whore! Your highness said even now I made you a duke: good my lord, do not recompense me in making me a cuckold. Duke. Upon mine honour, thou shalt marry her. Thy slanders I forgive; and therewithal Remit thy other forfeits.-Take him to prison, And see our pleasure herein executed. Lucio. Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, whipping, and hanging. Duke. Slandering a prince deserves it. She, Claudio, that you wrong'd, look you restore.— I have confess'd her, and I know her virtue.— Thanks, good friend Escalus, for thy much goodness: What's mine is your's, and what is your's is mine.- What's yet behind, that's meet you all should know'. 2 — THAT'S meet you all should know.] The first folio has "that meet," &c., and it was corrected in the second folio. Not so with a slight error of the same kind on the preceding page, where " If any woman's wrong'd " is printed in both the old copies "If any woman wrong'd." 3 Curtain drawn.] These words are in MS. at the conclusion of the play in the corr. fo. 1632. In general we are told that all the characters exeunt, but there is no such direction in any of the old copies of "Measure for Measure." There were curtains in our old theatres, that drew apart and disclosed the actors to the audience: here we must suppose that these curtains were drawn together, and that thus the piece concluded. We are not aware of any similar instance. "The Comedie of Errors was first printed in the folio of 1623, where it occupies sixteen pages, viz. from p. 85 to p. 100 inclusive, in the division of " Comedies." It was reprinted in the three subsequent impressions of the same volume. INTRODUCTION. WE have distinct evidence of the existence of an old play called "The Historie of Error," acted at Hampton Court on newyear's night, 1576-7. The same play, in all probability, was repeated at Windsor on twelfth-night, 1582-3, though, in the accounts of the Master of the Revels, it is called "The Historie of Ferrar." Boswell (Mal. Shakesp. iii. 406) not very happily conjectured, that this "Historie of Ferrar" was some piece by George Ferrers, as if it had been named after its author, who had been dead several years: the fact, no doubt, is, that the clerk, who prepared the account, merely wrote the title by his ear, and put down "of Ferrar" instead of "of Error." Thus we see that, shortly before Shakespeare is supposed to have come to London, a play was in course of performance upon which his own "Comedy of Errors" might have been founded. "The Historie of Error probably, an early adaptation of the Menæchmi of Plautus, of which a free translation was published in 1595, under the following title: was, "A pleasant and fine Conceited Comædie, taken out of the most excellent wittie Poet Plautus: Chosen purposely from out the rest, as least harmefull, and yet most delightfull. Written in English by W. W.-London Printed by Tho. Creede, and are to be sold by William Barley, at his shop in Gratious streete. 1595." 4to. The title-page, therefore, does not (as we might be led to suppose from Steevens's reprint in the "Six Old Plays ") mention the Menæchmi by name, but we learn it from the argument of the piece itself, which begins thus :— "Two twin-borne sonnes a Sicill marchant had, Menæchmus one, and Socicles the other."-Sign. A 3 b. Ritson was of opinion, "that Shakespeare was not under the slightest obligation" to the translation of the Menæchmi, by W. W., supposed, by Ant. Wood (Ath. Oxon. by Bliss, i. 766), to be W. Warner; and most likely Ritson was right, not from want of resemblance, but because "The Comedy of Errors" was, in all probability, anterior in point of date, and because Shakespeare may have availed himself of the old drama which, as already noticed, was performed at court in 1576-7, and in 1582-3. That court-drama, we may infer, had its origin in Plautus; and it was, perhaps, the popularity of Shakespeare's "Comedy of Errors" which induced Creede to print W. W.'s version of the Menæchmi |