CHETTLE, HENRY (c. 156o-16o7), English dramatist and miscellaneous writer, was the son of Robert Chettle, a Lon don dyer. He was apprenticed in 1577 to a printer, and in 1 589 became a partner with William Hoskins and John Danter. In I 592 he published Robert Greene's Groatsworth of Wit. In the preface to his Kind Herts Dreame (end of 1592) he admits his editorship of that pamphlet, and incidentally he apologized to three persons (one of them commonly identified with Shake speare) who had been abused in it. As early as 1598 Francis Meres includes him in his Palladis Tamia as one of the "best for comedy," and between that year and 1603 he wrote or col laborated in some forty-eight pieces. He seems to have been gen erally in debt, judging from numerous entries in Henslowe's diary of advances for various purposes, on one occasion (Jan. 17, 5599) to pay his expenses in the Marshalsea prison, on another (March 7, 1603) to get his play out of pawn. Of the plays usually attributed to Chettle's sole authorship only one was printed. This was The Tragedy of Hoffmann: or a Revenge for a Father (played 1602; printed 1631), a share in which Mr. Fleay assigns to Thomas Heywood. It has been suggested that this piece was put forward as a rival to Shakespeare's Hamlet. The Pleasant Comedie of Patient Grissill (1599) , in which he collaborated with Thomas Dekker and William Haughton, was reprinted by the Shakespeare Society in 1841. In Nov. 1S99 Chettle receives ten shillings for mending the first part of "Robin Hood," i.e. The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon, by Anthony Munday; and in the second part, which followed soon after and was printed in 160r, The Death of Robert, Earle of Huntingdon, he col laborated with Munday. Both plays are printed in Dodsley's Select Collection of Old English Plays (ed. W. C. Hazlitt, vol. viii.). Chettle died before the appearance of Dekker's Knight's Conjuring in 1607, for he is there mentioned as a recent arrival in limbo.
Hoffmann was edited by H. B(arrett) L(ennard) (1852), by Richard Ackermann (Bamberg, 1894), and J. S. Farmer in Old English Plays, Students' Facsimile Edition (1913).