This section contains 11,015 words (approx. 37 pages at 300 words per page) |
Dictionary of Literary Biography on Nicholas Rowe
Nicholas Rowe is still famous today as the first editor and biographer of Shakespeare. Most of his act and scene divisions and several of his emendations are still retained in editions of Shakespeare's plays, and he preserved valuable anecdotes from the acting tradition through Thomas Betterton. Samuel Johnson implied that his best work, his translation of Lucan's Pharsalia, the great Latin epic on the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey, was "one of the greatest productions of English poetry." But Rowe was best known in his own time, as he should be in ours, for his plays. After some temporary early successes, he scored a major hit with The Tragedy of Jane Shore in 1714, and from that time on, several of his plays were regularly performed and reprinted for more than a century. Three of his tragedies (Tamerlane, The Fair Penitent, andJane Shore) were among the...
This section contains 11,015 words (approx. 37 pages at 300 words per page) |