John Heminges

• 1. Introduction

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  John Heminges appears in Shakespeare's will alongside two other men. Richard Burbage and Henry Condell each received the same bequest: 26 shillings and eightpence to buy a mourning ring. Of those three, only Heminges and Condell were still alive in 1623 when the First Folio appeared. That book gathered Shakespeare's plays into a single volume for the first time. Without it, a number of those plays might have been lost entirely. Heminges was baptised on the 25th of November 1566 at St Peter de Witton Church in Droitwich, Worcestershire. By the time he died in 1630, he had spent nearly four decades at the center of the playing company Shakespeare called home. He was formally a grocer. He was in practice a theatre manager, a civic official, a landlord, and a literary editor. The question is how all of those lives fit inside a single man.

• 2. A Grocer's Apprentice

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  Heminges was sent to London at twelve years old to be trained in a trade. He spent nine years as an apprentice to the City Grocer John Collins. On the 24th of April 1587, that training was complete, and he became a freeman of the Grocers' Company. Less than a year later, his life took a different turn. On the 10th of March 1588, he received a licence to marry Rebecca Knell. She was sixteen years old. She was already a widow: her first husband, William Knell, had been an actor with the Queen's Men. Knell had been killed in 1587 at Thame in Oxfordshire by a fellow actor named John Towne. The new couple settled in the parish of St Mary Aldermanbury in London. There they had at least thirteen children between 1590 and 1613. Rebecca's first husband had died as a working actor. Within a few years, Heminges himself would be doing the same.

• 3. The King's Men

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  By 1593, Heminges was performing alongside the actor Augustine Phillips with Lord Strange's Men. Within a year, both had moved to the Lord Chamberlain's Men. That company later became the King's Men under James I, and Heminges remained with it until his death. His role within the company was not primarily that of a performer. Court documents relating to the King's Men almost always list Heminges as the one receiving money on the company's behalf. Henry Herbert's records indicate that he at least sometimes served as the company's point of contact with the Master of the Revels. In August 1604, that role placed him at Somerset House. Heminges and his fellow King's Men served there as grooms in the Spanish ambassador's household. The ambassador was Juan Fernandez de Velasco y Tovar, the 5th Duke of Frias. Shakespeare himself may have been among them, though the records are not clear on this. The actors were likely employed simply as extra staff in the grand household arrangements, not as recipients of any special royal favour. In 1630, Privy Council records show Heminges receiving 100 pounds to help the company through a period of plague. His holdings in the Globe Theatre made him more than an employee of that company. Those holdings would one day become the subject of a lawsuit brought by his own daughter.

• 4. Between Two Worlds

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  On the 13th of December 1608, Heminges was appointed one of ten seacoal-meters for the city of London. These were citizens charged with measuring the coal imported into the city by sea. He took on John Jackson as his deputy shortly after. Jackson would later join Heminges as a trustee when Shakespeare purchased the Blackfriars Gatehouse in 1613.

  Between 1595 and 1628, Heminges took on ten apprentices through the Grocers' Company. Eight of those ten appear to have performed for his theatrical company, in both boys' and adult roles. Alexander Cooke was one of them. Heminges also built and operated a taphouse at the Globe Theatre. He may have owned a structure abutting the playhouse, possibly used as an alehouse. The practical intelligence he had applied to the company's finances and civic affairs would soon find a different outlet entirely.

• 5. Preserving Shakespeare

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  Richard Burbage died in 1619, before the great editorial project was complete. Heminges and Henry Condell addressed the First Folio's preface to "the great Variety of Readers." In it, they expressed a wish that "the Author himselfe had liv'd to have set forth, and overseen his owne writings." They also described their own care and pain "to haue collected & publish'd" the works. Heminges had worked at the heart of Shakespeare's company. That standing gave his editorial role a weight that an outsider could not have brought. His name appears on the Folio's pages as an editor. Whether his name appears equally clearly as a performer in the plays contained within it is a question scholars have never fully resolved.

• 6. The Stage and the Courtroom

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  Ben Jonson's Sejanus and Every Man in His Humour both list Heminges as a performer, in each case alongside Shakespeare. A Jacobean inscription in the 1616 Jonson folio also credits him with playing Corbaccio in Volpone. That list includes Nathan Field, who did not join the King's Men until 1616. The implication is that Heminges continued to act, at least intermittently, into his fifties. The scholar Edmond Malone reported seeing Heminges's name associated with the role of Falstaff, but no other record links him to that part. A claim was later made to the poet Alexander Pope that Heminges had been a tragedian. The surviving evidence offers little to support it.

  As a sharer in the Globe Theatre, Heminges's name appears repeatedly in legal documents uncovered by the American researcher Charles William Wallace. The Globe attracted lawsuits because shares were sometimes left to heirs who had little interest in the company's welfare. One such case, known as Heminges v Ostler, was brought against him by his own daughter, Thomasina Ostler, who sued over a share in the company. The surviving records do not reveal the outcome.

  Heminges died in October 1630 in Southwark. He was buried on the 12th of October at St Mary Aldermanbury, the parish where he and Rebecca had settled more than four decades before. In his will, he had asked to be laid to rest as close to his wife as possible. At his death, his shares in the Globe and the Blackfriars Theatre passed to his son, William Heminges. The lawsuit records that accumulated during his years as a sharer remain among the most detailed surviving documents of how Shakespeare's company conducted its business.