KNOWLES, JAMES SHERIDAN Irish dramatist and actor, was born in Cork, on May 12, 1784. His father was the lexicographer, James Knowles (1759-1840), cousin german of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. The family removed to London in 1793, and the boy's talents secured him the friendship of Hazlitt, who introduced him to Lamb and Coleridge. He served for some time in the Wiltshire and afterwards in the Tower Hamlets militia, leaving the service to study medicine under Robert Willan (1757-1812). But he forsook medicine for the stage, making his first appearance probably at Bath, and playing Hamlet at the Crow theatre, Dublin. At Wexford he married, in Oct. 1809, Maria Charteris, an actress from the Edinburgh theatre. In 1810 he wrote Leo, in which Edmund Kean acted with great success ; another play, Brian Boroihme, written for the Belfast theatre in the next year, drew crowded houses, but his earnings were so small that he had to turn to school-teaching, first at Bel fast and then at Glasgow. His Caius Gracchus was produced at
Belfast in 1815; and his Virginius, written for Edmund Kean, was first performed in 1820 at Covent Garden. In William Tell (1825) Macready found one of his favourite parts. His best known play, The Hunchback, was produced at Covent Garden in 1832; The Wife was brought out at the same theatre in 1833; and The Love Chase in 1837. In his later years he became a Baptist preacher, and attracted large audiences at Exeter hall and elsewhere. He published two polemical works directed against the special doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. Knowles for some years.received an annual pension of £200, bestowed by Sir Robert Peel. He died at Torquay on Nov. 3o, 1862.
A full list of the works of Knowles and of the various notices of him will be found in the Life (1872), privately printed by his son, Richard Brinsley Knowles (1820-82), who was a well known journalist.