Edmond Malone
Edmond Malone was an Irish barrister, Shakespearean scholar and editor of the works of William Shakespeare. Assured of an income after the death of his father in 1774, Malone was able to give up his law practice for at first political and then more congenial literary pursuits. He went to London, where he frequented literary and artistic circles. He 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. He was friendly with Sir Joshua Reynolds, and sat for a portrait now in the National Portrait Gallery.
He was one of Reynolds' executors, and published a posthumous collection of his works with a memoir. Horace Walpole, Edmund Burke, George Canning, Oliver Goldsmith, Lord Charlemont, and, at first, George Steevens, were among Malone's friends. Encouraged by Charlemont and Steevens, he devoted himself to the study of Shakespearean chronology, and the results of his "An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in Which the Plays Attributed to Shakspeare Were Written", which finally made it conceivable to try to patch together a biography of Shakespeare through the plays themselves, are still largely accepted.
This was followed in 1780 by two supplementary volumes to Steevens's version of Dr Johnson's Shakespeare, partly consisting of observations on the history of the Elizabethan stage, and of the text of doubtful plays; and this again, in 1783, by an appendix volume. His refusal to alter some of his notes to Isaac Reed's edition of 1785, which disagreed with Steevens's, resulted in a quarrel with the latter. Malone was also 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.
Biography
Birth and early life
Edmond Malone was born 4 October 1741 in Dublin to Edmond Malone Sr. —MP of the Irish House of Commons and judge of the Court of Common Pleas in Ireland—and Catherine Collier, the niece of Robert Knight, 1st Earl of Catherlough. He had two sisters, Henrietta and Catherine, and an older brother, Richard. Edmond Malone Sr. was a successful lawyer and politician, educated at Oxford University and the Inner Temple in London, and called to the Bar in England in 1730, where he had a legal practice. But in 1740, a year before Edmond Jr. was born, his practice in England failed and he returned to Ireland. He took up residence with his wife on the family's country estate, Shinglas, in County Westmeath, and began a more successful legal practice there.According to Peter Martin, Malone's main biographer in the 20th century: "Virtually nothing is known of his childhood and adolescence except that in 1747 he was sent to Dr. Ford's preparatory school in Molesworth Street, Dublin, where his brother Richard had already been enrolled for two years". The next record of his education is 10 years later, in 1757, when he—not yet 16 years old—entered Trinity College Dublin, where his brother went to study two years earlier and where his father had received an honorary LL.D. the year before. 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. In the very first examination, of four in the academic year, he shared top honours with James Drought and John Kearney, who later became Fellows of the college.
As an undergraduate he wrote some poetry and literary history. Of the latter, a noteworthy example is a prose translation of Oedipus Rex by Sophocles with annotations and explanatory notes that Martin describes as "surprisingly erudite". The translation is accompanied by a twenty-page “… Essay on the Origin and Progress of Tragedy & on the Office & Advantages of the Antient Chorus" where he provides a brief comparison of Sophocles and Euripides and argues in favour of the restoration of the Chorus in modern drama.
Image:Roman Baths in Bath Spa, England - July 2006.jpg|alt=Photograph of the Baths showing a rectangular area of greenish water surrounded by yellow stone buildings with pillars. In the background is the tower of the abbey.|thumb|upright|left|The Great Bath – the entire structure above the level of the pillar bases is a later reconstruction.
His studies were interrupted when, in the summer of 1759, he and his father accompanied his mother to Highgate in England. Catherine's health had been deteriorating for some time and she now had increasing difficulty walking. After a short stay in Highgate she moved to the Roman Baths at Bath in Somerset, where the waters were supposed to have health-giving properties. Malone and his father returned to Ireland in October, too late to resume the winter term, so he elected to stay at Shinglas until the new year and study on his own. Not wishing to leave his father solitary, he nearly did not return to Trinity, but eventually resumed his studies in January 1760. The expenses for Catherine's stay at Bath put a strain on the family finances, but it was alleviated somewhat when, after a special examination on 2 June, he won a scholarship at Trinity and became a Scholar of the House.
