Edmond Malone, Shakespearean Scholar
A Literary Biography

First modern full-length biography of scholar and member of late eighteenth-century intellectual elite.

Peter Martin (Author)

9780521619820, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 17 February 2005

348 pages, 21 b/w illus.
22.7 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.53 kg

Edmond Malone (1741–1812) was the greatest early editor of Shakespeare's works, the first historian of early English drama, the biographer of Shakespeare, Dryden and Reynolds, and a relentless exposer of literary fraud and forgery. His dedication to discovering the facts of literary history through manuscripts and early editions laid the foundations for the scholar's code and the modern study of literature. Yet he was also a gregarious man, attracting many friends and enemies among his contemporaries. This first modern full-length biography of Edmond Malone illuminates in a unique way both the intensely private world of the scholar and the highly public world of the late eighteenth-century artistic, intellectual and political elite, including Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sarah Siddons and James Boswell.

List of illustrations
Preface
List of abbreviations
1. Irish beginnings
2. 'Shakspearomania'
3. Dr Johnson and the club
4. Courtship, books, forgeries, and Horace Walpole
5. Scholarship and strife
6. 'O Brave We!': helping Boswell with the Tour of the Hebrides
7. Deep in Shakespeare
8. Boswell's Life of Johnson
9. Interruptions and disappointments
10. The club of Hercules: exposing Shakespeare forgeries
11. Art and politics: homage to Reynolds and Burke
12. John Dryden and the closing of the century
13. Signs of weariness
14. 'The last of the Shakspearians'
Epilogue: The Malone–Boswell Third Variorum Edition (1821)
Appendices
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Biography: historical, political & military [BGH]