34 Facts About Edmond Malone

Edmond Malone was an Irish Shakespearean scholar and editor of the works of William Shakespeare.

Edmond Malone went to London, where he frequented literary and artistic circles.

Edmond Malone regularly visited Samuel Johnson and was of great assistance to James Boswell in revising and proofreading his Life, four of the later editions of which he annotated.

Edmond Malone was friendly with Sir Joshua Reynolds, and sat for a portrait now in the National Portrait Gallery.

Edmond Malone was one of Reynolds' executors, and published a posthumous collection of his works with a memoir.

Edmond Malone was a central figure in the refutation of the claim that the Ireland Shakespeare forgeries were authentic works of the playwright, which many contemporary academics had believed.

Edmond Malone had two sisters, Henrietta and Catherine, and an older brother, Richard.

Edmond Malone took up residence with his wife on the family's country estate, Shinglas, in County Westmeath, and began a more successful legal practice there.

Edmond Malone excelled at his studies, "an exemplary student, naturally diligent, consistently at the top of his class", and was awarded with books stamped with the College Arms.

Edmond Malone's studies were interrupted when, in the summer of 1759, he and his father accompanied his mother to Highgate in England.

Edmond Malone was called to the Irish bar in 1767, and from 1769 practised law on the Munster circuit with "indifferent rewards".

Edmond Malone returned to Ireland and the Munster circuit, but, in private letters, complained of his boredom with this occupation.

Edmond Malone transcribed a facsimile of the manuscript, including "interlineations, corrections, alterations", but he failed to publish it and the original manuscript has since been lost.

Edmond Malone had known Goldsmith, either in Dublin or in London in the 1760s, and to honour his friend he participated in an amateur production of Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer.

Edmond Malone's ambition was politics, and that summer he proposed himself as candidate to a seat in Parliament for Trinity College.

Objections were raised that his uncle, Anthony Edmond Malone, had joined the Townshend government whose autocratic policies the university was firmly against.

Edmond Malone travelled to London to interview the people who had known Goldsmith and collect information and anecdotes about him.

Edmond Malone spent six months there but apart from a letter from Susanna Spencer, in reply to a letter from Malone that is lost, we have no information about his activities there.

Edmond Malone had contributed an eight-page memoir of Goldsmith and annotations to the poems and plays.

When Edmond Malone returned to Ireland in early 1777, he set about transcribing all the annotations into his own copy.

Edmond Malone moved into a house in Sunninghill, about 42 kilometres outside London, and started work.

Edmond Malone befriended Reynolds and they remained close friends until the latter's death in 1792, when Reynolds named Edmond Malone his executor along with Edmund Burke and Philip Metcalfe.

Steevens brought up Susanna Spencer and suggested that Edmond Malone's work on Shakespeare was a mere device to keep his mind distracted from the unhappy relationship.

Edmond Malone was aggressive and arrogant, and his constant stream of corrections grated on the older editor.

When Edmond Malone first arrived in England in 1777 he already had a connection to Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, and, through his boyhood friend Robert Jephson, to James Caulfeild, 1st Earl of Charlemont.

Edmond Malone dined regularly with Johnson, Steevens, Reed, Reynolds, Richard Farmer, Horace Walpole, John Nichols, and John Henderson.

Edmond Malone dearly wanted to get in, but even though he had the support of Charlemont and Reynolds, he was thwarted by circumstances.

Edmond Malone kept notes on their conversations that Boswell later included in his The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.

The controversy was a perfect match for Edmond Malone: steeped in ancient and early modern English literature, by trade a lawyer, and with no patience for literary forgeries or those who entertained them.

In 1815 Lord Sunderlin announced his intention to donate part of his late brother's library to the Bodleian once the new edition of Edmond Malone's Shakespeare was complete.

Edmond Malone reserved c 800 volumes for the Library, while the rest was sold in 1818 at Sotheby's.

Edmond Malone published a denial of the claim to antiquity of the Rowley poems produced by Thomas Chatterton, and in this as in his branding of the Ireland manuscripts as forgeries, he was among the first to guess and state the truth.

At the time of his death, Edmond Malone was at work on a new octavo edition of Shakespeare, and he left his material to James Boswell the younger; the result was the edition of 1821 generally known as the Third Variorum edition in twenty-one volumes.

The Edmond Malone Society, devoted to the study of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English drama, was named after him.