William Rufus Chetwood

William Rufus Chetwood (died 1766) was an English or Anglo-Irish publisher and bookseller, and a prolific writer of plays and adventure novels. He also penned a valuable General History of the Stage.

Nothing certain is known of Chetwood's early life, but he may have spent an extended period at sea. In 1713 he appeared as the publisher of A Poem on the Memorable Fall of Chloe's P—s Pot (attributed to Jonathan Swift). In the following year he was acting as assistant manager to Joseph Ashbury's theatre company in Dublin. His first published writing appears to have been a Life of Lady Jane Grey, published in Dublin in 1715. By June 1715 he was prompter at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, which he remained for much of the following twenty years.

Chetwood soon built up a business as a publisher and bookseller, operating alone or in conjunction with other firms. His repeated partners in publishing included Barnaby Bernard Lintot, John Watts, William Mears, and James Roberts, on ventures that included several Shakespeare plays, almost every new London play between 1719 and 1722, Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack, Colley Cibber's collected plays, and many of Eliza Haywood's novels. Meanwhile, he published alone plays by Theophilus Cibber, Thomas D'Urfey and Thomas Doggett, Richard Savage's memoirs of Theophilus Keene, and Haywood's novel Love in Excess.

Early plays by Chetwood – South-Sea, or, The Biter Bit and The Stock-Jobbers, or, The Humours of Exchange Alley – were published but remained unperformed. Chetwood also published two novels almost certainly by him: The Voyages, Dangerous Adventures, and Imminent Escapes of Captain R. Falconer and the 1726 Voyages and Adventures of Captain Robert Boyle, which remained in print at least until the mid-19th century. His first work to be performed on stage was The Lovers' Opera (1729), an adaptation of Susanna Centlivre's A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718). This went through at least three published editions and was also performed on the Dublin stage in 1736.

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