[1] Malone was also a central figure in the refutation of the claim that the Ireland Shakespeare forgeries were authentic works of the playwright, which many contemporary academics had believed.

Edmond Malone Sr. was a successful lawyer and politician, educated at Oxford University and the Inner Temple in London, and called to the Bar in England in 1730, where he had a legal practice.

[4] According to Peter Martin, Malone's main biographer in the 20th century: "Virtually nothing is known of his childhood and adolescence except that in 1747 he was sent to Dr. Ford's preparatory school in Molesworth Street, Dublin, where his brother Richard had already been enrolled for two years".

Malone excelled at his studies, "an exemplary student, naturally diligent, consistently at the top of his class",[5] and was awarded with books stamped with the College Arms.

[4] …the Antient Chorus … has been entirely rejected by all the modern tragick writers … few but those who converse more with the dead than the living, have any ideas of its use & advantages.As an undergraduate he wrote some poetry and literary history.

Malone and his father returned to Ireland in October, too late to resume the winter term, so he elected to stay at Shinglas until the new year and study on his own.

The expenses for Catherine's stay at Bath put a strain on the family finances, but it was alleviated somewhat when, after a special examination on 2 June, he won a scholarship at Trinity and became a Scholar of the House.

[8][9] Malone probably entered the Inner Temple in January 1763, but few records survive of his studies there; except that he was "invited to come to the bench table"[10] in the commons—an honour Peter Martin describes as comparable to becoming a Warden in a guild[10]—on 10 May 1763.

Outside schoolwork he published satirical articles about the government and on the abuse of the English language, and made corrections to the text in his copy of a new edition of Jonathan Swift's correspondence.

[8] They would have found other common interests in the law and Ireland, as Johnson would soon start work as private secretary to the English statesman and Irish politician William Gerard Hamilton.

He was finished at the Inner Temple, but still required further study for the Irish Bar, and his motivation was flagging; particularly since it would mean leaving London and its "coffee-shops, theaters, newspapers, and politics.

On hearing that the judgeship might not come to pass, Malone wrote to his father: "It shall be a lesson to me, never to believe in any great man's word, unless coupled with performance, & to aspire by every truest means at the greatest blessing of life, independence.

Arriving back in London, without the Southwells, in February he announced his fresh determination to proceed with law: "It is my firm resolution to apply as closely as possible till I go to Ireland, to the study of law, & the practice of the Court of Chancery…"[14] From the Person, parts & address of the young Lord, I thought the poor Girl payd dear enough for his Estate & title … I hope no child of mine will ever stoop to be exalted on such terms; domestic enjoyment in comfort & mediocrity has a thousand superior charms.He was called to the Irish bar in 1767, and from 1769 practised law on the Munster circuit with "indifferent rewards".

On a visit with Dr. Thomas Wilson, Senior Fellow of Trinity College, in 1774 he discovered several papers by Alexander Pope that Henry St John, the poet's literary executor, had collected.

According to Martin's description, "Malone played two parts and wrote an excessively long epilogue of eighty-two lines, with several allusions that suggest his literary tastes.

"[17] His father died unexpectedly on 22 March 1774, leaving the four siblings with a modest income, and Malone free to pursue interests outside the drudgery of his legal practice.

[20] The legacy left him free to pursue a life of scholarship, and he promptly gave up the nomination in favour of contributing to a new edition of Goldsmith that was being prepared.

The memoir was based on "Authentic Anecdotes" by Richard Glover—published in The Universal Magazine in May 1774, and Edmund Burke included it in The Annual Register for that year—as well as first-hand information from Dr. Wilson at Trinity.

His uncle, Anthony Malone, had had his portrait painted by Reynolds in 1774, and Malone himself had good company: during the ten times between 23 February and 10 July that he sat for the portrait, Reynolds's appointment book shows that he sat on the same date as Edward Gibbon, the British historian and MP; George Spencer, 4th Duke of Marlborough; Hester Thrale, author of Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson and a close friend of Johnson; and (28 April and 17 May) George III, then king of England and Ireland.

[26] Until this point their relationship had been a cordial and productive one—Steevens having given Malone his first opportunity as an editor of Shakespeare, and in return having benefitted greatly from the younger scholar's work—but while working on the addendum they had a falling-out.

Steevens brought up Susanna Spencer and suggested that Malone's work on Shakespeare was a mere device to keep his mind distracted from the unhappy relationship.

[30] When Malone first arrived in England in 1777 he already had a connection to Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, and, through his boyhood friend Robert Jephson, to James Caulfeild, 1st Earl of Charlemont.

But by this time Johnson's advancing age and ill health prevented his socialising as much as in earlier years, and Malone did not often enough get a chance to spend time with him or people like Edmund Burke, James Boswell, Edward Gibbon, Charles Burney, Joseph Banks, William Windham, Charles James Fox, or John Wilkes.

For the third edition in 1778 he added an appendix arguing against the poems' antiquity, and Thomas Warton, in his The History of English Poetry (1778), devoted an entire chapter to it.

[37] The controversy was a perfect match for Malone: steeped in ancient and early modern English literature, by trade a lawyer, and with no patience for literary forgeries or those who entertained them.

As Martin puts it he "entered the fray"[38] in December 1781 by "[sending] an anonymous 'brat into the world'"[38] The "brat" was an article in two parts in The Gentleman's Magazine, signed "Misopiclerus".

[40] I do humbly recommend, that … the friends of the reverend antiquarian … and the learned mythologist … may, as soon as possible, convey the said [gentlemen] to the room over the north porch of Redcliffe church, … that in order to wean these gentlemen by degrees from the delusion under which they labour, and to furnish them with some amusement, they may be supplied with proper instruments to measure the length, breadth, and depth, of the empty chests now in the said room, and thereby to ascertain how many thousand diminutive pieces of parchment, all eight inches and a half by four and a half, might have been contained in those chests; (according to my calculation, 1,464,578;—but I cannot pretend to be exact:).Before he died, Malone detailed what should be done with his library in his will: I request my said brother [Lord Sunderlin] will not permit my collection of books which I estimate to be worth two thousand pounds to be sold or disposed of but preserve them or at least such of them as he is not already possessed of as an addition to his own library and with respect to the great collection of antient English Poetry and Plays contained therein which comprises almost all the original Editions of Shakespeare’s Works and is perhaps the most curious valuable and extensive collection of that kind ever assembled I recommend that he should for the sake of preserving it entire either bequeath it as an heir Loom to go with the Baronston Estate or to the Library of the College of Dublin where we were both bred but it is not my intention or meaning hereby to create any implied trust, but to leave the whole and every part of my library freely and absolutely at his disposal.

1598, and Venus and Adonis, 4to 1593, to make it complete; and of those three plays it contains very early copies, carefully collated with those original editions; and of the fourth piece [the Venus and Adonis of 1593] no copy was ever seen by any of the Collectors of these precious rarities, or is now known to exist, though I have no doubt that at some future time it will be discovered.The influence of the Malone collection from its 1821 receipt in the Bodleian is shown by both the donations to and purchases of the Library in the years following: in 1833 Thomas Caldecott donated his poems of Shakespeare, and at the Heber sale in 1834, and afterward, further gaps in the collection were filled.

Malone published a denial of the claim to antiquity of the Rowley poems produced by Thomas Chatterton, and in this (1782) as in his branding (1796) of the Ireland manuscripts as forgeries, he was among the first to guess and state the truth.

Lord Sunderlin (1738–1816), his elder brother and executor, presented the larger part of Malone's book collection, including dramatic varieties, to the Bodleian Library, which subsequently bought many of his manuscript notes and his literary correspondence.