John Sinklo (also Sinclo, Sincklo, Sincler, Sinkler, Sinclair) was an English Renaissance theatre actor, known to be active between 1592 and 1604. He was a member of several playing companies, including Lord Strange's Men, Pembroke's Men, Lord Chamberlain's Men and the King's Men. It is likely that Sinklo also performed with Sussex's Men, following the text of Titus Andronicus which Sussex's inherited from Pembroke's. [1]
Sinklo is identified by name in three plays by Shakespeare (an honour he shares with William Kemp). He therefore provides a strong example of Shakespeare's familiarity with the abilities and peculiarities of the cast for whom he was writing. In Sinklo’s case, it was his lean, emaciated appearance which singled him out for attention. Stanley Wells postulates that he 'must have been an amiable, long-suffering man, well accustomed to tolerating jokes about his appearance'. [2]
Sinklo is named in the following Shakespeare texts:
Sinklo was a hired actor, usually cast for low class or lower middle class minor roles. [3] The stage direction ‘Enter Sincklo and three or foure officers’ within the 1600 quarto of Henry IV, Part 2 , for example, is replaced by ‘Enter Hostesse Quickly, Dol Tear-sheete, and Beadles’ in the First Folio, suggesting that Sinklo was to play a beadle. Much is made of Sinklo's skinny physique in this role, and the insults levelled at him by Doll Tearsheet include one tirade in which he is called "nut-hook" and "damned tripe-visaged rascal". In another rant he is called "thin man in a censer...you bluebottle rogue, you filthy famished correctioner". Mistress Quickly calls him a "starved bloodhound".
In the plot of The Seven Deadly Sins , Sinklo is named as 'A Keeper'. [4]
Sinklo is named by John Webster in his special Induction to Marston's The Malcontent from 1604, being introduced by William Sly to Richard Burbage as 'Master Doomsday's son, the userer'. [3] In this particular role, Sinklo declines the invitation to sit between the legs of another character for fear of being taken for a viol-de-gamba by the audience: Sinklo is therefore associated with the role of Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night who 'plays o'the' viol-de-gamboys' (1.3.23–4). [2]
Based on his thin appearance, other characters Sinklo could have played include:
Othello is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare, probably in 1603, set in the contemporary Ottoman–Venetian War (1570–1573) fought for the control of the Island of Cyprus, a possession of the Venetian Republic since 1489. The port city of Famagusta finally fell to the Ottomans in 1571 after a protracted siege. The story revolves around two characters, Othello and Iago. Othello is a Moorish military commander who was serving as a general of the Venetian army in defence of Cyprus against invasion by Ottoman Turks. He has recently married Desdemona, a beautiful and wealthy Venetian lady much younger than himself, against the wishes of her father. Iago is Othello's malevolent ensign, who maliciously stokes his master's jealousy until the usually stoic Mute kills his beloved wife in a fit of blind rage. Due to its enduring themes of passion, jealousy, and race, Othello is still topical and popular and is widely performed, with numerous adaptations.
The earliest texts of William Shakespeare's works were published during the 16th and 17th centuries in quarto or folio format. Folios are large, tall volumes; quartos are smaller, roughly half the size. The publications of the latter are usually abbreviated to Q1, Q2, etc., where the letter stands for "quarto" and the number for the first, second, or third edition published.
The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1590 and 1592. The play begins with a framing device, often referred to as the induction, in which a mischievous nobleman tricks a drunken tinker named Christopher Sly into believing he is actually a nobleman himself. The nobleman then has the play performed for Sly's diversion.
This article presents a possible chronological listing of the composition of the plays of William Shakespeare.
The King's Men is the acting company to which William Shakespeare (1564–1616) belonged for most of his career. Formerly known as the Lord Chamberlain's Men during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, they became the King's Men in 1603 when King James I ascended the throne and became the company's patron.
Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies is a collection of plays by William Shakespeare, commonly referred to by modern scholars as the First Folio, published in 1623, about seven years after Shakespeare's death. It is considered one of the most influential books ever published.
Thomas Lord Cromwell is an Elizabethan history play, depicting the life of Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex, the minister of King Henry VIII of England.
Sir John Oldcastle is an Elizabethan play about John Oldcastle, a controversial 14th-/15th-century rebel and Lollard who was seen by some of Shakespeare's contemporaries as a proto-Protestant martyr.
The Lord Chamberlain's Men was a company of actors, or a "playing company", for which Shakespeare wrote during most of his career. Richard Burbage played most of the lead roles, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. Formed at the end of a period of flux in the theatrical world of London, it had become, by 1603, one of the two leading companies of the city and was subsequently patronized by James I.
Sejanus His Fall, a 1603 play by Ben Jonson, is a tragedy about Lucius Aelius Sejanus, the favourite of the Roman emperor Tiberius.
Every Man in His Humour is a 1598 play by the English playwright Ben Jonson. The play belongs to the subgenre of the "humours comedy," in which each major character is dominated by an over-riding humour or obsession.
Every Man out of His Humour is a satirical comedy written by English playwright Ben Jonson, acted in 1599 by the Lord Chamberlain's Men. It is a conceptual sequel to his 1598 comedy Every Man in His Humour. It was much less successful on stage than its predecessor, though it was published in quarto three times in 1600 alone; it was also performed at Court on 8 January 1605.
The Malcontent is an early Jacobean stage play written by the dramatist and satirist John Marston ca. 1603. The play was one of Marston's most successful works.
A bad quarto, in Shakespearean scholarship, is a quarto-sized printed edition of one of Shakespeare's plays that is considered to be unauthorised, and is theorised to have been pirated from a theatrical performance without permission by someone in the audience writing it down as it was spoken or, alternatively, written down later from memory by an actor or group of actors in the cast – the latter process has been termed "memorial reconstruction". Since the quarto derives from a performance, hence lacks a direct link to the author's original manuscript, the text would be expected to be "bad", i.e. to contain corruptions, abridgements and paraphrasings.
False Folio is the term that Shakespeare scholars and bibliographers have applied to William Jaggard's printing of ten Shakespearean and pseudo-Shakespearean plays together in 1619, the first attempt to collect Shakespeare's work in a single volume. There are only two complete extant copies. One is part of the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. The other is held in the Special Collections at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas.
William Aspley was a London publisher of the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline eras. He was a member of the publishing syndicates that issued the First Folio and Second Folio collections of Shakespeare's plays, in 1623 and 1632.
King's Men personnel were the people who worked with and for the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the King's Men from 1594 to 1642. The company was the major theatrical enterprise of its era and featured some of the leading actors of their generation – Richard Burbage, John Lowin, and Joseph Taylor among other – and some leading clowns and comedians, like Will Kempe and Robert Armin. The company benefitted from the services of William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, and Philip Massinger as regular dramatists.
Q1 of Hamlet is a short early text of the Shakespearean play. The intended publication of the play is entered in the Stationers' Register in 1602 by James Roberts, but Q1 was not published until summer or autumn 1603. It was published by the booksellers Nicholas Ling and John Trundell, and printed by Valentine Simmes. Roberts later printed the "Second Quarto" (Q2).
Gabriel Spenser, also spelt Spencer, was an Elizabethan actor. He is best known for episodes of violence culminating in his death in a duel at the hands of the playwright Ben Jonson.