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Rowlands, Samuel, 1573?-1630?

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Samuel Rowlands (c. 1573 - 1630), English author of pamphlets in prose and verse, which reflect the follies and humours of the lower middle-class life of his time, seems to have had no contemporary literary reputation; but his work throws considerable light on the social London of his day.

Among his works, which include some poems on sacred subjects, are:

  • The Betraying of Christ (1598)
  • The Letting of Humour's Blood in the Head-vaine (epigrams and satires) and A Mery Meetinge, or tis Mery when Knaves mete (1600)--the two latter being publicly burnt by order, but republished later under other names (Humors Ordinarie and The Knave of Clubbes)
  • Greene's Ghost haunting Conie-Catchers (1602), which he pretended to have edited from Greene's papers, but which is largely borrowed from his printed works
  • Tis Merrie when Gossips meete (1602), a dialogue between a Widow, a Wile, a Maid and a Vintner
  • Looke to it; for Ile stabbe ye (1604), in which Death describes the tyrants, careless divines and other evil-doers whom he will destroy
  • Hell's broke loose (1605), an account of John of Leyden, and in the same year a Theatre of Divine Recreation (not extant), poems founded on the Old Testament
  • A Terrible Battle between ... Time and Death (1606)
  • Democritus, or Doctor Merry-man his Medicines against Melancholy humors, reprinted, with alterations, as Doctor Merrie-man, and Diogenes Lent home (1607), in which Athens is London
  • The Famous History of Guy, Earl of Warwick (1607), a long romance in Rowlands's favorite six-lined stanza, and one of his hastiest, least successful efforts
  • Humors Looking Glasse (1608)
  • Martin Mark-all, Beadle of Bridewell (1610), a history of roguery containing much information about notable highwaymen and the completest vocabulary of thieves' slang up to that time.

Of his later works may be mentioned Sir Thomas Overbury; or the Poysoned Knights Complaint, and The Melancholic Knight (1615), which suggests a hearing of Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle. The last of his humorous studies, Good Newes and Bad Newes, appeared in 1622, and in 1628 he published a pious volume of prose and verse, entitled Heaven's Glory, Seeke it: Earts vanitie, Flye it: Hells Horror, Fere it.

After this nothing is known of him. Edmund Gosse, in his introduction to Rowlands's complete works, edited (1872-80) for the Hunterian Club in Glasgow by Sidney John Hervon Herrtage, sums him up as a kind of small non-political Daniel Defoe, a pamphleteer in verse whose talents were never put into exercise except when their possessor was pressed for means, and a poet of considerable talent without one spark or glimmer of genius.

Gosse's notice is reprinted in his Seventeenth Century Studies (1883). A poem by Rowlands, The Bride (1617), was reprinted at Boston, USA, in 1905 by A. C. Potter.

External links

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.


This biographical information was gathered from the Samuel_Rowlands page, courtesy of the Wikipedia project.

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