HENSLOWE, PHILIP (d. 1616), English theatrical man ager, was the son of Edmund Henslowe of Lindfield, Sussex, master of the game in Ashdown forest and Broil park. He appears to have been in the service of the bailiff to Viscount Montague, and settled in Southwark before 1577. He married the bailiff's widow, and, with the fortune he got with her, he became a considerable owner of Southwark property. He started his connection with the stage when he bought (March 24, 1584) land near the southern end of Southwark bridge, on which stood the Little Rose playhouse, afterwards rebuilt as the Rose. Suc cessive companies played in it under Henslowe's financial man agement between 1592 and 1603. The theatre at Newington Butts was also under him in 1594. A share of the control in the Swan theatre, which like the Rose was on the Bankside, fell to Hens lowe before the close of the 16th century. With the actor Edward Alleyn, who married his step-daughter Joan Woodward, he built in Golden lane, Cripplegate Without, the Fortune play house, opened in Nov. 160o. In Dec. 1594 they had secured the Paris garden, a place for bear-baiting, on the Bankside, and in 1604 they bought the office of master of the royal game of bears, bulls and mastiffs from the holder, and obtained a patent. Alleyn sold his share to Henslowe in Feb. 161o, and three years later Henslowe formed a new partnership with Jacob Meade and built the Hope playhouse, designed for stage performances as well as hull and bear-baiting, and managed by Meade.
In the theatres in which Henslowe had a share were first pro duced many plays by the famous Elizabethan dramatists. His relations to the companies who acted in his theatres were very complicated. In the case of the "Admiral's Men" he was not their manager or director, but practically their banker, in which capacity he probably influenced policy and certainly had a hold on play wrights and actors to whom he made advances. What is known as "Henslowe's Diary" contains some accounts referring to Ash down forest between 1576 and 1581, entered by John Henslowe, while the later entries by Philip Henslowe from 1S92 to 1609 are a principal source of information for the theatrical history of the time, and for the biography of individual playwrights and actors.
"Henslowe's Diary" passed into the hands of Edward Alleyn, and thence into the Library of Dulwich college, where the manu script remained intact for more than 150 years. In 1780 Malone tried to borrow it, but it had been mislaid; in 1790 it was dis covered and given into his charge. He was then at work on his Variorum Shakespeare. Malone had a transcript made of certain portions, and collated it with the original; and this transcript, with various notes and corrections by Malone, is now in the Dulwich library. An abstract of this transcript he also published with his Variorum Shakespeare. The ms. of the diary was eventually returned to the library in 1812 by Malone's executor. In 1840 it was lent to J. P. Collier, who in 1845 printed for the Shakespeare Society what purported to be a full edition, but it was afterwards shown by G. F. Warner (Catalogue of the Dulwich library, 1881) that a number of forged interpolations have been made, the responsibility for which rests on Collier.
See Henslowe's Diary, ed. J. P. Collier (Shakespeare Soc., 1845) Henslowe's Diary, ed. W. W. Greg (19o4—o8) ; Henslowe Papers, being Documents Supplementary to Henslowe's Diary, ed. W. W. Greg (1907) ; E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (vol. i., 1923) .