Poets in the Parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate

Abstract

HE unpublished Parish Registers of St. Giles, Cripplegate,1 now on deposit in the London Guildhall Library, add to the small store of biographical data available concerning some by i6thand i7th-ceCntury poets. These poets, in some instances, were also playwrights, and information about them is of interest to students of the period. John Shaw(e) is identified as a Poett in the burial entry of his wife Margery on the 7th of July, i609. It is impossible to be certain that the wedding of one John Shawe and Margarett Evans on the ist of July, I590, refers to the same man. Parish clerks were not always accurate, and Margaret might easily have become Margery. Was Mary, the daughter of John Shawe, weaver, who was buried on the 7th of December, I592, a child of this marriage? A John Shawe is listed as scrivener when his daughter Camelia was christened on the i6th of January, i602. An entry on the 22nd of June, i6io, records the burial of John Shawe, Yeoman, and another on the 23rd of March, i6I3, the burial of Joyce, wife of John Shawe, yeoman. I suspect these entries concern two separate men, but it is possible that these are the burial records of the poet, and of his second wife. On the other hand, the John Shaw, Poett, may have been the John Shaw known to literary historians, who was described by Simon Wastel in i623 (A true Christians daily delight) as his schoolmate at Westmoreland fifty years before, and a fellow student at Queen's College, Oxford. According to the DNB, this Shaw was vicar at Woking, Surrey, in i588, was deprived in I596 for non-conformity, and is supposed to have lived at Woking until his death in i625. He was married and had two sons, John and Tobias. The Short-Title Catalogue lists two titles under the name of John Shaw: Biblii summula (i621), and The blessedness of Marie, the mother of Jesus. A sermon (i6i8). Of more dramatic interest is information about George Wilkins, dramatist and poet. Kenneth Muir, referring in his preface to The Painfull Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre2 says, Very little is known about George Wilkins. The dramatist is not the poet whose death is recorded in the burial register of St. Leonard's, Shoreditch, i9 August i603, but may have been his son, and also the victualler who testified in the Mountjoy-Bellott suit of i6I2, according to the belief of Guy Sheppard Greene.3 George B. Dickson lists three men of