John Hippisley (actor)

This was followed in the same season by Sir Hugh Evans in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, Gomez in John Dryden's The Spanish Friar, Polonius in Hamlet, Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida, and other comic parts.

[2] He remained at Lincoln's Inn Fields until the season of 1732–3, playing among many other characters Sir Francis Gripe in Susanna Centlivre's The Busie Body, Sir William Wisewood in Colley Cibber's Love's Last Shift, Corbaccio in Ben Jonson's Volpone, Old Woman in John Fletcher's Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, Obadiah in Robert Howard's The Committee, and Calianax in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy, and originating one or two characters, the most important of which was Peachum in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera in January 1728.

(The piece, with some alterations, and under the title of The Connaught Wife, was given in 1767 at the Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, and printed in London in the same year.

Hippisley played Sir Thomas Testy in March 1732 in his Sequel to Flora, or Hob's Wedding (1732), another adaptation from The Country Wake, attributed to John Leigh.

[2] His son John Hippisley appeared at Covent Garden as Tom Thumb, in April 1740; he later was known as a writer about Africa.

[2] He was buried in Clifton, Gloucestershire, with the following epitaph:[3] When the Stage heard that death had struck her John, Gay Comedy her Sables first put on; Laughter lamented that her Fav’rite died, And Mirth herself, (’tis strange) laid down and cry’d.