Life
He was a native of Preston, Lancashire. Little is known of his early life and his parentage is not certain. He may be the son of the John Weever who in 1590 was one of thirteen followers of local landowner Thomas Langton put on trial for murder after a riot which took place at Lea Hall, Lancashire.
He was educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he was admitted as a sizar on 30 April 1594. Weever's first tutor at Cambridge was William Covell, himself a native of Lancashire and author of Polimanteia (1595) which contains one of the first printed notices of Shakespeare. Another of Weever's tutors was Robert Pearson, whom in later life he mentions with gratitude as a 'reverend, learned divine'. It is possible that Weever considered a career in the church himself but after receiving his degree on 16 April 1598 he appears to have left Cambridge and travelled to London, where he immersed himself in the literary scene. In late 1599 he published Epigrammes in the Oldest Cut, and Newest Fashion, containing a sonnet on Shakespeare, and epigrams on Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, William Warner and Christopher Middleton, all of which are valuable to the literary historian. The sonnet on Shakespeare is particularly interesting since it follows the typical Shakespearian sonnet form: this may indicate Weever had seen actual examples of Shakespeare's sonnets, which at this date circulated only in manuscript. Many other epigrams however relate to persons Weever knew at Cambridge and presumably were composed while he was still a student there. The book also has commendatory verses by some of Weever's Cambridge friends.
Weever was in York in 1603 and later apparently in Lancashire. Eventually however he settled in London and married, buying a house in the parish of St. James, Clerkenwell. His wife's first name was Anne, but it is not clear from the surviving records whether she was Anne Edwards, who married a man named John Weaver in St. James' church in 1614; or Anne Panting, who married a John Weaver in the same church in 1617; or neither of these.
Weever died between mid-February and late March 1632 and was buried at St James, Clerkenwell. His own funeral monument has since been destroyed but a copy of the verses on it survives in the 1633 edition of John Stow's Survey of London.
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