Shakespeare, Malone and the Problems of Chronology

Malone, in the eighteenth century, came up with a method for determining Shakespeare's chronology that was wrong: we have been using it ever since.

This Element will be on the three versions of Edmond Malone's An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the Plays Attributed to Shakspeare were Written and the way they created, shaped, focused, directed, and misdirected, our idea of the chronology and sequence of Shakespeare's plays.In 1778 Edmond Malone published his first contribution to Shakespeare scholarship, An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the Plays Attributed to Shakspeare were Written. He revised and republished it in 1790 and began a further revision of it which was printed posthumously in 1821. This Element will be on the three versions of Malone's Attempt and the way they created, shaped, focused, directed, and misdirected, our idea of the chronology and sequence of Shakespeare's plays. By showing Malone's impressive, fallible choices, adopted or adapted by later editors, it reveals how current Shakespeare editions are, in good and bad ways, Malonian at heart.