Shakespeare's Actors (3)
Some information about other actors who performed in Shakespeare's plays:
- John Heminges (Heminge): Baptized November 25, 1566 in Droitwich,
- Worcestershire. Apprenticed in 1578 (age 11) to James Collins, a London grocer; Collins died in 1585, but Heminges finished out his apprenticeship under his widow and became free of the Grocers' Company in 1587. In March 1588 he married Rebecca Edwards Knell, the 16-year-old widow of William Knell, a famous player with the Queen's Men who had been killed by his fellow Queen's Man John Towne the previous year. Heminges may have also been associated with the Queen's Men, since his grant of arms in 1629 (the year before he died) calls him a longtime servant of Queen Elizabeth, King James, and King Charles. In 1593 he was with Strange's Men, and his first definite appearance with the Chamberlain's is 1596, though he was probably with the troupe from its inception. He died in 1630. (More...)
- Henry Condell: Baptized September 5, 1576, in Norwich,
- Norfolk, the son of Robert Condell, a fishmonger. On October 24, 1596, at the age of 20, he married Elizabeth Smart, a wealthy heiress whose father had recently died, and for the next several years the couple was involved in lawsuits against relatives of Elizabeth's who had tried to take advantage of her youth to get at her money. The Condells eventually won, and Henry was a very wealthy man, with a net worth in the thousands of pounds. His first definite appearance as an actor is in Jonson's Every Man in His Humour with the Chamberlain's Men in 1598 (age 21 or 22), though he may be the "Harry" in several Strange's Men "plots" from earlier in the 1590s. (More...
- Nicholas Tooley: Born late 1582 or early 1583, in Antwerp,
- the son of a wealthy merchant-adventurer who died when Nicholas was an infant. His mother remarried at least twice, and some time in the 1590s Nicholas came under the care of Cuthbert Burbage and his wife, with whom he lived until the end of his life in 1623, and through whom he became an actor. He most likely acted with the Chamberlain's Men, though his first definite appearance is with the King's Men as a legatee in Augustine Phillipps' will (1605).
- Samuel Cross is named as one of the actors in the First
- Folio, and is named by Thomas Heywood as a famous actor "before my time" (i.e. the mid 1590s), but otherwise nothing is known of him. A Samuel Crosse was baptized in 1568, which may be the actor.<.LI>
Biographies provided by David Kathman.