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5 unusual facts about Thomas Coxeter


John Monck Mason

In 1779 Mason published in London an edition of the Dramatick Works of Philip Massinger (4 vols.) which the Dictionary of National Biography found no improvement on that of Thomas Coxeter (1761); the memoir by Thomas Davies was however praised at the time.

Thomas Coxeter

In the prospectus he said that, having determined to "revive the best of our old plays, faithfully collated with all the editions that could be found in a search of above thirty years", he "happened to communicate his scheme to one who now invades it" — the reference being to Robert Dodsley, whose Select Collection of Old Plays appeared in 1744.

Born at Lechlade in Gloucestershire on 20 September 1689, he was educated at Coxwell, Berkshire, and at Magdalen School in Oxford.

Coxeter's manuscript collections were largely used in Theophilus Cibber's Lives of the Poets and in Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry.

In 1720 he contributed one or more of the indexes to John Hudson's edition of Josephus; and in 1739 he published a new edition of the Life of Bishop Fisher often attributed to Richard Hall, its translator into Latin.



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