John Heminges - Life

Life

Heminges was born in Droitwich Spa, Worcestershire in 1556. Sent to London as an apprentice at age twelve, he was presented to the Grocers' Company, becoming a freeman in 1587. In London, he lived in the parish of St Mary Aldermanbury, at which church he served as a sidesman. On 10 March 1588 Heminges and Rebecca Knell were married at the church, and they had 14 children baptized there between 1590 and 1613. Alexander Chalmers originated the now-accepted argument that his wife was the widow of William Knel, an actor with the Queen's Men who had been killed in 1587 a fight with John Towne, a fellow actor. His association with theatre had certainly begun by 1593; records from that year show Heminges and Augustine Phillips, another future King's Man, in the touring company of Lord Strange's Men. By the next year he and Phillips had joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men/King's Men. He stayed with this company until his death. In 1630, Privy Council records show he received ₤100 to relieve the company during a period of plague; Heminges himself died a short time after this order, at age 73.

Heminges as mentioned in Shakespeare's will along with Richard Burbage and Henry Condell, each was bequeathed two nobles (roughly a pound) to buy mourning rings in his memory. Burbage died before the publication of the First Folio, but Heminges and Condell acted as ostensible co-editors and mentioned in their epistle to "the great Variety of Readers" the "care, and paine" they took to collect the works, since the author had not "liv'd to have set forth, and overseen his owne writings". Their editorial efforts were vital to preserving a number of Shakespeare's plays, some of which might have been lost otherwise.

Heminges remained active in the Grocers' Company alongside his theatrical activities; indeed, the two sometimes intertwined. He was, between 1608 and 1621, one of the ten citizen seacoal-meters for the city of London. Beginning in 1595, he bound ten apprentices with the Grocers' Company; of these ten, eight appear to have performed for Heminges' company, in both boys' and adult roles. Alexander Cooke was one of his apprentices.

Due to his intimate involvement in the creation of the First Folio, readers have found it both tempting and easy to idealize Heminges; one early critic, exercising more admiration than objectivity, wrote that "He was a fine actor, a trustworthy man, and had a good head for business. Until his death, he managed the company's financial affairs with extraordinary success." A darker picture of Heminges emerged when American researcher Charles William Wallace discovered the records of the lawsuit Ostler v. Heminges (1615). When King's Man William Ostler died intestate in 1614, his property should have passed to his widow, Thomasine Heminges Ostler. But the widow's father, John Heminges, seized control of his late son-in-law's shares in the Globe and Blackfriars theatres. Thomasine sued her father to regain her property. The surviving records do not specify the final outcome of the suit, though it appears that Heminges managed to retain control of the shares. At his death, his shares in the Globe and Blackfriars theatres passed to his son, William Heminges.

On Heminges's death in October 1630, his body was taken back to St Mary Aldermanbury and buried on 12 October. He had asked in his will to be buried as close to his wife as possible.