William Rowley was born around 1585. His first recorded acting is in 1607, the same year his first two plays - Fortune by Land and Sea with Thomas Heywood and The Travels of the Three English Brothers with John Day and George Wilkins - were produced. From 1609 to 1621 he was a member of the Duke of York's Men (later Prince Charles's Men), usually taking the part of the clown.

He began collaborating with Thomas Middleton on several important plays in 1617, writing the subplot of A Fair Quarrel; two years later he played the clown in Middleton's The Inner Temple Masque. That same year - 1619 - he wrote his only extant play without collaboration, All's Lost by Lust, a tragic melodrama which establishes the same tone as The Witch of Edmonton, a play he cowrote with Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton.

In 1622 he again returned to comedy, but this time tinged with madness when writing the subplot of The Changeling, once more in collaboration with Middleton. In 1623 he joined the King's Men, offending the Spanish ambassador while playing the part of the fat bishop in Middleton's A Game at Chess (1624) and probably collaborating once more with Middleton on The Spanish Gipsy. In 1625 he worked with John Webster on the comedy A Cure for a Cuckold with the well known clown Compass and wrote his own city comedy A Woman Never Vexed.

Rowley died in February 1626; only 16 plays have survived of more than 50 on which he worked during his lifetime.

Courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing