English playwright and miscellaneous writer, born at Santon Hall, Norfolk, according to his sons account. He was educated at Bury St. Edmunds School, and at Caius College, Cambridge, where he was entered in 1656. He left the university without a degree, and joined the Middle Temple. In 1668 he produced a prose comedy, The Sullen Lovers, or the Impertinents, based on Les Fâcheux of Molière, and written in avowed imitation of Ben Jonson. His best plays are Epsom Wells (1672), for which Sir Charles Sedley wrote a prologue, and the Squire of Alsatia (1688). Alsatia was the cant name for Whitefriars, then a kind of sanctuary for persons liable to arrest, and the play represents, in dialogue full of the argot of the place, the adventures of a young heir who falls into the hand of the sharpers there. For fourteen years from the production of his first comedy to his memorable encounter with Dryden, Shadwell produced a play nearly every year. These productions display a genuine hatred of shams, and a rough but honest moral purpose. They are disfigured by indecencies, but present a vivid picture of contemporary manners.
Shadwell is chiefly remembered as the unfortunate Mac Flecknoe of Drydens satire, the last great prophet of tautology, and the literary son and heir of Richard Flecknoe:
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence, | |
But Shadwell never deviates into sense. |
A complete edition of Shadwells works was published by his son Sir John Shadwell in 1720. His other dramatic works areThe Royal Shepherdess (1669), an adaptation of John Fountains Rewards of Virtue; The Humorist (1671); The Miser (1672), adapted from Molière; Psyche (1675); The Libertine (1676); The Virtuoso (1676); The history of Timon of Athens the Man-hater (1678),on this Shakespearian adaptation see O. Beber, Shadwells Bearbeitung des Timon of Athens (Rostock, 1897); A True Widow (1679); The Woman Captain (1680), revived in 1744 as The Prodigal; The Lancashire Witches and Teague ODivelly, the Irish Priest (1682); Bury Fair (1689); The Amorous Bigot, with the second part of Teague ODivelly (1690); The Scowerers (1691); and The Volunteers, or Stockjobbers, published posthumously (1693). See also The Victory in Hungary, As I Walked in the Woods; Literary Criticism.