(Lafayette, National Portrait Gallery)
(Walter Stoneman, National Portrait Gallery)
(Sir William Orpen, UCL Art Museum)
(Walter Stoneman, National Portrait Gallery)
(Hertfordshire Society)
Here are the founding members of the Malone Society, a scholarly organization created in 1906. Its emphasis is and was on critical editions of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, non-Shakespearean, at that. Pollard, like his colleagues and his predecessors such as James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps and Frederick J. Furnivall, believed that literature was best studied in its earliest textual state, quartos and folios from the early modern period, without previous editorial intervention. He stated: "work of permanent utility can be done by placing in the hands of students at large such reproductions of the original textual authorities as may make constant and continuous reference to those originals themselves unnecessary." Therefore, the Malone Society should "be formed for the purpose of producing accurate copies of the best editions of early plays."
Greg supervised almost every publication during his lifetime. He remembered and did not wish to duplicate the technical distractions of Furnivall's facsimiles, which he excoriated because of bad printing, illegibility, and some doctoring in ink that would not bear scrutiny. John S. Farmer had created excellent collotype editions in his Tudor Facsimile Series, and chances are that Greg and his mates took notice and published accordingly.
Each member was a great scholar and noted Englishman.
The University of London's Institute of English Studies administers the Society's publications.
