Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 44.djvu/242

 

 PEER, WILLIAM (d. 1713), actor, owes the survival of his name to a humorous mention of his career by Steele in the ‘Guardian,’ No. 82. He is declared to have been an actor at the Restoration, and to have taken ‘his theatrical degree under Betterton, Kynaston, and Harris.’ No mention of him is traceable in early theatrical records, and Genest only quotes what is said by Steele. He is said to have ‘distinguished himself particularly in two characters, which no man ever could touch but himself.’ One was the speaker of the prologue to the play introduced into ‘Hamlet.’ This preface he spoke ‘with such an air as represented that he was an actor, and with such an inferior manner as only acting an actor, as made the others on the stage appear real great persons, and not representatives. This was a nicety in acting that none but the most subtle player could so much as conceive.’ His delivery of the three lines assigned him won universal applause. His second part was the Apothecary in the ‘Caius Marius’ of Otway, an adaptation of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ first played at Dorset Garden in 1680. When Marius demanded the poison ‘Peer at length consented in the most lamentable tone imaginable, delivered the poison like a man reduced to the drinking of it himself, and said: My poverty, but not my will consents; Take this and drink it off, the work is done.’ Steele continues: ‘It was an odd excellence, and a very particular circumstance this of Peer's, that his whole action of life depended upon speaking five lines better than any man else in the world.’ No other parts were apparently assigned him, and the management of the Theatre Royal (Drury Lane) gave him the post of property man. The easy circumstances thus induced made him grow fat and so disqualify himself for his theatrical parts. This, it is hinted, shortened his life, which closed near his seventieth year, presumably about June 1713. Steele then gives a list of the properties Peer left behind him, including items such as 8d. for ‘pomatum and vermilion to grease the face of the stuttering cook, 3d. for blood in Macbeth, 8d. for raisins and almonds for a witch's banquet,’ &c.

 PEERIS, WILLIAM (fl. 1520), family chronicler, was a clerk in holy orders and secretary to Henry Algernon Percy, fifth earl of Northumberland [q. v.] He wrote in English verse a ‘Metrical Chronicle’ of the Percys from the Conquest downwards. It commences ‘here beginneth the Prologue of this little treaties followinge wch is ye dis-cent of the Lord Percies made … by me Wm Peeris, clerke and priest, secretary to the Rt noble Earl Harry the Vth Earl of Northumberland.’ According to De Fonblanque, who quotes copiously from it, it is full of inaccuracies; the original manuscript is now among the Royal MSS. in the British Museum Library (18 D ii) (, Cat. p. 283), but a copy is also extant among the Dodsworth MSS. in the Bodleian (, Cat. Cod. No. 4192), which the Rev. John Besley, vicar of Long Benton, printed at Newcastle in 1845. Ritson also attributes to Peeris some proverbs in verse which adorned the walls of three apartments in Wressell Castle, Yorkshire, and have been printed in the ‘Antiquarian Repertory,’ ed. 1808, iv. 332, &c. A manuscript copy is among the Royal MSS. in the British Museum.

 PEERS, RICHARD (1645–1690), translator and author, the son of Richard Peers of Lisburn, co. Antrim, was born there in 1645. His father, a poor tanner, apprenticed him to his own trade. Peers, however, ran away to Bristol, whence an uncle sent him to a school in Carmarthenshire. It is stated on doubtful authority that the master was Jeremy Taylor, and that by Taylor's intercession Peers became a scholar at Westminster under Busby. He matriculated from Christ Church, Oxford, on 22 July 1664, aged 19, was elected student in 1665, and graduated B.A. in 1668, M.A. in 1671. As an undergraduate he eked out his scanty living by ‘doing the exercises of idle scholars.’ In 1670 the delegates of the university press bought of Wood for 100l. his completed ‘History and Antiquities,’ with a view to publishing a Latin translation. The work was entrusted to Dr. Fell of Christ Church, who employed Peers to execute it. Wood says that Peers was no Latin scholar when he took up the translation, and frequent alterations had at first to be made in his rendering. In a year, however, he translated to the end of 1298, and ‘at length, by his great diligence and observation overcoming the difficulties, became a