The present hall has the great distinction, according to Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, of being “one of the only two buildings now remaining in London in which, so far as we know, any of the plays of Shakespeare were performed in his own time.”[385] The other, of course, being the Middle Temple Hall, where Twelfth Night was acted on February 2, 1601-2.
The Comedy of Errors was played on the evening of Innocents’ Day (December 28), 1594, in the hall, before a crowded audience; some of the guests from the Inner Temple created a disturbance because they were not properly accommodated, and this led to an official inquiry. Mr. Sidney Lee thinks it probable that Shakespeare himself was not present, as he was acting on the same day before the Queen at Greenwich. Another performance of the play was given in the hall by the Elizabethan Stage Society on December 6, 1895.[386]
George Gascoigne’s Jocasta, adapted from the Phœnissæ of Euripides, was acted in the Refectory in 1566. Gray’s Inn was famous for its masques and revels, and on July 7, 1887, in honour of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, the Benchers of Gray’s Inn presented in the hall, to a distinguished audience, the Masque of Flowers, which had been performed before James I. on Twelfth Night, two hundred and sixty-four years before.
Gray’s Inn had a brilliant roll of members in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it is Bacon’s spirit that seems to haunt the whole place. He helped the students in preparing their revels, probably wrote a masque or masques, and planted trees in the gardens, the arrangement of which he is believed to have super-intended. His name remains in Verulam Buildings.
Returning to Holborn, and walking a little to the west, we come to the impressive front of Staple Inn, the most remarkable street front of old houses still in existence in London. The origin of the place is unknown, and nothing satisfactory has been discovered respecting the meaning of the name, or as to what it was before it came into the occupation of the Inn of Chancery. There is a tradition that it originally belonged to the merchants of the Staple. It was purchased by the Benchers of Gray’s Inn in 1529, and in Elizabeth’s reign there were 145 students in term, and 69 out of term. It was bought in 1884 by the Prudential Assurance Company for £68,000, and the Holborn front was restored and cleared from plaster covering the timber beams.