Editions in Collier, Five Old Plays (1833), and Dodsley4 (1874, iv), and by H. C. Grumbine (1900), J. S. Farmer (1911, T. F. T.), and J. W. Cunliffe (1912, E. E. C. T.).
Of the seven collaborators, three—Bacon, Yelverton, and Fulbecke—subsequently attained distinction. It is to be wished that editors of more important plays had been as communicative as offended dignity, or some other cause, made Thomas Hughes.
WILLIAM HUNNIS (?-1597).
[Nearly all that is known of Hunnis, except as regards his connexion with the Blackfriars, and much that is conjectural has been gathered and fully illustrated by Mrs. C. C. Stopes in Athenaeum and Shakespeare-Jahrbuch papers, and finally in William Hunnis and the Revels of the Chapel Royal (1910, Materialien, xxix).]
The date of Hunnis’s birth is unknown, except as far as it can be inferred from the reference to him as ‘in winter of thine age’ in 1578. He is described on the title-page of his translation of Certayne Psalmes (1550) as ‘seruant’ to Sir William Herbert, who became Earl of Pembroke. He is in the lists of the Gentlemen of the Chapel about 1553, but he took part in plots against Mary and in 1556 was sent to the Tower. He lost his post, but this was restored between Elizabeth’s accession in 1558 and the opening of the extant Cheque Book of the Chapel in 1561, and on 15 Nov. 1566 he was appointed Master of the Children in succession to Richard Edwardes (q.v.). For the history of his Mastership, cf. ch. xii (Chapel). Early in 1559 he married Margaret, widow of Nicholas Brigham, Teller of the Exchequer, through whom he acquired a life-interest in the secularized Almonry at Westminster. She died in June 1559, and about 1560 Hunnis married Agnes Blancke, widow of a Grocer. He took out the freedom of the Grocers’ Company, and had a shop in Southwark. He was elected to the livery of the Company in 1567, but disappears from its records before 1586. In 1569 he obtained a grant of arms, and is described as of Middlesex. From 1576–85, however, he seems to have had a house at Great Ilford, Barking, Essex. His only known child, Robin, was page to Walter Earl of Essex in Ireland, and is said in Leicester’s Commonwealth to have tasted the poison with which Leicester killed Essex in 1576 and to have lost his hair. But he became a Rider of the Stable under Leicester as Master of the Horse during 1579–83, and received payments for posting services in later years up to 1593. In 1562 William Hunnis became Keeper of the Orchard and Gardens at Greenwich, and held this post with his Mastership to his death. He supplied greenery and flowers for the Banqueting Houses of 1569 and 1571 (cf. ch. i). In 1570 the Queen recommended him to the City as Taker of Tolls and Dues on London Bridge, and his claim was bought off for £40. In 1583 he called attention to the poor remuneration of the Mastership, and in 1585 he received grants of land at Great Ilford and elsewhere. He died on 6 June 1597.
Hunnis published several volumes of moral and religious verse, original and translated: Certayne Psalmes (1550); A Godly new Dialogue of Christ and a Sinner (S. R. 1564, if this is rightly identified with the Dialogue of Hunnis’s 1583 volume); A Hive Full of Honey (1578, S. R. 1 Dec. 1577, dedicated to Leicester); A Handful of Honnisuckles (N.D., S. R. 11 Dec. 1578, a New Year’s gift to the Ladies of the Privy Chamber); Seven Sobbes of a Sorrowful Soule for Sinne (1583, S. R. 7 Nov. 1581, with the Handful of Honnisuckles, The Widow’s Mite, and A Comfortable Dialogue between Christ and a Sinner, dedicated to Lady Sussex); Hunnies Recreations (1588, S. R. 4 Dec. 1587, dedicated to Sir Thomas Heneage). Several poems by Hunnis are also with those of Richard Edwardes and others in The Paradyse of Daynty Deuises (1567); one, the Nosegay, in Clement Robinson’s A Handfull of Pleasant Delites (1584); and it is usual to assign to him two bearing the initials W. H., Wodenfride’s Song in Praise of Amargana and Another of the Same, in England’s Helicon (1600).
The name of no play by Hunnis has been preserved, although he may probably enough have written some of those produced by the Chapel boys during his Mastership. That he was a dramatist is testified to by the following lines contributed by Thomas Newton, one of the translators of Seneca, to his Hive Full of Honey.
In prime of youth thy pleasant Penne depaincted Sonets sweete,
Delightfull to the greedy Eare, for youthfull Humour meete.
Therein appeared thy pregnant wit, and store of fyled Phraze