Alexander Dyce

Who was Alexander Dyce?

Alexander Dyce was a Scottish dramatic editor and literary historian.

He was born in Edinburgh and received his early education at the high school there, before becoming a student at Exeter College, Oxford, where he graduated B.A. in 1819. He took holy orders, and became a curate at Lantegloss, in Cornwall, and subsequently at Nayland, in Suffolk; in 1827 he settled in London.

His first books were Select Translations from Quintus Smyrnaeus, an edition of Collins, and Specimens of British Poetesses. He issued annotated editions of George Peele, Robert Greene, John Webster, Thomas Middleton, Marlowe, and Beaumont and Fletcher, with lives of the authors and much illustrative matter. He completed, in 1833, an edition of James Shirley left unfinished by William Gifford, and contributed biographies of Shakespeare, Pope, Akenside and Beattie to Pickering's Aldine Poets. He also edited Richard Bentley's works, and Specimens of British Sonnets. His carefully revised edition of John Skelton, which appeared in 1843, revived interest in that trenchant satirist. In 1857 his edition of Shakespeare was published by Moxon; and the second edition was issued by Chapman & Hall in 1866.