Shakespeare · Lewkenor · The Inns of Court
The Comedy of Errors: Twins, Travellers and the Night of Errors
I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.
So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.
Antipholus of Syracuse, The Comedy of Errors, I.ii.
A divided family, a foreign city and a comedy performed amid the confusion of an Elizabethan revel.
Before its mistaken dinners, disputed debts and furious beatings, The Comedy of Errors begins with a traveller under sentence of death. Egeon has entered Ephesus from Syracuse, a city whose merchants are forbidden there. He must find money before sunset or die. His explanation carries the audience back to a shipwreck, a broken household and two pairs of identical boys.
Lewes Lewkenor’s writings offer a revealing way into this world: travellers displaced from home, strangers judged by appearances, and stories in which identity becomes dangerously uncertain. The documentary trail also leads to the Inns of Court, where the earliest recorded performance of the comedy took place on 28 December 1594.
The Night of Errors: 28 December 1594
The Christmas revels at Gray’s Inn created a miniature court, complete with a ruler, officers, ceremonial honours and diplomatic visitors. Henry Helmes played the Prince of Purpoole. The Inner Temple sent an ambassador and his train to this imaginary principality. The language of rank and diplomatic courtesy was part of the entertainment.
The surviving account, Gesta Grayorum, describes what happened when too many distinguished spectators crowded onto the stage:
There arose such a disordered tumult and crowd upon the stage, that there was no opportunity to effect that which was intended: there came so great a number of worshipful personages upon the stage that might not be displaced, and gentlewomen whose sex did privilege them from violence, that when the Prince and his officers had in vain, a good while, expected and endeavoured a reformation, at length there was no hope to redress for that present.
Gesta Grayorum (1688), account of the revels of 1594–95, pp. 21–22; spelling modernised.
The visitors took offence. The account calls their representative the “Lord Ambassador”, but this was the ambassador of the Inner Temple within the mock court. The failure to accommodate him became an affront to the dignity of his society:
The Lord Ambassador and his train thought that they were not so kindly entertained as was before expected, and thereupon would not stay any longer, but, in a sort, discontented and displeased. After their departure, the throngs and tumults did somewhat cease, although so much of them continued as was able to disorder and confound any good inventions whatsoever.
Gesta Grayorum, pp. 21–22; spelling modernised.
Once the visitors had gone, the evening continued with dancing and the play:
It was thought good not to offer anything of account, saving dancing and reveling with gentlewomen; and after such sports, a Comedy of Errors (like to Plautus his Menechmus) was played by the players. So that night was began and continued to the end in nothing but confusion and errors; whereupon, it was ever afterwards called, “The Night of Errors”.
Gesta Grayorum, p. 22; spelling modernised.
The comedy’s confusion spilled into the story of its performance. An entertainment intended to display the hospitality and order of a miniature state became memorable for disorder, injured precedence and a departing delegation. Published in 1688, the account preserves the revels’ own comic treatment of the fiasco. See the surviving printed record at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
A translator among the lawyers and poets
Lewkenor entered the Middle Temple in 1579. The Inns of Court joined legal education to literary activity, performance and elaborate ceremonial play. They supplied an audience alert to statutes, evidence, arrest, jurisdiction and the language of argument. Those subjects run through The Comedy of Errors, from Egeon’s sentence to the dispute over a gold chain.
A further connection appears among the commendatory verses to Lewkenor’s The Commonwealth and Government of Venice (1599). A poem signed “Henry Elmes” praises his experience abroad and the value of his translation:
’Tis not affected grace, or mockt disguise
Assures a true return from foreign parts.
Travel confounds the vain, confirms the wise,
Leukenor live thou esteemed for thy deserts,
While thy last travels do thy first commend,
To strangers proved in them a grateful friend,
And for thy absence to thy native clime,
A welcome Venturer of rich prized time.
Henry Elmes, commendatory verse in Lewkenor, The Commonwealth and Government of Venice (1599), preliminary matter; spelling modernised.
