Richard Hunt

Richard Hunt (alternatively Hunte) was born in Gloucestershire in 1596, the son of a cleric, and died in February 1661. He is primarily noted for his connection to William Shakespeare. Life He attended Oriel College, Oxford, from which he matriculated on 4 December 1612 at the age of 16. He received his B.A. on 23 October 1615, his M.A. on 10 July 1618, and a Bachelor of Divinity sometime afterwards. Thereafter, on 8 July 1621, he became vicar of Bishop's Itchington, and three years later, on 24 January 1623 married Anne Lees of nearby Lighthorne (d.1636), a parish in the Stratford-on-Avon district of Warwickshire. In 1657 he performed the funeral oration over Robert Lucy, a relative of the Thomas Lucy of Charlecote figuring in legends of Shakespeare's youth. All of his seven children died in infancy or childhood between 1631 and 1657. Shakespeare as Roscius Paul Altrocchi, retired professor of Neurology at Stanford Medical School, and a lifelong subscriber to the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, according to which the works of Shakespeare were actually written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, in 2003 made what the mainstream Elizabethan scholar Alan H. Nelson of Berkeley University termed "one of the most important Shakespeare discoveries of recent years"; Altrocchi noted in a copy of the 1590 edition of William Camden's Britannia, that turned out to be Richard Hunt's, an annotation which read: et Gulielmo Shakespear Roscio planè nostro (and to William Shakespeare, manifestly our Roscius). The periphrastic eponym Roscius here is an allusion to the great Roman actor Quintus Roscius Gallus, and was applied at the time by John Weever (1599) and Thomas Fuller (1662) to Edward Alleyn, and by William Camden to Richard Burbage. It was variously applied to actors like Richard Tarlton and William Ostler, the latter by John Davies of Hereford. There is one instance of it referring to playwrights, Ben Jonson and William Davenant. Nelson and Altrocchi conclude: