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GEORGE WHETSTONE (1544?-1587?)

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Originally appearing in Volume V28, Page 587 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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GEORGE WHETSTONE (1544?-1587?)  ,
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English dramatist and author, was the third son of Robert Whetstone (d . 1557) . A member of a wealthy
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family that owned the
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manor of Walcot at Bernack, near Stamford, he appears to have inherited a small patrimony which he speedily dissipated, and he complains bitterly of the failure of a lawsuit to recover an
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inheritance of which he had been unjustly deprived . In 1572 he joined an English regiment on active service in the Low Countries, where he met George Gascoigne and Thomas Churchyard . Gascoigne was his guest near Stamford when he died in 1577, and Whetstone commemorated his friend in a long
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elegy . His first
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volume, the Rocke of Regarde (1576), consisted of tales in
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prose and verse adapted from the
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Italian, and in 1578 he published The right excellent and famous Historye of Promos and
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Cassandra, a
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play in two parts,
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drawn from the eighty-fifth novel of Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatomithi . To this he wrote an interesting preface addressed to William Fleetwood, recorder of
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London, with whom he claimed kinship, in which he criticizes the contemporary drama . In 1582 he published his Heptameron of Civill Discourses, a collection of tales which includes The Rare Historie of Promos and Cassandra . From this prose version apparently Shakespeare drew the plot of Measure for Measure, though he was doubtless familiar with the story in its earlier dramatic form . Whetstone accompanied
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Sir Humphrey Gilbert on his expedition in 1578-1579, and the next
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year found him in Italy . The Puritan spirit was now abroad in England, and Whetstone followed its dictates in his prose tract A Mirour for Magestrates (1584), which in a second edition was called A Touchstone for the Time . Whetstone did not abuse the stage as some Puritan writers did, but he objected to the performance of plays on Sundays .

In 1585 he returned to the

army in Holland, and he was
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present at the
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battle of Zutphen . His other
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works are a collection of military anecdotes entitled The Honourable Reputation of a Souldier (1585); a
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political tract, the English Myrror (1586), numerous elegies on distinguished persons, and The Censure of a Loyall Subject (1587) . No information about Whetstone is available after the publication of this last
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book, and it is conjectured that he died shortly afterwards .

End of Article: GEORGE WHETSTONE (1544?-1587?)
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