George Rowell was an eminent theatre

Theatre

Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...

 historian

Historian

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

, a lecturer

Lecturer

Lecturer is an academic rank. In the United Kingdom, lecturer is a position at a university or similar institution, often held by academics in their early career stages, who lead research groups and supervise research students, as well as teach...

 and a foremost expert on the nineteenth century. His specialisms included Victorian

Victorian era

The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...

 melodrama

Melodrama

The term melodrama refers to a dramatic work that exaggerates plot and characters in order to appeal to the emotions. It may also refer to the genre which includes such works, or to language, behavior, or events which resemble them...

 and the theatre of Henry Irving

Henry Irving

Sir Henry Irving , born John Henry Brodribb, was an English stage actor in the Victorian era, known as an actor-manager because he took complete responsibility for season after season at the Lyceum Theatre, establishing himself and his company as...

, W. S. Gilbert

W. S. Gilbert

Sir William Schwenck Gilbert was an English dramatist, librettist, poet and illustrator best known for his fourteen comic operas produced in collaboration with the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan, of which the most famous include H.M.S...

, Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...

 and Arthur Wing Pinero

Arthur Wing Pinero

Sir Arthur Wing Pinero was an English actor and later an important dramatist and stage director.-Biography:...

.

Biography

Rowell lectured in drama

Drama

Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do","to act" . The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a...

 at Bristol University from around 1950, joining a fledgling department that consisted of Glynne Wickham

Glynne Wickham

-Life:Appointed in 1948 to the department of drama at Bristol University , he convened a 1951 symposium on "the responsibility of universities to the theatre" to endorse the policy of studying drama in the context of theatre and a 1954 symposium on "the relationship between universities and radio,...

, George W. Brandt and John Lavender. Bristol became the first British University to offer Drama as a degree subject—as distinct from English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

—when the visionary Vice-Chancellor, Sir Philip Morris, appointed Wickham (then 26) as the first junior academic in Drama in 1947. As part of this department—a team dubbed 'the four musketeers' by Wickham—Rowell played a key part in defining how drama would be taught as a discipline. They developed a distinctive conception of their subject now largely accepted: of drama as a 'laboratory' subject, involving practice as well as library study, and indeed by 1951 they had their own studio space—a converted squash court. In keeping with this ethos, Brandt did some acting and directed several television, radio and film as well as stage, productions; Rowell, in collaboration with Kenneth Mobbs of Bristol Opera House, adapted and revised W. S. Gilbert

W. S. Gilbert

Sir William Schwenck Gilbert was an English dramatist, librettist, poet and illustrator best known for his fourteen comic operas produced in collaboration with the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan, of which the most famous include H.M.S...

's farce Engaged

Engaged (play)

Engaged is a three-act farcical comic play by W. S. Gilbert. It premiered at the Haymarket Theatre on 3 October 1877, the same year as The Sorcerer, one of Gilbert's comic operas written with Arthur Sullivan, which was soon followed by the collaborators' great success in H.M.S. Pinafore...

(1877), converting it into a Comic Opera

Comic opera

Comic opera denotes a sung dramatic work of a light or comic nature, usually with a happy ending.Forms of comic opera first developed in late 17th-century Italy. By the 1730s, a new operatic genre, opera buffa, emerged as an alternative to opera seria...

 in 1962. The department can also lay claim to a piece of theatrical history; they hosted the premiere of Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter, CH, CBE was a Nobel Prize–winning English playwright and screenwriter. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party , The Homecoming , and Betrayal , each of which he adapted to...

's first play, The Room

The Room

The Room is Harold Pinter's first play, written and first produced in 1957. Considered by critics the earliest example of Pinter's "comedy of menace", this play has strong similarities to Pinter's second play, The Birthday Party, including features considered hallmarks of Pinter's early work and...

, in May 1957, performed in that former squash court of a theatre, The Drama Studio.

During his time at Bristol, Rowell became a world expert on Victorian theatre, in the process building up a personal collection on the subject (now part of the University's Theatre Collection, as well as the National Archives) and being appointed as Special Lecturer in drama. He published extensively upon his specialist area, as the bibliography below attests; of particular worth to students and scholars are his collections of dramatic texts, each meticulously contextualised and introduced. As well as collections of Arthur Wing Pinero

Arthur Wing Pinero

Sir Arthur Wing Pinero was an English actor and later an important dramatist and stage director.-Biography:...

 and W. S. Gilbert's works, he compiled many rare and important plays and critical articles. His seminal compendium, Nineteenth Century Plays (1953), contains ten plays spanning 1829-90, juxtaposing 'blood and thunder' barnstormers like C.H. Hazlewood

Colin Henry Hazlewood

Colin Henry Hazlewood was an English playwright.Hazlewood was born in 1823, and became a low comedian on the Lincoln, York, and western circuits. In 1850 he wrote and produced at the City of London Theatre a farce entitled ‘Who's the Victim?’ which was received with favour, and he commenced...

