Location: Early Modern History Workshop, University of Cambridge

This paper discusses the importance of historical data to the study of literature. Its focus is the work of Edmond Malone (1741-1812), one of the most influential eighteenth-century editors of Shakespeare and the first to argue at length that successful vernacular literary editing depended upon a deep knowledge of the context in which a play or poem was produced. For Malone, such a foundation guarantees the utility of his work and distinguishes it from his predecessors’ outmoded emphasis on beauties and faults. Yet Malone’s extensive mobilisation of archival data is, in spite of his claimed objectivity, itself the basis for a distinctive interpretative approach to Shakespeare, especially visible in the editor’s attitude to anachronisms in the plays. By showing how his author “has given all countries and all ages the manners of his own”, Malone in fact reworks a commonplace of neoclassical theatre criticism in a way that reflects both the cultural and political changes of his era.