The proposed identification of this Henry Elmes with Henry Helmes, the Prince of Purpoole, would link Lewkenor’s literary reception directly to the presiding figure at the revels. The different forms of the name require care: the printed poem securely establishes Elmes’s endorsement of Lewkenor; identifying its signer with the prince is a further step.
The poem’s language is particularly apt beside the comedy. “Foreign parts”, “mockt disguise”, travel and service to strangers belong to a world in which a man’s outward appearance can misrepresent his experience. Elmes praises the traveller who returns with knowledge, rather than merely an affected manner.
“No difference at all”: Lewkenor’s lookalikes
In The Spanish Mandeville of Miracles (1600), Lewkenor translated Antonio de Torquemada’s collection of extraordinary histories and discussions. Its speakers debate resemblance: can two people look so much alike that even those close to them cannot tell them apart? Ludovico introduces the question:
The shapes of men being all one their countenances and gestures so divers, that it is unpossible to find one like another in all points. Whereas I have heard and read of many that were so like in resemblance the one unto the other, that there was no difference at all to be found between them.
Ludovico, in Torquemada, The Spanish Mandeville of Miracles, translated by Lewkenor (1600); spelling modernised.
These are speeches in Torquemada’s dialogue, rendered into English by Lewkenor. Their first-person accounts belong to its speakers. They should be read as translated narratives, rather than as incidents Lewkenor claims personally to have witnessed.
One example concerns two young men sold to Mark Antony as brothers. Their resemblance proves more extraordinary when their different origins are discovered:
The first is of two striplings which one Toranius sold to Marke Anthonio, saying, they were two brothers, when in truth the one was born in Europe and the other in Asia, whose likeness was such, that there was not in any one point difference between them, and when Anthonio finding himself deceived, began to be angry, Toranius satisfied him in saying, that there was greater cause of wonder in this diversity of their nations, than if as he first had said, they had been born and begotten of one father and mother.
Ludovico, The Spanish Mandeville of Miracles (1600); spelling modernised.
Shakespeare multiplies the difficulty by giving his comedy two pairs of twins: the Antipholus brothers and their servants, both called Dromio. An audience can follow the substitutions while the characters cannot. The translated anecdote poses the same underlying question of knowledge: how much can a face prove about a person’s family and origins?
The servant claimed by another family
Bernardo supplies a longer story. A servant is approached by a man who insists that they are brothers. The resemblance seems conclusive, yet the servant denies knowing him. An inheritance is involved, so the question must be settled:
The Earl had a lackey, whom another man came to seek, saying he was his brother, and that he had run away from his parents being young, they were so like, that there was not between them any jot of difference at all, unless it were that he who came were somewhat more in years, but which is strangest, though the lackey were sent for to take possession of some goods left him by his father: yet did he constantly deny the other to be his brother: whereupon the Earl commanded them both to go to the same village for to satisfy an old woman there, which said, she was mother to them both.
Bernardo, The Spanish Mandeville of Miracles (1600); spelling modernised.
The woman then produces what should be decisive evidence: a childhood burn. Even that test fails to establish the identity she believes in:
The lackey coming thither, could not persuade them but that he was the selfsame whom they supposed, in the end the old woman looking fixedly upon him, for better assurance (quoth she) if thou art my son, thou hast in such a place on your leg a mark, which when thou wert a child was burned. The lackey with wonderful astonishment confessed that he had such a mark indeed, though still persevering with oaths to affirm that he knew them not, and that he never in all his life before had been in that village, as the truth indeed was, for afterwards it was proved, that he was born far from that place, and it was well known who were his parents.
Bernardo, The Spanish Mandeville of Miracles (1600); spelling modernised.
The comparison reaches beyond a general interest in twins. A servant arrives among strangers who insist that he belongs to them. He denies their account of his life; their apparent evidence contradicts his own knowledge. In Shakespeare’s comedy, each Dromio is repeatedly punished for failing to recognise a situation that belongs to the other.
