Nicholas Rowe (1674–1718) was an incredibly hardworking poet, translator, and dramatist throughout his relatively short life. He brought out the first “modern” edition of Shakespeare’s plays in 1709, and his translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, regarded by many as his master work, took many years and was published posthumously in 1719. As a firm supporter of the Whig interest, he held various public positions (if none of them quite as grand as he hoped). Following the death of Nahum Tate in 1715, he was appointed poet laureate, a position that involved penning numerous occasional works. Concurrent with this extremely busy public and literary life, he also wrote seven tragedies and one comedy and, in so doing, made an impact on eighteenth-century performance, public and private. To this day, many have heard of the “gay Lothario,” if not the play in which the cad appears. In plays such as The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714), The Tragedy of Lady Jane Gray (1715), and, more ambiguously, The Fair Penitent (1703), female suffering is dwelt on, and these plays’ leading roles provided powerful vehicles for generations of female actors. Rowe coined the term she-tragedies in his ironic epilogue to Jane Shore, but he did not invent female-centered drama. He followed in the footsteps of Thomas Otway and John Banks in his depiction of powerful but persecuted women, and, indeed, the actor who brought Otway’s and Banks’ strong and sad heroines to the stage, Elizabeth Barry, also appeared in many of Rowe’s creations.While one could not say that controversy rages nowadays over Rowe’s plays, they have been and remain open to a wide range of different approaches. J. Douglas Canfield’s 1977 Nicholas Rowe and Christian Tragedy looked at the plays as metaphysical dramas of conflicts between good and evil, sin and redemption, and, indeed, the deeply biblical nature of Rowe’s writing should not be ignored. More recently, work has looked at sex and gender in his dramas. Anne Greenfield has written on marital rape in Tamerlane (1701), and Jean Marsden has looked at the tragedies Jane Shore and Jane Gray in terms of audience reactions to the emotions provoked by painful and prolonged depictions of female suffering. Other approaches have stressed the political issues in and topicality of Rowe’s plays. Tamerlane has long been seen as offering parallels between an improbably virtuous Tamerlane and William III, on the one hand, and the flamboyantly vicious Bajazet and Louis XIV, on the other. However, although Rowe’s Whig credentials seemed sufficiently clear to his contemporaries to gain him government posts and, eventually, the poet laureateship, a certain ambivalence has also been detected. Paulina Kewes, for example, argues that to see Jane Shore as a tearjearker ignores its immediate context in terms of the Succession Crisis with the treatment of the usurping and unpleasant Gloster suggestive of Rowe’s doubts over the legitimacy of the continued exclusion of the Stuarts.The advantage of having all the plays available together in a modern edition1 is that consecutive reading shows how consistent was Rowe’s referencing to the very fluid political situation in those first decades of the eighteenth century. His first drama, the Orientalist Ambitious Step-Mother (1701), can be seen as offering a parallel between Artemisa the unscrupulous Queen of Persia and Mary of Modena wife of James II. Moreover, the conclusion in which the younger son wins the throne from the elder suggests that ability is more important than strict primogeniture. The Fair Penitent (1703) was one of the most frequently performed plays on the British stage as well as a favorite for private theatricals during the eighteenth century. The play is memorable for the caddish Lothario and for feisty Calista with her speech “How hard is the Condition of our Sex, / Thro’ ev’ry State of Life the Slaves to Man?” (3.1.39–40). However, the compelling sexual content reflects the disorder of the unruly state beyond the villa walls. Much indebted to Thomas Otway’s The Orphan (1680), The Fair Penitent similarly translates sexual license into civil disorder. The Biter (1705) Rowe’s only comedy, is a very verbal three act farce set in a “country town,” Croydon, where an unruly group of Londoners comes for a day trip of shopping, flirting, and marrying. Most notably, all the intrigues and successful conclusions lie in the hands of women. Rowe’s next two plays, Ulysses (1706), a riff on the Odyssey, and The Royal Convert (1708), set in Anglo-Saxon Britain, continue the theme of the primacy of women. Penelope, with a clear nod to Queen Anne, is noble, chaste, self-sacrificing, and capable: her husband and son are less notable. In The Royal Convert, the union of England and Scotland underlies much of the action—uniting Saxons and the “British”—and Ethelinda, “a British Lady,” concludes the play with a stirring speech prophesying that in “Times to come, / Of Royal Race a British Queen shall rise, / Great, Gracious, Pious, Fortunate and Wise” (5.375–77). There does not seem much ambivalence here.The Late Plays contains Rowe’s final two plays, The Tragedy of Jane Shore and The Tragedy of Lady Jane Gray, plays that, on the one hand, are the epitome of female-centered weeping drama but, on the other, also respond to the Succession Crisis and a Jacobite uprising. These are also consciously Shakespearean dramas. Indeed, the subtitle of Jane Shore, Written