Edward Alleyn
English actor (1566–1626)
Edward Alleyn ( AL-in; 1 September 1566 – 21 November 1626) was an English actor who was a major figure of the Elizabethan theatre and founder of the College of God's Gift in Dulwich.
Early life
Alleyn was born on 1 September 1566 in Bishopsgate, London; or so it was recorded in the Biographia Britannica as a product of Alleyn's own writing. Alleyn does record his birth date in a diary several times but does not distinctly identify his birthplace as Bishopsgate. In the St. Botolph parish registers it is recorded that he was baptized on the day after his birth. He was born a younger son of Edward Alleyn with two brothers named John, and William. His father was an innkeeper and porter to Queen Elizabeth I and his mother, Margaret Townley, was the daughter of John Townley. His mother's link to the Lancashire Towneley family is somewhat of a mystery. Alleyn said she was the daughter of John Townley of Townley but the claim does not easily fit with the available information on the Townley family tree. Regardless of this, the road that passes Alleyn's School was named after her in 1884.
“Edward Alleyn” enters the record as english actor (1566–1626). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Edward, Alleyn and English can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Edward Alleyn” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Edward, Alleyn and English provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q560455. VIAF identifies the subject as 3640149068575265730000. The Library of Congress control number is n50022999. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1566, 1626 and 1884.
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This entry incorporates text from “Edward Alleyn” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.