Edmond Malone, Shakespearean Scholar

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.

• First modern full-length biography of important figure in the history of scholarship • Detailed account of the world of the intellectual and political elite of the late eighteenth century • New insight into the relationship between Boswell and Johnson, and the development of Boswell’s great biography

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.