WILLIAM, an English dramatic writer of very considerable ability, and of whom hardly anything is known, seems to have flourished during the early part of the seventeenth century. He witnessed during his life three sovereigns on the throne, Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I. He was educated at Cambridge, for Wood has recorded of him that he was "the ornament for wit and ingenuity of Pembroke Hall in Cambridge;" and it is of him most probably Merces, in the second part of his Wits Commonwealth, 1598, speaks, when he says, "Maister Rowley, once a rare scholar of Pembroke Hall in Cambridge." He belonged to the royal company of players, and as an actor excelled most in comedy. He was on terms of close intimacy with all the reigning poets and wits of his time, and is known to have aided many of them in the composition of works for the stage, as well as having himself written a number of able comedies and tragedies, which were acted with "great applause" during his own time. In Charles Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, there are extracts given from the following works: A Fair Quarrer, by T. Middleton and W. Rowley; All's Lost by Lust, a tragedy, by W. Rowley; A New Wonder, A Woman Never Vext, a comedy, by W. Rowley; The Witch of Edmonton, a tragi-comedy, by Rowley, Decker, and Ford; The Old Law, a comedy, by Massinger, Middleton, and Rowley; Fortune by Land and Sea, by Heywood and Rowley. Speaking of The Old Law, Lamb remarks, "There is an exquisiteness of moral sensibility making one to gush out tears of delight, and a poetical strangeness in all the improbable circumstances of this wild play, which are unlike anything in the dramas which Massinger wrote alone. The pathos is of a subtler edge; Middleton and Rowley, who assisted in this play, had both of them finer geniuses than their associate." Several others of Rowley's plays will be found in Dodsley's Collection, and in Watt's Bibliotheca Britannica. Shakspeare is said to have assisted Rowley in the composition of his Birth of Merlin, 1662.