Malone's final examination at Trinity was in the Michaelmas term in 1761, and he received his BA degree at the following Commencement on 23 February 1762. As only one of three, he achieved the top mark. The decision to study law was an obvious choice: his father, uncle, and grandfather had all been Irish Barristers. He'd received—on payment of £3 6s 8d—admittance to the Inner Temple in London in 1761, but did not begin his law studies until the new year in 1763. The interval was spent in Dublin reading, and he quickly applied to become a Reader of the Trinity College Library. Martin speculates that he spent his time reading "possibly law although probably also literature".
Law school and legal practice
Malone probably entered the Inner Temple in January 1763, but few records survive of his studies there; except that he was "invited to come to the bench table" in the commons—an honour Peter Martin describes as comparable to becoming a Warden in a guild—on 10 May 1763. Outside schoolwork he published satirical articles about the government and on the abuse of the English language, and made corrections to the text in his copy of a new edition of Jonathan Swift's correspondence. He was admitted to the Inner Temple the same year as James Boswell—a coincidence Martin thinks "literary historians cannot fail to wonder at"—but there is nothing to indicate that they ever crossed paths there.More significantly, in 1764, Malone's close friend Thomas Southwell and his father Edmund introduced Malone to Samuel Johnson, whose quarters on Inner Temple Lane were close to his own lodgings. Martin describes it as “…the most important meeting of Malone's life" and he became an "…ardent follower of Johnson's and, Boswell excepted, the most enthusiastic defender and celebrator of Johnson's writings and life." Malone's friendship with Johnson lasted until the latter's death in 1784. Although Malone failed to write down his conversations with Johnson, and none of his letters on the subject to John Chetwood have been found, Martin speculates that Shakespeare must have been among their topics of conversation, as Johnson was just then finishing up his great edition of Shakespeare that he had begun in 1756. They would have found other common interests in the law and Ireland, as Johnson would soon start work as private secretary to the English statesman and Irish politician William Gerard Hamilton. For Hamilton he compiled notes on the Corn Laws that Malone in 1809 would publish, along with two of Hamilton's speeches in the Irish House of Commons and some other miscellaneous works, under the title Parliamentary Logick.
The Southwells were also his companions when, in the autumn of 1766, he travelled in the south of France. There he visited Paris, Avignon, and Marseille; socialising and relaxing. Around this time he began having doubts about his choice of the law as a career. He was finished at the Inner Temple, but still required further study for the Irish Bar, and his motivation was flagging; particularly since it would mean leaving London and its "coffee-shops, theaters, newspapers, and politics." There was also some tension between him and his father over this, and over a judgeship his father had been promised by Lord Worthington. On hearing that the judgeship might not come to pass, Malone wrote to his father: "It shall be a lesson to me, never to believe in any great man's word, unless coupled with performance, & to aspire by every truest means at the greatest blessing of life, independence." Both issues resolved themselves shortly however, as his father succeeded to the bench as Judge of the Irish Court of Common Pleas while Malone was still in Marseille. Arriving back in London, without the Southwells, in February he announced his fresh determination to proceed with law: "It is my firm resolution to apply as closely as possible till I go to Ireland, to the study of law, & the practice of the Court of Chancery…"
He was called to the Irish bar in 1767, and from 1769 practised law on the Munster circuit with "indifferent rewards". He was not having great success in this field, and he missed London with its "…great literary world of Johnson, coffee-houses, theatre, newspapers, and politics." In the early months of 1769 he also had an intense, but ultimately fruitless, romance with Susanna Spencer. When the relationship failed—for reasons that are unknown but which Martin speculates were related to their families' relative social status—Malone suffered a "nervous collapse" and " the will to read, to join in family activities, to practice law." He spent the better part of the summer in Spa with his brother, while his sisters, by letter, suggested remedies for his low mood and attempted to cheer him up. He returned some time after September, but his depression lingered on. He worked the Munster circuit and at some point after March in 1772 visited London, perhaps on the suggestion of his exasperated father. How long he remained or what his activities were is not known. He returned to Ireland and the Munster circuit, but, in private letters, complained of his boredom with this occupation.