Edmond Malone

• 1. Introduction

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  Edmond Malone was born on the 4th of October 1741 in Dublin, and by the time he died on the 25th of May 1812, he had done something that no scholar before him had managed: he made it possible to read the plays of William Shakespeare as a biography. That single insight, modest in description but enormous in implication, reshaped how we understand the greatest writer in the English language. Malone was not a professional academic. He trained as a lawyer, practiced on the Munster circuit with, as he admitted, "indifferent rewards", and only abandoned the law after his father’s death freed him from financial obligation. The questions that follow are worth sitting with: how did an Irish barrister with a failed romantic life and a middling legal career become the foremost editor of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century? And what drove him to stake his reputation, time and again, against forgeries that had convinced some of the best minds of his age?

• 2. Dublin Boy, Trinity Scholar

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  In 1747, young Edmond was sent to Dr. Ford’s preparatory school on Molesworth Street in Dublin, following his older brother Richard by two years. A decade later, in 1757, not yet sixteen years old, he entered Trinity College Dublin. His father had received an honorary LL.D. from the same institution the year before, giving the occasion a particular weight for the family. At Trinity, Malone was described by his main biographer Peter Martin as "an exemplary student, naturally diligent, consistently at the top of his class", and he was awarded books stamped with the College Arms as prizes. In the very first examination of the academic year, he shared top honours with James Drought and John Kearney, both of whom later became Fellows of the college.

  His undergraduate writing already signalled what was coming. Among his literary efforts was a prose translation of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, accompanied by a twenty-page essay on the origin and progress of tragedy and the role of the ancient chorus. Martin called it "surprisingly erudite". Malone argued in that essay for restoring the chorus to modern drama, a position that shows him thinking about theatrical tradition at an unusually early age.

  His studies were disrupted in the summer of 1759, when his mother Catherine’s failing health required travel to Highgate and then to the Roman Baths at Bath in Somerset. The expenses strained the family finances. But on the 2nd of June, after a special examination, he won a scholarship at Trinity and became a Scholar of the House, which eased some of the burden. He received his BA degree at the Commencement on the 23rd of February 1762, achieving the top mark "valde bene" as one of only three students to do so.

• 3. Law, Longing, and London

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  Malone paid £3 6s 8d for admittance to the Inner Temple in London in 1761, following a family tradition: his father, uncle, and grandfather had all been Irish barristers. He began his law studies in early 1763, and on the 10th of May that year he was "invited to come to the bench table" in the commons, an honour Peter Martin compares to becoming a Warden in a guild. He also published satirical articles on the government and on the abuse of the English language during this period, hinting at where his real appetite lay.

  In 1764, Malone’s close friend Thomas Southwell and his father Edmund introduced him to Samuel Johnson. Johnson’s quarters on Inner Temple Lane were close to Malone’s own lodgings. Martin calls it "the most important meeting of Malone’s life". Malone became, in Martin’s words, an "ardent follower of Johnson’s and, Boswell excepted, the most enthusiastic defender and celebrator of Johnson’s writings and life." The friendship lasted until Johnson’s death in 1784.

  He was called to the Irish bar in 1767 and practiced on the Munster circuit from 1769 onward. The work was unrewarding. In the early months of 1769 he had an intense romance with Susanna Spencer that ended unhappily, and the collapse left him in what Martin describes as a "nervous collapse", losing the will to read or practice law. He spent much of that summer recuperating in Spa with his brother while his sisters sent letters trying to lift his spirits. The Munster circuit, the boredom, the distance from London’s literary world: all of it gnawed at him. He complained in private letters of his tedium. The death of his father on the 22nd of March 1774 changed everything.

• 4. Amateur Stage, Political Speech

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  On the 4th of April 1774, the Irish-born author Oliver Goldsmith died. Malone had known him, either in Dublin or in London in the 1760s, and he honoured his friend by participating in an amateur production of Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer on the 27th of September 1774. The event had deliberately patriotic overtones: it was staged at the country seat of Sir Hercules Langrishe, a member of the Irish House of Commons, at Knocktopher, and the Irish politicians Henry Grattan and Henry Flood both played parts. Malone himself played two roles and wrote an epilogue of eighty-two lines, which Martin notes "celebrates Shakespeare, touches on Irish politics, and concludes with a panegyric on the stage."

  That same year, freed by his inheritance and his father’s death, Malone turned to politics. He proposed himself as a candidate for a seat in Parliament for Trinity College that summer. His uncle Anthony Malone’s association with the Townshend government, whose autocratic policies Trinity opposed, became an obstacle. In his speech to the electors, Malone defended his uncle as a man of principle who "sought to do his best for his constituents rather than gain advantage for himself and his friends", and declared that he himself had won "at too high a price indeed, an honourable independence" and would not forfeit it for any motive. He won the nomination. But before the election in May 1776, Anthony Malone died and left Edmond an annual income and his brother Richard the estate at Baronston. Financial independence now made the parliamentary ambition unnecessary. He gave up the nomination and went to London to interview people who had known Goldsmith, contributing an eight-page memoir and annotations to the posthumous Poems and Plays by Oliver Goldsmith.

• 5. Ordering the Shakespeare Canon

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  George Steevens, by the mid-1770s the inheritor of the editorial mantle for the Jacob Tonson edition of Shakespeare’s collected works, invited Malone into his orbit when Malone came to London in 1776. Steevens lent him a copy of Gerard Langbaine’s An Account of the English Dramatic Poets, published in 1691, into which Steevens had transcribed notes by William Oldys alongside his own. Malone finished transcribing those annotations into his own copy on the 30th of March 1777, and on the 1st of May he left Ireland for good.

