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EDMOND MALONE, SHAKESPEAREAN SCHOLAR: A LITERARY BIOGRAPHY. By Peter Martin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xxiii + 298. $59.95.
As Shakespeareans and Johnsonians know, Edmond Malone was one of England's greatest scholars and men of letters. During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Malone earned widespread respect as editor of Shakespeare, as biographer of a range of literary figures, notably Dryden, and as bookman par excellence. In addition, as a lawyer cum scholar, he relentlessly prosecuted literary fraud, especially when he found it mixed with simple laziness. In the late eighteenth century, when "secondary" or "scholarly" works were much closer to the heart of literary life than they are now, Malone, in prominence and reputation, had an influence as wide and as deep as, say, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren combined.
But curiously, in the twentieth century, few people have written comprehensively on Malone. Well aware of the dearth of writing on this figure, Peter Martin chooses to advance Malone's reputation by writing a biography. Martin thus undertakes a difficult task indeed, for a comprehensive biography of Malone requires the biographer to delve into issues that animated the literary world of the 178os and 179os-issues far removed from those animating us now. Inevitably, then, some readers will find Martin's biography too detached from contemporary matters to be compelling. But other readers will welcome Edmond Malone, Shakespearean Scholar, especially since the most recent biography of Malone was Sir James Prior's hagiography of 1860. If Martin's book fails to "situate" Malone in a "framework" that speaks to current issues, it succeeds as documentary literary biography, as learned intellectual prose modestly designed to advance and diffuse knowledge. Martin appears content to outline the mind and work of a principal maker of modern literary scholarship-one who antedated English scholars influenced by German or continental models of intellectual prose. And although Martin may be accused of writing an excessively sympathetic biography, it is hard to imagine a sensitive biographer of Edmond Malone proceeding any other way.
Writing a biographical rather than an interpretive work about Malone is difficult for another reason as well: the essence of Malone's contribution virtually requires the biographer to adopt an admiring, seemingly uncritical-and thus perhaps unexciting-posture. After all, Malone's work is undeniably...