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Henry Glapthorne

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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HENRY GLAPTHORNE (fl. 1635-1642), English poet and dramatist, wrote in the reign of Charles I. All that is known of him is gathered from his own work. He published Poems (1639), many of them in praise of an unidentified "Lucinda"; a poem in honour of his friend Thomas Beedome, whose Poems Divine and Humane he edited in 1641; and Whitehall (1642), dedicated to his "noble friend and gossip, Captain Richard Lovelace." The first volume contains a poem in honour of the duke of York, and Whitehall is a review of the past glories of the English court, containing abundant evidences of the writer's devotion to the royal cause. Argalus and Parthenia (1639) is a pastoral tragedy founded on an episode in Sidney's Arcadia; Albertus Wallenstein (1639), his only attempt at historical tragedy, represents Wallenstein as a monster of pride and cruelty. His other plays are The Hollander (written 1635; printed 1640), a romantic comedy of which the scene is laid in Genoa; Wit in a Constable (1640), which is probably a version of an earlier play, and owes something to Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing; and The Ladies Priviledge (1640). The Lady Mother (1635) has been identified (Fleay, Biog. Chron. of the Drama ) with The ,. Noble Trial, one of the plays destroyed by Warburton's cook, and Mr A. H. Bullen prints it in vol. ii. of his Old English Plays as most probably Glapthorne's work. The Paraside, or Revenge for Honour (1654), entered at Stationers' Hall in 1653 as Glapthorne's, was printed in the next year with George Chapman's name on the title-page. It should probably be included among Glapthorne's plays, which, though they hardly rise above the level of contemporary productions, contain many felicitous isolated passages.

The Plays and Poems of Henry Glapthorne (1874) contains an unsigned memoir, which, however, gives no information about the dramatist's life. There is no reason for supposing that the George Glapthorne of whose trial details are given was a relative of the poet.