William Heminges

William Heminges (1602 – c. 1653?), also Hemminges, Heminge, and other variants, was a playwright and theatrical figure of the Caroline period. He was the ninth child and third son of John Heminges, the actor and colleague of William Shakespeare.

William Heminges was christened on 3 October 1602 in the parish of St. Mary's, Aldermanbury, in London. He was educated at Winchester School and then at Christ Church, Oxford, where he attained his M.A. degree in 1628. Only two of his plays have survived, The Jews' Tragedy (1626; published 1662) and The Fatal Contract (c. 1639; published 1653). In these two tragedies, the dramatist was strongly influenced by the works of Shakespeare. A third play is lost: titled The Coursing of the Hare, or the Madcap, it was staged at the Fortune Theatre in March 1633.

Little is known of Heminges's life. The parish records of St. Giles in the Fields record the birth of a daughter in 1639, and the burials of two sons a decade later. He was in financial difficulties in the middle 1630s, and spent some time in prison. His date of death is a mystery; Andrew Pennycuicke and Anthony Turner, the booksellers who issued The Fatal Contract in 1653, refer to him then as deceased.

Among Heminges's non-dramatic literary works, his satirical "Elegy on Randolph's Finger" (c. 1632) has gathered significant attention from scholars and critics. Its fullest version occurs in MS. Ashmole 38 in the collection of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. The poem refers to an incident in which Thomas Randolph lost his finger "in a fray" with "a riotous gentleman." (Heminges and Randolph were friends and former schoolmates.) In the poem, the severed finger is carried into the Underworld by group of English poets that includes Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, George Chapman, Thomas Heywood, James Shirley, John Ford, John Webster, and Richard Brome, among others — the "neoterical refined wits" of the age.

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