English dramatist, a native of Cheshire, entered Queens College, Cambridge, in 1571. He graduated and became a fellow of his college in 1576, and was afterwards a member of Grays Inn. He wrote The Misfortunes of Arthur. Uther Pendragons son reduced into tragical notes by Thomas Hughes, which was performed at Greenwich in the Queens presence on the 28th of February 1588. Nicholas Trotte provided the introduction, Francis Flower the choruses of Acts I. and II., William Fulbeck two speeches, while three other gentlemen of Grays Inn, one of whom was Francis Bacon, undertook the care of the dumb show. The argument of the play, based on a story of incest and crime, was borrowed, in accordance with Senecan tradition, from mythical history, and the treatment is in close accordance with the model. The ghost of Gorlois, who was slain by Uther Pendragon, opens the play with a speech that reproduces passages spoken by the ghost of Tantalus in the Thyestes; the tragic events are announced by a messenger, and the chorus comments on the course of the action. Dr. W. J. Cunliffe has proved that Hughess memory was saturated with Seneca, and that the play may be resolved into a patchwork of translations, with occasional original lines. Appendix II. to his exhaustive essay On the Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (1893) gives a long list of parallel passages.
The Misfortunes of Arthur was reprinted in J. P. Colliers supplement to Dodsleys Old Plays; and by Harvey Carson Grumline (Berlin, 1900), who points out that Hughess source was Geoffrey of Monmouths Historia Britonum, not the Morte DArthur.