  He moved into a house in Sunninghill, about 42 kilometres outside London, and began sending a steady stream of notes and corrections to Steevens. In January 1778, The Plays of William Shakspeare was published in ten volumes. Malone’s central contribution appeared in the first volume: "An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in Which the Plays Attributed to Shakspeare Were Written". The essay garnered him more attention than all the notes and corrections he had supplied. Its findings are, according to the source, still largely accepted today. By making it conceivable to sequence the plays, Malone opened a new kind of scholarly project: using the plays themselves to piece together a biography of their author.

  After settling in London, first briefly in Marylebone Street and then at 55 Queen Anne Street East in what is now Foley Street, he sat for his portrait with Joshua Reynolds beginning on the 23rd of February 1779. Reynolds was then charging 35 guineas, or £36.75, for a face-and-shoulders portrait. During the ten sittings between that date and the 10th of July, Reynolds’s appointment book shows that Malone shared sitting dates with Edward Gibbon, George Spencer the 4th Duke of Marlborough, Hester Thrale, and on the 28th of April and the 17th of May, George III.

• 6. The Club and Its Costs

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  "The Club" had been founded by Johnson and Reynolds in 1764, and by the early 1780s membership had become a much sought-after honour. Malone wanted in badly. The group was deliberately exclusive, limited at that time to 35 members, and since members rarely left, openings came only at death. After David Garrick died in 1779, the members resolved to keep his spot open in tribute to the actor and theatre manager, and successive votes left all candidates blackballed.

  It was not until the 5th of February 1782 that, as Martin puts it, "the memory of Garrick having dimmed sufficiently, Malone at last was admitted into this august company." He attended his first meeting on the 19th of February 1782 and quickly became one of The Club’s most enthusiastic supporters. He held the only permanent office, treasurer. The access to Johnson that he had hoped membership would bring proved limited: Johnson’s health was failing, and in the period between Malone’s admission and Johnson’s death on the 13th of December 1784, they saw each other at The Club only five times. The last occasion was the 22nd of June 1784, when Johnson "was in obvious pain and had to drag himself to get there." Malone visited Johnson at his house at Bolt Court and kept notes on their conversations, notes that James Boswell later drew on for The Life of Samuel Johnson, published in 1791. The letter to Malone from John Byng, 5th Viscount Torrington, is described in the source as the best surviving account of Johnson’s last hours.

• 7. Unmasking the Forgers

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  In 1769, the poet Thomas Chatterton, then only seventeen years old, sent Horace Walpole a series of poems he claimed were written by a fifteenth-century monk named Thomas Rowley. Walpole was briefly convinced but later reconsidered. When Chatterton committed suicide the following year, rumours circulated that Walpole’s treatment had played a part. The controversy did not die. In 1777, Thomas Tyrwhitt published the forgeries as Poems, Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley and Others, in the Fifteenth Century, reigniting the debate. By late 1781, two books appeared just days apart defending the poems’ authenticity: one by the classical scholar Jacob Bryant and one by Jeremiah Milles, Dean of Exeter and President of the Society of Antiquaries of London.

  Malone entered what Martin calls the "fray" in December 1781, sending what he called an anonymous "brat into the world": an article in two parts in The Gentleman’s Magazine, signed "Misopiclerus". The essay compared the Rowley poems to poetry by writers actually working in that era; traced Chatterton’s real sources to Shakespeare, Pope, and Dryden; and picked apart the arguments of the poems’ defenders. By February he published a second edition as Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley. His mockery of Bryant and Milles included a calculation that the chests supposedly containing Rowley’s manuscripts at Redcliffe church could have held 1,464,578 small pieces of parchment, noting with dry understatement that he "cannot pretend to be exact."

  He repeated the feat in 1796 with the Ireland Shakespeare forgeries, a collection of manuscripts attributed to Shakespeare that many contemporary academics had accepted as genuine. Malone was among the first to declare them fakes. His 1790 edition of Shakespeare, covering the years from 1783 onward in preparation, was praised by Edmund Burke, criticised by Horace Walpole, and, in the source’s words, "damned" by Joseph Ritson.

• 8. The Library and Its Afterlife

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  Before he died, Malone set out in his will exactly what he wanted done with his books. He estimated his collection to be worth two thousand pounds and asked his brother Lord Sunderlin not to sell it but to preserve it, and specifically recommended that the collection of early English poetry and plays, which he described as "perhaps the most curious valuable and extensive collection of that kind ever assembled", be either entailed with the Baronston estate or donated to the College of Dublin.

  In 1815, Lord Sunderlin announced his intention to donate part of the library to the Bodleian Library at Oxford, once the new Variorum Shakespeare edition was complete. He reserved around 800 volumes for the Bodleian, and the rest was sold at Sotheby’s in 1818. The collection arrived at the Bodleian in 1821. Most of Malone’s books are bound with the initials "E. M." in an interlaced monogram on the spine.

  At the time of his death, Malone had been at work on a new edition of Shakespeare. He left his materials to James Boswell the younger, and the result was the 1821 edition now known as the Third Variorum, in twenty-one volumes. Malone also received an LL.D. from Trinity College Dublin in 1801, and The Malone Society, devoted to the study of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English drama, was later named after him. In 1801, describing his Shakespeare collection in seven quarto volumes, he noted that it lacked only a handful of items to be complete, including the Venus and Adonis of 1593, of which he wrote: "no copy was ever seen by any of the Collectors of these precious rarities, or is now known to exist, though I have no doubt that at some future time it will be discovered."