Samuel Rowlands

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

*gutenberg author| id=Samuel+Rowlands | name=Samuel Rowlands

References

*1911