Nicholas Rowe (writer)

• 1. Introduction

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  Nicholas Rowe died on the 6th of December 1718, and within a year the King of England had sent his widow a pension. Not as condolence, exactly. As payment. The pension came in recognition of Rowe's translation of Lucan, a verse paraphrase of the Pharsalia that Samuel Johnson would later call one of the greatest productions in English poetry. That a translation could earn royal gratitude tells you something about the world Rowe moved through. He was a man who wrote tragedies admired for their domestic warmth, edited Shakespeare before anyone else thought to do it properly, and rose from a law student in Middle Temple to Poet Laureate of England. His tomb in Westminster Abbey placed his bust near Shakespeare's own. The inscription asked readers to remember a man "skill'd to draw the tender Tear." Whether that tenderness was his gift or his strategy is a question his career raises at every turn.

• 2. Law Abandoned for the Stage

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  John Rowe, Nicholas's father, was a barrister and sergeant-at-law who published Benlow's and Dallison's Reports during the reign of King James II. He enrolled his son at Middle Temple in 1691, convinced the boy had made sufficient progress to study law. Rowe did study, and by the accounts that survive he read statutes and reports with genuine comprehension. He tried to understand law not as a list of precedents but as a system of rational government and impartial justice. That framing sounds less like a future lawyer and more like a future dramatist.

  When John Rowe died in 1692, Nicholas was nineteen and suddenly the master of an independent fortune. The family held a considerable estate at Lamerton in Devonshire. Free from his father's career ambitions, Rowe set law aside entirely. He turned first to poetry, then to writing plays. His path to the theatre was less rebellion than opportunity. The fortune made it possible; the talent made it inevitable.

  Before his first play opened, Rowe had also passed through Highgate School and Westminster School, where Richard Busby had guided his early education. In 1688 he had become a King's Scholar. The institutional formation was thorough, perhaps more thorough than the legal training he would discard. What remained from Westminster and Middle Temple was a rigorous, structured mind, the kind that could divide Shakespeare's plays into scenes and exits, or find the rational architecture inside Lucan's civil-war epic.

• 3. Tragedies and Their Audiences

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  The Ambitious Stepmother opened in 1700 at Lincoln's Inn Fields, produced by Thomas Betterton and set in Persepolis. It was Rowe's first play, and it was well received. The following year brought Tamerlane, in which the conqueror Timur stood in for William III and Louis XIV was denounced through the character of Bajazet. For many years the play was performed on the anniversary of William's landing at Torbay. In Dublin in 1712, at a moment when political passions were running high, a performance provoked a serious riot.

  The Fair Penitent arrived in 1702, published in 1703. It was an adaptation of Massinger and Field's The Fatal Dowry. Samuel Johnson called it one of the most pleasing tragedies ever written in English, noting that its story was domestic and therefore easily received by the imagination, and that its diction was exquisitely harmonious. One character from that play, Lothario, became so culturally recognisable that his name turned into a common word for a womaniser. Johnson also noted that the character of Calista appeared to have suggested to Samuel Richardson the figure of Clarissa Harlowe, just as Lothario seemed to echo in Richardson's Lovelace.

  Rowe attempted comedy only once, with The Biter in 1704 at Lincoln's Inn Fields. It failed. He returned to tragedy with Ulysses in 1705, though Johnson was not generous there either, observing that audiences had been too early acquainted with poetical heroes to expect pleasure from their revival. Jane Shore proved to be the high point of Rowe's theatrical career. Played at Drury Lane in 1714 with Anne Oldfield in the title role, it ran for nineteen nights and outlasted every other Rowe work on the stage. The play's domestic scenes and its sympathetic treatment of both a repentant wife and a forgiving husband gave it a warmth that audiences returned to. The Tragedy of Lady Jane Grey came in 1715, proved unsuccessful, and Rowe wrote no further plays.

• 4. Editing Shakespeare

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  In 1709-10, printed by Tonson, Rowe published the first eighteenth-century edition of William Shakespeare, seven volumes in all: six of plays and a seventh of poems. No one had done this before in any systematic modern sense, and Rowe is considered the first editor of Shakespeare's works.

  His practical experience in the theatre shaped his choices. He divided the plays into scenes, and sometimes into acts, noting the entrances and exits of players. He standardised the spelling of character names and added a list of the dramatis personae at the front of each play. The 1709-10 edition was also the first illustrated edition of Shakespeare, with a frontispiece engraving provided for every play.

  Rowe also wrote a short biography of Shakespeare titled Some Account of the Life &c. of Mr. William Shakespear, attached to the edition. His base text, however, was the corrupt Fourth Folio, a choice that would cause problems. Many later eighteenth-century editors followed his lead and inherited the same textual errors. The monument erected in Westminster Abbey by John Michael Rysbrack around 1722 placed Rowe's bust near Shakespeare's. The tomb inscription made the pairing explicit, asking that Rowe's relics be trusted to the shrine near his Shakespeare, and praising him as the next in skill to draw the tender tear.

• 5. Laureate and Public Servant

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  Rowe served as under-secretary to the Duke of Queensberry from 1709 to 1711, during Queensberry's time as principal secretary of state for Scotland. Public office and literary ambition ran in parallel throughout Rowe's adult life. When George I came to the throne, Rowe was made a surveyor of customs. In 1715 he succeeded Nahum Tate as Poet Laureate.

  He also held the position of clerk of the council to the Prince of Wales. In 1718, just months before his death, Lord Chancellor Parker nominated him as clerk of the presentations in Chancery. The accumulation of offices suggests a man who was valued institutionally, not simply admired at a literary distance.

  Rowe's translation of Lucan's Pharsalia was published in 1718, the year he died. It ran through eight editions between 1718 and 1807, a span that indicates sustained readership well beyond his lifetime. Upon his death, George I granted his widow a pension in 1719, citing that translation specifically. His other miscellaneous work included occasional verses addressed to Godolphin and Halifax, adaptations of Horace's odes, translations of Jean de La Bruyere's Caracteres and Claude Quillet's Callipaedia, and a memoir of Boileau prefixed to a translation of the Lutrin.

• 6. What the Tomb Records

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  The inscription on Rowe's tomb in Westminster Abbey records two lives, not one. It commemorates Nicholas Rowe, who died in 1718 at the age of forty-five, and Charlotte, his only daughter, wife of Henry Fane, who died in 1739 at twenty-two. The inscription describes Charlotte as inheriting her father's spirit and as amiable in her own innocence and beauty.

  The tomb was erected by John Michael Rysbrack around 1722. The monument was funded by those who had mourned Rowe in death and loved him in life. His second wife, Anne Devenish, whom he had married in 1717, was Charlotte's mother. Anne survived them both. The inscription's closing lines address her directly: the childless parent and the widowed wife who inscribed the monument stone that holds their ashes and expects her own.

  Rowe's first wife, Antonia Parsons, had died in 1706. They had married in 1695 and had a son, John, born in 1699. John married Mary Hambly Rowe and had eight children. Two generations of family life are folded into the record of a man remembered at Westminster Abbey beside Shakespeare's own monument, praised on stone for a quality that his plays had spent two decades demonstrating: the ability to make an audience feel.