disturbance during the evening on the part of guests from the Inner Temple, who, dissatisfied with the accommodation afforded them, retired in dudgeon. ‘So that night,’ the contemporary chronicler states, ‘was begun and continued to the end in nothing but confusion and errors, whereupon it was ever afterwards called the “Night of Errors.” ’ [70] Shakespeare was acting on the same day before the Queen at Greenwich, and it is doubtful if he were present. On the morrow a commission of oyer and terminer inquired into the causes of the tumult, which was attributed to a sorcerer having ‘foisted a company of base and common fellows to make up our disorders with a play of errors and confusions.’