Dramatist and miscellaneous writer (temp. Elizabeth), produced “The Rocke of Regard” (1576); “The right excellent and famous Historye of Promos and Cassandra” (1578); “An Heptameron of Civill Discourses” (1582); “A Mirur for Magestrates of Cyties” (1584); “An Addition: or, Touchstone of the Time” (1584); “The Honourable Reputation of a Souldier” (1586); “The English Myrror” (1586); “The Enemie to Unthriftynesse” (1586); “Amelia” (1593); and “Remembrances” of the lives of several worthies, including Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and George Gascoigne.

  One Gentleman notwithstanding among them may I not ouerslyppe, so farre reacheth his fame, and so worthy is he, if hee haue not already, to weare the Lawrell wreathe, Master George Whetstone, a man singularly well skyld in this faculty of Poetrie.

  A more enduring interest attaches, in the history of our dramatic literature, to the next play founded on a subject from Italian story. George Whetstone’s “Promos and Cassandra,” from which Shakspere took the story of his “Measure for Measure,” was printed in 1578; and its subject is a novel of Giraldi Cinthio’s, which Whetstone himself translated in his “Heptameron of Civil Discourses” (1582). Cinthio himself dramatised the story in a work of earlier date. The author of this play, in his Dedication, exhibits a very critical spirit, and for various reasons condemns the dramatic tastes of the principal literary nations of Europe, his own among the number. But though he takes lofty ground with reference to both diction and construction, it cannot be said that he was in practice highly successful in either respect. Consideration of “Decorum” preventing him from “convaying” his whole story in a single play of five acts, he has distributed it over two—but very unequally as to the serious interest of the argument, which is wholly absorbed by the first part. And to “work kindly” the action of his characters, he has made his low comedy very low, and his grosser characters very gross…. It was something different from mere condensation which converted “Promos and Cassandra” into “Measure for Measure.”

  Whetstone’s service is to have pointed out the way in which others more richly gifted than himself were hereafter to walk.

  Whetstone’s works are crude productions, and are interesting only to the historian of literature and the bibliographer. He achieved some reputation in his day.