ABSTRACT
Edmond Malone (1741-1812) was educated privately and at Trinity College, Dublin. A lawyer for ten years, he established himself in London in 1777 as a private man of letters, and became a close friend of Johnson, Bos well, Reynolds, Percy, Walpole, Burke, Farmer, and Steevens. He assisted Bos well with his biography of Johnson, and edited several reissues of that work; in addition to his Shakespearian labours he edited the works of Goldsmith (1780) and Reynolds (1791), and Dryden’s prose works (1800). Malone also published an account of the origin of the plot of The Tempest (2 vols, 1808-9), and exposed the forgeries of Chatterton’s Rowley poems, and Ireland’s Shakespeare papers. He left his materials for a new edition of Shakespeare to James Boswell the younger, who issued a twenty-one volume edition in 1821. The bulk of his collection of early printed books and manuscripts is in the Bodleian. See John Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1817-58, 8 vols), v (1828), pp. 444-67; James Prior, Life of Edmond Malone (1860); D.N.Smith, ‘Malone’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 3 (1939), 23-36; Arthur Brown, Edmond Malone and English Scholarship (inaugural lecture, University College, London, 1963).
