"Thursday.—At breakfast, brawn, mustard, and malmsey. At dinner, roast beef, venison-pasties, with like solemnities as afore. And at supper, mutton and hens roasted.
"New Year's Day.—In the morning, breakfast as formerly. At dinner like solemnity as on Christmas Eve.
"The Banquetting Night.—It is proper to the Butler's office, to give warning to every House of Court, of this banquet; to the end that they and the Innes of Chancery, be invited thereto to see a play and mask. The hall is to be furnished with scaffolds to sit on, for Ladies to behold the sports, on each side. Which ended the ladyes are to be brought into the Library, unto the Banquet there; and a table is to be covered and furnished with all banquetting dishes, for the Lord Chancellor, in the Hall; where he is to call to him the Ancients of other Houses, as many as may be on the one side of the table. The Banquet is to be served in by the Gentlemen of the House.
"The Marshall and Steward are to come before the Lord Chancellour's mess. The Butlers for Christmas must serve wine; and the Butlers of the House beer and ale, &c. When the banquet is ended, then cometh into the Hall the Constable-Marshall, fairly mounted on his mule; and deviseth some sport for passing away the rest of the night.
"Twelf Day.—At breakfast, brawn, mustard, and malmsey, after morning prayer ended. And at dinner, the Hall is to be served as upon St. John's Day."
The performance of "Gorboduc" at the Inner Temple was received with such great applause, and the services of Lord Robert Dudley, first favourite of the Queen, so highly appreciated at that particular "grand Christmasse," that Queen Elizabeth commanded a repetition of the play about a fortnight later, before herself, at her Court at Whitehall. A contemporary MS. note (Cotton MSS., Vit. F. v.) says of
The Performance before the Queen,
that "on the 18th of January, 1562, there was a play in the Queen's Hall at Westminster by the gentlemen of the Temple after a great mask, for there was a great scaffold in the hall, with great triumph as has been seen; and the morrow after, the scaffold was taken down." An unauthorised edition of the play was first published, in September of that year, by William Griffith, a bookseller in St. Dunstan's Churchyard; but nine years afterwards an authorised and "true copy" of the play was published by John Day, of Aldersgate, the title being then altered from "Gorboduc" (in which name the spurious edition had been issued) to "Ferrex and Porrex." The title of this edition set forth that the play was "without addition or alteration, but altogether as the same was shewed on stage before the Queen's Majestie, by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple." The argument of the play was taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth's "History of British Kings," and was a call to Englishmen to cease from strife among themselves and become an united people, obedient to one undisputed rule:—