an English dramatist, poet and miscellaneous writer, was appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in 1715. On his father's death, when he was nineteen, he became the master of an independent fortune. He was left to his own direction, and from that time ignored law to try his hand first at poetry, and then later at writing plays. The Ambitious Stepmother, Rowe's first play, produced in 1700 at Lincoln’s Inn Fields by Thomas Betterton and set in Persepolis, was well received.
