Thomas Freeman, was a minor English Jacobean poet and epigramist who is mostly remembered for writing an early poem addressed to Shakespeare. Freeman was born near Moreton-in-Marsh

Moreton-in-Marsh

Moreton-in-Marsh is a town and civil parish in northeastern Gloucestershire, England. The town is at the crossroads of the Fosse Way Roman road and the A44. The parish and environs are relatively flat and low-lying compared with the surrounding Cotswold Hills...

, Gloucestershire

Gloucestershire

Gloucestershire is a county in South West England. The county comprises part of the Cotswold Hills, part of the flat fertile valley of the River Severn, and the entire Forest of Dean....

, and entered Magdalen College, Oxford

Magdalen College, Oxford

Magdalen College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. As of 2006 the college had an estimated financial endowment of £153 million. Magdalen is currently top of the Norrington Table after over half of its 2010 finalists received first-class degrees, a record...

, in 1607 at the age of 16 and matriculated with a Bachelor of Arts 22 June 1611.

After graduation he moved to London, and in 1614 published two collections of epigrams in one volume, Rvbbe, and A great Caste, and Rvnne And a great Cast: the second bowle, dedicated to Thomas, Lord Windsor. They were addressed to many of the contemporary poets as well as the poets of history, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Daniel, Donne, Spenser, Heywood, and Chapman. His last poem was written in 1630 to commemorate the birth of Charles, Prince of Wales

Charles II of England

Charles II was monarch of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland.Charles II's father, King Charles I, was executed at Whitehall on 30 January 1649, at the climax of the English Civil War...

.

His Epigram 92 is an early example of Shakespeare criticism.

To Master W: Shakespeare.

Shakespeare, that nimble Mercury thy braine,

Lulls many hundred Argus-eyes asleepe,

So fit, for all thou fashionest thy vaine,

At th' horse-foote fountaine thou hast drunk full deepe,

Vertues or vices theame to thee all one is:

Who loues chaste life, there’s Lucrece for a Teacher:

Who list read lust there’s Venus and Adonis,

True modell of a most lasciuious leatcher.

Besides in plaies thy wit windes like Meander:

Whence needy new-composers borrow more

Thence Terence doth from Plautus or Menander.

But to praise thee aright I want thy store:

Then let thine owne works thine owne worth vpraise,

And help t'adorne thee with deserued Baies.

His epigram 37 has attracted some attention from modern readers, owing perhaps to its self-reflexive commentary:

Whoop, whoop, me thinkes I heare my Reader cry,

Here is rime doggrell: I confesse it I;

Nor to a certaine pace tie I my Muse;

I giue the Reines, anon the Curbe I vse;

And for the foote accordingly I fit her,

To diuerse matter vsing diuerse meeter,

Her lines, they are as long as I allot her,

As why not, vessels be as please the Potter,

Nor care I for a Censors ciuill hood,

I please my selfe, at home my Musicke's good.

Freeman was mentioned by Anthony Lane

Anthony Lane

Anthony Lane is a film critic for The New Yorker magazine.-Personal life:Lane lives in Cambridge with Allison Pearson, a British writer and former Daily Mail columnist...

 in a review of Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey's 1990 English Poetry Full-Text Database, a set of 4 CD-ROM

CD-ROM

A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback. The 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data....

s which, in that pre-WWW age, struck him as "a magnificent tribute to the powers of human incompetence --- and also, by the same token, to the blessings of human forgetfulness." This incident was described by James Gleick

James Gleick

James Gleick is an American author, journalist, and biographer, whose books explore the cultural ramifications of science and technology...

 as an example of how unprepared people were for the WWW to bring all of human literature to the tips of their fingers. Gleick mistakenly states that Freeman is not mentioned on Wikipedia

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...

, although it's possible that this very page was added as a response to Gleick's anecdote.