Bride’ was given for his benefit on 28 May. On 3 June 1709 a performance of ‘Hamlet’ was given at Drury Lane ‘for the benefit of Cave Underhill, the old comedian,’ who played once more the first Gravedigger. This character he repeated on 23 Feb. 1710. On 12 May he was, for his benefit, once more Trincalo in Dryden's ‘Tempest.’ This was his last performance at Drury Lane.
He was seen once, on 26 Aug. 1710, at Pinkethman's booth at Greenwich, where, for the benefit of Pinkethman, the part in the ‘Rover’ of Ned Blunt was acted ‘by the famous true comedian, Cave Underhill, to oblige Pinkethman's friends.’ This was Underhill's last appearance. His death is said to have taken place ‘soon after.’ He was in his late years a pensioner of the theatre. In his advertisement in the ‘Tatler’ he stated that he had acted under four reigns, was not now able to perform so often as heretofore, and had had losses to the value of near 2,500l. He was commonly called Trincalo Underhill; and his name was sometimes spelt Undril.
Under the date 30 May 1709 Steele in the ‘Tatler’ (No. 22), dating from Will's coffee-house, speaks to his friends ‘on behalf of honest Cave Underhill, who has been a comic for three generations: my father admired him extremely when he was a boy. There is certainly nature excellently represented in his manner of action, in which he ever avoided that general fault in players of doing too much.’ Cibber speaks of Underhill as being at the time he (Cibber) joined the company at the Theatre Royal one of the principal actors who ‘were all original masters in their different stile, not mere auricular imitators of one another, which commonly is the highest merit of the middle rank, but self-judges of nature from whose various lights they only took their true instruction’ (Apology, ed. Lowe, i. 99). In his ‘Brief Supplement’ Tony Aston disparages Underhill, saying that he knows Underhill was much cried up in his time, but he (Aston) is so stupid as not to know why. Underhill was, he says, ‘about fifty years of age the latter end of King William's reign, about six foot high, long and broad faced,’ and something inclined to corpulence. ‘His face very like the Homo Sylvestris or Champanza, for his nose was flattish and short, and his upper lip very long and thick, with a wide mouth and short chin, a churlish voice and awkward action’ (ib. ii. 308). Cibber praises Underhill for the very gifts for which he is censured by Aston (i. 154). Cibber speaks of the want of proportion in his features, which, ‘when soberly composed, with an unwandering eye hanging over them, threw him into the most lumpish, moping mortal that ever made beholders merry.’ Davies says that he was a jolly and droll companion, a tavern-haunter, dividing his time between Bacchus and Venus, a martyr to gout, acting till he was past eighty, and he adds (following Tom Brown) that he possessed an admirable vein of pleasantry, and told stories with a bewitching smile. In Brown's ‘Letters from the Dead to the Living’ is a scurrilous epistle from ‘Tony’ Lee or Leigh to Cave Underhill, and the reply. On this correspondence the charges of drunkenness and immorality against Underhill seem to rest.
An anonymous comedy, ‘Win her and take her, or Old Fools will be Meddling,’ 4to, 1691, acted at the Theatre Royal the same year, was dedicated by Underhill to Lord Danby. It is supposed to have been given to Underhill by the anonymous author, who wrote the part of Dullhead expressly for him.
A portrait by Robert Bing, engraved by John Faber, jun., of Underhill as Obadiah in the ‘Committee,’ published in 1712, and reproduced in Cibber's ‘Apology,’ does not bear out Aston's unflattering description of him as an anthropoid ape. The original of this is in the Mathews collection in the Garrick Club.
[Merchant Taylors' Reg. i. 169; Masson's Milton, vi. 351; Cibber's Apology, ed. Lowe; Genest's Account of the English Stage; Biographia Dramatica; Davies's Dramatic Miscellanies; Tom Brown's Works, ed. 1707; British Essayists, ed. Chalmers; Doran's Annals of the English Stage, ed. Lowe; Betterton's English Stage; Dibdin's English Stage; Smith's Cat.; Notes and Queries, 7th ser. x. 206, 276.]
UNDERHILL, EDWARD (fl. 1539–1561), the ‘hot-gospeller,’ came ‘of a worshipful house in Worcestershire,’ and was born probably about 1515 (Collectanea Top. et Gen. vi. 382). His grandfather, John Underhill, originally of Wolverhampton, acquired in 1509 a lease of Eatington, Warwickshire, and left two sons, Edward and Thomas. Edward inherited Eatington, and was father of Thomas Underhill (1518?–1603), a leading protestant, to commemorate whose memory an annual sermon was founded in St. Mary's Church, Warwick; a poetical epitaph on his son Anthony, who predeceased him on 16 July 1587, is said, on flimsy evidence, to have been composed by Shakespeare (Colvile, Warwickshire Worthies, pp. 767–9). John Underhill's younger son, Thomas, possibly the Thomas Underhill who,
