Lorenzino de Medici

Lorenzino de' Medici , 1515-47, member of the cadet branch of the Medici family. A boon companion of Alessandro de' Medici , he secretly plotted the duke's murder—possibly out of republican convictions. With a hired assassin, he stabbed Alessandro to death (1537) and fled to Venice, where he was eventually assassinated on the orders of Cosimo I de' Medici, the successor to Alessandro. He is the hero of Alfred de Musset's drama, Lorenzaccio (1833).

Larivey, Pierre De (c.1540–1612), French dramatist, of Italian extraction—his name is a pun on the family name Giunti, ‘the newly arrived’. In 1577 he saw the Italian commedia dell'arte company the Gelosi play at Blois, and inspired by them he wrote nine comedies, six of which were published in 1579, and three in 1611. Though based on Italian models, they are in no sense translations but adaptations which often contain much new material. They were played extensively in the provinces, and also in Paris. The best known, Les Esprits (The Ghosts), is taken from a comedy by Lorenzino de' Medici, itself based on material from Plautus and Terence; in its turn it provided material for both Molière—L'École des maris (1661) and L'Avare (1668)—and Regnard—Le Légataire universel (1708). Larivey was the most substantial writer of comedy in France before Corneille.

Milton, Ernest (1890–1974), American-born actor who spent most of his life in England. He made his first appearance in the USA in 1912, and was first seen in London in Montague Glass and Charles Klein's Potash and Perlmutter (1914) and Potash and Perlmutter in Society (1916). After some varied experience, during which he played Oswald in Ibsen's Ghosts and Marchbanks in Shaw's Candida, he joined the company at the Old Vic in 1918, and then and on subsequent visits gave interesting and highly idiosyncratic performances of many of Shakespeare's leading characters, especially Hamlet, Shylock, Macbeth, and Richard II. He was at his best in fantastic or sinister roles, and was admirable as Pirandello's Henry IV (1925), a part he played again in 1929 when the play was renamed The Mock Emperor. He was also excellent as Channon in Ansky's The Dybbuk (1927); as Rupert Cadell in Patrick Hamilton's Rope (1929; NY, as Rope's End, 1929); as a gaunt and somewhat frightening Pierrot in Laurence Housman's Prunella (1930); and as Lorenzino de' Medici in Night's Candles (1933), an adaptation of Alfred de Musset's Lorenzaccio. In 1933 he was also seen in New York in The Dark Tower by George S. Kaufman and Alexander Woollcott, and after returning to London appeared in the title-roles of his own play Paganini and of Timon of Athens (both 1935). After playing King John for the Old Vic (1941) he was less often seen, though he gave interesting performances at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, as Lorenzo Querini in Hochwälder's The Strong are Lonely (1955) and as Pope Paul in Montherlant's Malatesta (1957). He joined the RSC in 1962 to play the Cardinal in Middleton's Women Beware Women.