John Lowin

By late 1603, he had joined the new King's Men, apparently as a hired man rather than a sharer, as his name is not mentioned in the original royal patent.

That he became important to the company fairly quickly is suggested by his appearance as himself (alongside Richard Burbage and Henry Condell) in the induction to John Marston's The Malcontent.

He is mentioned in the surviving cast lists of the company's productions of Ben Jonson's Sejanus (1603), Volpone (1605), The Alchemist (1610), and Catiline (1611), John Fletcher's Bonduca and Valentinian (both ca.

From that year until the theaters closed in 1642, Lowin (together with Joseph Taylor) assumed the roles previously fulfilled by Heminges, serving as treasurers and as contacts with the court and with the Master of the Revels.

Lowin, whose portrait in the Ashmolean Museum reveals as a large and imposing figure, is often associated with comic characters, especially those of a "stout blunt humor," including Falstaff and Melantius in Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy.

On the authority of James Wright's Historia Histrionica (1699), he is also associated with Jonson's Epicure Mammon (The Alchemist), Morose (Epicoene), and the title role in Volpone.

Finally, in Roscius Anglicanus, John Downes reports that Lowin originated the title role in Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII.