HUNNIS, WILLIAM (d. 1597), English musician and poet, was as early as 1549 in the service of William Herbert, afterwards earl of Pembroke. In 155o he published Certayne Psalms . . . in Englishe metre, and shortly afterwards was made a gentleman of the Chapel Royal. During the reign of Mary he was impli cated in plots against the queen, and was imprisoned for some time. In 1566 he was made Master of the children of the Chapel Royal. No complete piece of his is extant, perhaps because of the rule that the plays acted by the children should not have been pre viously printed: In his later years he purchased land at Barking.
Hunnis's extant works include Certayne Psalms (1549) , A Hive full of Hunnye (1578), Seven Sobbes of a sorrowful Soule for Sinne (1583) , Hunnies Recreations (1588) , 16 poems in the Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576) , and two in England's Helicon (1600) . See Mrs. C. Carmichael Stopes's tract on William Hunnis, reprinted (1892) from the Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare Gesellschaft.