Henry Glapthorne
Henry Glapthorne was a 17th-century English playwright and the fourth son of Thomas Glapthorne, a country squire from Cambridgeshire. Baptized in July 1610, he was registered at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1624. His personal life included the loss of his mother shortly after his registration, and he had a daughter named Lovelace, with the tragic death of his wife Susan occurring in 1643, the year he is believed to have died. Glapthorne's literary contributions consist of seven surviving plays, with four additional titles known but not extant. His notable works, such as "The Lady's Privilege" and "Revenge for Honour," reveal a tendency to draw heavily on existing dramatic conventions, including self-plagiarism and borrowing from contemporaries like Ben Jonson and John Fletcher. Glapthorne's plays often feature exotic settings and stock characters, employing dramatic devices such as coincidence and unlikely resurrections. Despite his engagement with the dramatic traditions of his time, he is generally regarded as having produced works that lack the depth and innovation seen in the works of his more celebrated peers.
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Henry Glapthorne
Playwright
- Born: 1610
- Birthplace: England
- Died: 1643?
- Place of death: England
Biography
Relatively little is known about Henry Glapthorne. He apparently was the fourth son of country squire, Thomas Glapthorne, in Cambridgeshire, England, who was a bailiff. Glapthorne was the first surviving son of Thomas’s third wife, Faith Hatcliffe Glapthorne. He was baptized in St. Andrew’s parish in Whittlesey in July, 1610.
Little is known about Glapthorne’s early education, but he was registered in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University, in the spring of 1624. His mother died in the following year. Records exist documenting the baptism of Glapthorne’s only daughter, Lovelace, on July 1, 1642, and of the death of his wife, Susan, on March 22, 1643. Glapthorne is thought to have died in the same year.
What is known about the dramatic artistry of Henry Glapthorne is gleaned from his seven extant plays. There is evidence that he wrote four other plays whose titles are known but that have not been found. Of the plays that exist, probably The Lady’s Privilege and Revenge for Honour are the strongest, although all of Glapthorne’s plays are derivative and unoriginal. The author had a perplexing habit of plagiarizing from himself, usurping lines from one play to use in another. Also, he was not adverse to lifting lines from dramatists like Ben Jonson or John Fletcher and incorporating them into his own scripts, although he cannot be judged too harshly for this because many of the major playwrights of his day were not above such thievery.
Glapthorne was a Royalist during a time when the English throne was threatened and eventually toppled in the fall of King Charles I. He appears to have written his plays in considerable haste and with little care. He frequently employed stock situations and stereotypical characters in his dramas, and he depended on such elements as exotic settings, coincidence, and unbelievable resurrections from the dead to advance his plots.
In Revenge for Honour, the setting is exotic—the court of Almanzor, the Caliph of Arabia. Two half brothers, Abilqualit and Abrahen, vie for the love of the immoral Caropia, wife of Mura, a soldier. A situation arises in which the affair between Abilqualit, son of the caliph, and Caropia is revealed. To save Caropia from a humiliating condemnation, Abilqualit falsely confesses to rape, a crime whose punishment is blinding. The punishment is meted out and Abilqualit supposedly dies. When this happens, the grief-stricken caliph wipes tears from his eyes with a poisoned handkerchief placed on Abilqualit’s body by Abrahen and promptly dies. Abrahen now claims the throne and kills Caropia, but Abilqualit is not really dead. He revives and launches a revolution against his Abrahen, who kisses the toxic handkerchief and dies. As in much Caroline tragedy, when the play ends, the stage is strewn with dead bodies. Glapthorne wrote in the traditions of his age, but he did not write very well. He never approached the heights of Jonson’s comic realism or of Fletcher’s tragicomedy.