's Lady Audley's Secret

Lady Audley's Secret

Lady Audley's Secret is a sensation novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon published in 1862. It was Braddon's most successful and well known novel. Critic John Sutherland described the work as "the most sensationally successful of all the sensation novels." The plot centers on "accidental bigamy" which...

(1863) and Leopold Lewis' The Bells

The Bells

"The Bells" is a heavily onomatopoeic poem by Edgar Allan Poe which was not published until after his death in 1849. It is perhaps best known for the diacopic repetition of the word "bells." The poem has four parts to it; each part becomes darker and darker as the poem progresses from "the jingling...

(1871) with the social satire of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Money

Money (play)

Money is a comic play by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. It premiered at the Theatre Royal Haymarket on 8 December 1840.-Production history:The play was revived at the Royal National Theatre in 1999, directed by John Caird and with a cast including Jasper Britton, Roger Allam, Simon Russell Beale, Sophie...

(1840) and James Albery

James Albery

James Albery was an English dramatist.-Life and career:Albery was born in London. On leaving school Albery entered an architect's office, and started to write plays. His farce A Pretty Piece of Chiselling was given its first production by the Ingoldsby Club in 1864...

's Two Roses (1870). His volume of Victorian Dramatic Criticism (1971) contains a wealth of articles, essays and reviews on all aspects of nineteenth century theatre—pantomime

Pantomime

Pantomime — not to be confused with a mime artist, a theatrical performer of mime—is a musical-comedy theatrical production traditionally found in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Jamaica, South Africa, India, Ireland, Gibraltar and Malta, and is mostly performed during the...

, melodrama

Melodrama

The term melodrama refers to a dramatic work that exaggerates plot and characters in order to appeal to the emotions. It may also refer to the genre which includes such works, or to language, behavior, or events which resemble them...

, Ibsen, the 1890s

1890s

The 1890s were sometimes referred to as the "Mauve Decade" - because William Henry Perkin's aniline dye allowed the widespread use of that colour in fashion - and also as the "Gay Nineties", under the then-current usage of the word "gay" which referred simply to merriment and frivolity, with no...

—including writings from luminaries such as William Hazlitt

William Hazlitt

William Hazlitt was an English writer, remembered for his humanistic essays and literary criticism, and as a grammarian and philosopher. He is now considered one of the great critics and essayists of the English language, placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. Yet his work is...

, Charles Lamb, William Archer

William Archer

William Archer may refer to:* William S. Archer , U.S. Senator and Representative from Virginia* William Archer Irish naturalist and microscopist especially interested in Protozoa and Desmids...

, Henry James

Henry James

Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....

 and George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...

. Further works included a history of provincial theatres in Britain and a study of the Old Vic

Old Vic

The Old Vic is a theatre located just south-east of Waterloo Station in London on the corner of The Cut and Waterloo Road. Established in 1818 as the Royal Coburg Theatre, it was taken over by Emma Cons in 1880 when it was known formally as the Royal Victoria Hall. In 1898, a niece of Cons, Lilian...

, London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

's last remaining Georgian

Georgian architecture

Georgian architecture is the name given in most English-speaking countries to the set of architectural styles current between 1720 and 1840. It is eponymous for the first four British monarchs of the House of Hanover—George I of Great Britain, George II of Great Britain, George III of the United...

theatre.

George Rowell died on 1 November 2001, leaving a widow, Nancy, who died in December 2004.

Works

Rowell, G. (1953) Nineteenth Century Plays. Oxford: The World's Classics.

Rowell, G. (1956) The Victorian Theatre 1792-1914: A Survey. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rowell, G. & Mobbs, K. (1962) Engaged! or Cheviot's Choice. A comic opera in three acts. Written by W. S. Gilbert. Chappell & Co.

Rowell, G. (ed.) (1968) Late Victorian plays, 1890-1914 (World's Classics). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rowell, G. (ed.) (1971) Victorian Dramatic Criticism. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd.

Rowell, G. (ed.) (1972) Nineteenth Century Plays. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rowell, G. (1978) Queen Victoria goes to the Theatre. Elek Books Ltd.

Rowell, G. & Jackson, A. (1984) The Repertory Movement: A History of Regional Theatre in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rowell, G. (1982) Theatre in the Age of Irving (Drama and Theatre Studies). Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Inc.

Rowell, G. (ed.) (1982) Plays by W. S. Gilbert: The Palace of the Truth, Sweethearts, Princess Toto, Engaged, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (British and American Playwrights). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rowell, G. (ed.) (1986) Plays by A. W. Pinero: The Schoolmistress, The Second Mrs Tanqueray, Trelawny of the 'Wells', The Thunderbolt (British and American Playwrights). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rowell, G. (1987) William Terriss and Richard Prince: Two Characters in an Adelphi Melodrama. Society for Theatre Research.

Rowell, G. (1989) 'The Drama of Wilde and Pinero' in Ford, B. (ed.) The Later Victorian Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rowell, G. (1993) The Old Vic Theatre: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.