William Winter

Shadows of the Stage William Winter

It is recorded of John Lowin, an actor contemporarywith Shakespeare and associated with several ofShakespeare's greater characters (his range was sowide, indeed, that it included Falstaff, Henry the Eighth, and Hamlet), that, having survived the halcyon days of"Eliza and our James" and lingered into the drab andrusset period of the Puritans, when all the theatres inthe British islands were suppressed, he became poorand presently kept a tavern, at Brentford, called TheThree Pigeons. Lowin was born in 1576 and he died in1654-his grave being in London, in the churchyard ofSt. Martin-in-the-Fields-so that, obviously, he wasone of the veterans of the stag