Weever was born in 1576 and 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 resided for about four years from 1594, but he took no degree.
In 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, William Warner and Christopher Middleton, all oi which are valuable to the literary historian. In 1601 he published The Mirror of Martyrs or The Life and Death of . Sir John Oldcastie, which he calls in his preface the "first trew Oldcastie" perhaps on account of the fact that Shakespeare's Faistaff first appeared as Sir John Oldcastie.
In the fourth stanza of this long poem, in which Sir John is his own panegyrist. , occurs a reminiscence of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar which serves to fix the date of the play. After travelling in France, the Low Countries and Italy, Weever settled in Clerkenwell, and made friends among the chief antiquaries of his time.
The result of extensive travels in his own country appeared in Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631), now valuable on account of the iater obliteration of the inscriptions.
The Huth Library contains a unique copy of a thumb-book Agnus Dei (1606), containing a history of Christ. The Mirror of Martyrs has been reprinted for the Roxburghe Club (1872).
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.
He is best known for his Epigrammes in the Oldest Cut, and Newest Fashion (1599), containing epigrams on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other poets of his day, and for his Ancient Funerall Monuments, the first full-length book to be dedicated to the topic of English church monuments and epitaphs, which was published in 1631, the year before his death.
Weever's wife's first name was Anne, but it is unclear from the surviving records whether she was Anne Edwards, who married a man named John Weaver in St James Church, Clerkenwell, in 1614; Anne Panting, who married a John Weaver in the same church in 1617; or neither of these.