“The fruit and exercise of your youngest years”
The date 1600 belongs to the book’s publication, not to the making of Lewkenor’s translation. Ferdinando Walker’s address to Lewkenor, dated 23 April 1600, explicitly describes an early work preserved for years before it reached print:
Receive, therefore, gentle Master Lewkenor, this poor Treatise, having so many long years lien obscured among your waste papers, and lately by your cruel sentence condemned to the fire, now with a milder conceit under your protection; for though you think it unworthy of the world’s view, as being the fruit and exercise of your youngest years, yet I assure you, it hath passed the censure of grave and learned judgments, and received excellent allowance; through whose encouragements I have presumed to give it life, and no longer to deprive the world of a discourse so worthy to be known and published.
Ferdinando Walker, address to Lewes Lewkenor, The Spanish Mandevile of Miracles (1600), preliminary matter, dated London, 23 April 1600; spelling modernised.
Walker also tells the dedicatee that the translation was the gentleman’s “first labour”, undertaken “for his exercise in the Spanish tongue”, and kept by him “many years”. These statements place the translation in Lewkenor’s early literary work. Its stories of mistaken identity were therefore part of his English writing well before their publication in 1600.
This changes the chronological argument. The 1600 imprint does not rule out a relationship with a comedy performed in 1594: Walker supplies direct testimony that the translation had a substantial earlier existence. His reference to “grave and learned judgments” also shows that others had assessed it before publication. He does not give the year of translation or name Shakespeare among its readers; access by the playwright remains the question to investigate.
The classical relationship is more direct. Gesta Grayorum itself compares the performed comedy to Plautus’s Menaechmi, a comedy of separated twin brothers. Shakespeare’s use of a second pair of doubles also invites comparison with the confusions of master and servant in Plautus’s Amphitruo. These classical precedents give the resemblance stories a wider literary setting.
Travel and the loss of the self
Antipholus of Syracuse enters Ephesus to look for his brother and mother. His “drop of water” speech turns that search into a fear of disappearance. Finding the lost family may mean losing his own identity. The city then supplies a grotesque answer: strangers know his name, claim his money, invite him home and call him husband.
The opening warning makes the danger of being a stranger explicit:
Therefore give out you are of Epidamium,
Lest that your goods too soon be confiscate.
This very day a Syracusian merchant
Is apprehended for arrival here,
And, not being able to buy out his life,
According to the statute of the town
Dies ere the weary sun set in the west.
First Merchant, The Comedy of Errors, I.ii.
False identity initially offers protection from the law. Mistaken identity then threatens every other form of security: the traveller’s money, freedom, bodily safety and confidence in his senses. Reading the play beside Lewkenor’s discussions of travel and resemblance brings those anxieties into focus without reducing the comedy to a single historical key.
From confusion to recognition
The ending brings both sets of twins into view. What separate encounters made impossible becomes intelligible when the doubles can stand together. Egeon’s family is restored, the disputed actions can be assigned to the right men, and the servants finally escape the contest over who should go first:
We came into the world like brother and brother,
And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another.
Dromio of Ephesus, The Comedy of Errors, V.i.
At Gray’s Inn, an evening designed around precedence had collapsed into offended dignity. The comedy ends by giving its two servants a different solution: they walk together. That contrast makes the setting of the Night of Errors especially suggestive. Both the play and its first recorded occasion turn on the difficulty of knowing people, placing them correctly and making a society work.
Sources and further reading
Gesta Grayorum (London, 1688), pp. 20–23; Folger Shakespeare Library, C444 copy 1. See also D. S. Bland’s edition (1968), and Alan H. Nelson’s documentary commentary for Shakespeare Documented.
Lewes Lewkenor, The Commonwealth and Government of Venice (1599), preliminary verses signed Henry Elmes. The poem has been checked against the EEBO–TCP transcription; spelling is modernised.
Antonio de Torquemada, The Spanish Mandeville of Miracles (1600), translated by Lewkenor, dialogue passages on closely resembling people. Spelling is modernised in the extracts above.
William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, I.ii and V.i; Plautus, Menaechmi and Amphitruo.
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