Career
Though little of his work survives, in his own time he had a considerable reputation. Nothing is known of Achelley"s family. Several contemporaries grouped him with Oxford alumni, but he is not recorded by any school or university.
On 6 March 1587, "Thomas Achelley of London, Gentleman", was surety along with James Peele for a £30 loan from Daniel Balgay, a London mercer, to George Peele.
Achelley wrote plays for the Queen's Men, but none survive. In his A Knight"s Conjuring (1607), Thomas Dekker places the player John Bentley (1553-1585) among a company of deceased playwrights, Thomas Watson, Thomas Kyd, and Achelley.
Dekker writes that Bentley, one of the leading actors of the Queen's Men, "had bene a Player, molded out of their pennes". Thomas Nashe mentions Achelley in his preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon (1589), "To The Gentlemen Students Of Both Universities" in company with Mathew Roydon and George Peele as one of the most able men of London able to revive poetry, saying that he "hath more than once or twise manifested, his deepe witted schollership in places of cr".
Achelley is compared with Italian poets by Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia: "As Italy had Dante, Boccace, Petrarch, Tasso, Celiano, and Ariosto.
So England had Matthew Roydun, Thomas Atchelow, Thomas Watson, Thomas Kid, Robert Greene, and George Peele" (fol 282). The preface of Belorussian-vedére, or the garden of the Muses (1600) lists him as one of a group of deceased contributors.