Owen Hall was the principal pen name of the Irish-born theatre writer, racing correspondent, theatre critic and solicitor, James Davis, when writing for the stage. After his successive careers in law and journalism, Hall wrote the librettos for a series of extraordinarily successful musical comedies in the 1890s and the first decade of the 1900s, including A Gaiety Girl, An Artist's Model, The Geisha, A Greek Slave and Florodora. Despite his achievements, Hall was constantly in financial distress because of his gambling and extravagant lifestyle; his pseudonym was a pun on "owing all".

Edwardian musical comedy was a form of British musical theatre that extended beyond the reign of King Edward VII in both directions, beginning in the early 1890s, when the Gilbert and Sullivan operas' dominance had ended, until the rise of the American musicals by Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart, George Gershwin and Cole Porter following the First World War.