in Imitation of Shakespear’s Style, served as a reminder that Rowe had brought out an edition of Shakespeare’s plays in 1709. Jane Shore presents a repentant Jane, suffering persecution from the usurper, Richard III, “Gloster.” This role was taken by Colley Cibber, who also played Gloster in his own 1699 adaptation of Richard III, which must have encouraged comparisons between the plays among the savvy London audiences, who thought over what is better, a “foreign” monarch or a “legitimate” tyrant. The Tragedy of Lady Jane Gray concludes with Jane Gray praying on her way to the scaffold for a “Monarch of the Royal Blood / Brave Pious, Equitable, Wise and Good” (5.343–44) to save Britain from Roman Catholicism and leave her safe with a male heir to “guard the Faith for which I Die to Day” (2.352). When John Banks wrote a play equally praising Jane Gray’s defense of Protestantism, The Innocent Usurper; or, The Death of Lady Jane Gray (published 1694), the play’s performance (his preface tells us) was refused. The dangers of usurpation were far more vexed in the late 1680s and the 1690s than the defense of Protestantism was significant. And, indeed, Banks’ Jane Gray is, if “innocent,” still a usurper. However, Rowe faced no such problem. Whatever vague conspiracies and shifts in allegiance went on secretly, George I inherited the throne smoothly from Queen Anne. Jane Gray, so warmly looking forward to George II as well as to the current king, George I, stressed religion and continuity over strict lineal, Stuart inheritance—this is in line with Rowe’s earliest play The Ambitious Step-Mother. Noble women—“female heroes,” to use Paula de Pando’s useful phrase—or a “race of female patriots”—to echo Brett Wilson—made for a drama that, if it had sexual and sentimental allure, also had the ability to make a politics of steadfast refusal of constituted authority attractive rather than subversive. Female tears are powerful weapons displaying iron hands even as they wave lace handkerchiefs. Given that, throughout much of his energetic literary career, Rowe was working on his translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, there can be little doubt as to his engagement with the often violent and intensely disruptive politics of his age. The horrors of civil war hang over his plays, from internecine fighting for the throne in his first play to offstage civil disorder in The Fair Penitent, invasion and turmoil in The Royal Convert, the depiction of Penelope perilously holding Ithaca together, and, finally, Jane Gray bravely seeking to defend the realm against Catholic horrors.Tamerlane, The Fair Penitent, and The Tragedy of Jane Shore were Rowe’s most popular plays, regularly performed throughout the eighteenth century. These three plays are still available in single editions, and Tamerlane and The Fair Penitent are included in J. Douglas Canfield’s student-oriented anthology for Broadview. However, for the other plays by Rowe, such as The Biter and The Royal Convert, one has to search, and this makes the three volumes of the plays in the Routledge/Taylor and Francis edition very welcome. Each of those three volumes has an excellent musical appendix by Joe Lockwood that includes scores and scholarly discussion of the music, its orchestration, vocal effects, and probable positioning in the play where this is speculative.Nevertheless, though this edition of the plays is welcome, it is not without its problems. The way in which information about the plays is presented is not uniform between the three volumes of plays or even, in the case of volume 1, consistent within the volume. For instance, while Rebecca Bullard, who edited The Ambitious Step-Mother and The Fair Penitent in volume 1, not only lists the actors but also gives information about them (which becomes repetitious given the same core of actors in both plays), John McTague gives no information about any of the actors listed in the dramatis personae for Tamerlane. Michael Caines edited all the plays in volume 2, and the actors are listed in the dramatis personae, but no information is given about them. In this volume and only this volume, prologues and epilogues are printed together at the front of the play. Claudine van Hensbergen edited the final two plays in volume 3, and, here, the amount of information given in the introductions is far more complete and varied than it is in the other volumes, and brief actor biographies are provided (with repetition). There are also some oversights. In The Ambitious Step-Mother, Artaxerxes is sometimes given the speech heading “Artax” and sometimes “Art.,” which is confusing since this is also the speech heading for his half brother, Artaban. In The Royal Convert (in vol. 2), the Saxon Prince Offa is referred to as “Ossa” in Caines’ introduction, and in the dramatis personae he is listed as both “Offa, a Saxon Prince,” and as “Ossa” in relation to his sister Rodogune. These are not facsimile copies of the plays, so the variation in names is odd. These are, of course, minor points, though added together, and with a few more areas of redundant annotation or confusing information, it makes these (very costly) volumes less user-friendly than they could have been. Rowe has been overlooked, and it has been impossible to find modern editions of the lesser-known plays. These volumes redress this lack and will surely inspire and enable further investigation into the plays and their powerful mixture of sex, sentiment, and politics.