WHETSTONE, GEORGE (1544 ?-1587?), English drama tist and author, was the third son of Robert Whetstone (d. 1557). In 1572 he joined an English regiment on active service in the Low Countries, where he met George Gascoigne and Thomas Churchyard. Gascoigne was his guest near Stamford when he died in 1577, and Whetstone commemorated his friend in a long elegy. He wrote: Rocke of Regarde (1576), tales in prose and verse adapted from the Italian; The right excellent and famous Historye of Promos and Cassandra (1578), a play in two parts, drawn from the 85th novel of Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatomithi; Heptameron of Civill Discourses (1582, reprint in Hazlitt's Shakespeare's Library, vol. iii. 1875), a collection of tales which includes The Rare Historie of Promos and Cassandra. From this prose version apparently Shakespeare drew the plot of Measure for Measure, though he was doubtless familiar with the story in its earlier dramatic form. Whetstone accompanied Sir Humphrey
Gilbert on his expedition in 1578-79, and the next year found him in Italy. The Puritan spirit was now abroad in England, and Whetstone followed its dictates in his prose tract A Mirour for Magestrates (1584), which in a second edition was called A Touchstone for the Time. In 1585 he returned to the army in Holland, and he was present at the battle of Zutphen.
His other works are a collection of military anecdotes entitled The Honourable Reputation of a Souldier (5585) ; a political tract, the English Myrror (r.586), numerous elegies on distinguished persons, and The Censure of a Loyall Subject (1587). the edition of Promos and Cassandra by J. S. Farmer, 191o, m Tudor Facsimile Texts.