Edmund Malone, 1741-1812.
Edmund Malone, who lacked Steevens’s quick wit and incisive style, was a laborious and amiable archæologist, without much ear for poetry or delicate literary taste. He threw abundance of new light on Shakespeare’s biography, and on the chronology and sources of his works, while his researches into the beginnings of the English stage added a new chapter of first-rate importance to English literary history. To Malone is due the first rational ‘attempt to ascertain the order in which the plays attributed to Shakespeare were written.’ His earliest results on the topic were contributed to
Steevens’s edition of 1778. Two years later he published, as a supplement to Steevens’s work, two volumes containing a history of the Elizabethan stage, with reprints of Arthur Brooke’s ‘Romeus and Juliet,’ Shakespeare’s Poems, and the plays falsely ascribed to him in the Third and Fourth Folios. A quarrel with Steevens followed, and was never closed. In 1787 Malone issued ‘A Dissertation on the Three Parts of King Henry VI,’ tending to show that those plays were not originally written by Shakespeare. In 1790 appeared his edition of Shakespeare in ten volumes, the first in two parts.