Synopses & Reviews
First modern full-length biography of scholar and member of late eighteenth-century intellectual elite.
Synopsis
Edmond Malone (1741-1812) was the greatest early editor of Shakespeare's works, the first historian of English drama, the biographer of Dryden and Reynolds, and a relentless exposer of literary fraud and forgery. He laid the foundations for the scholarly study of literature; yet he was also gregarious, attracting many friends and enemies among his contemporaries. This first modern full-length biography of Edmond Malone illuminates the private world of the scholar and the public world of the late eighteenth-century artistic, intellectual and political elite.
Table of Contents
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.