Category:F. G. Fleay

Frederick Gard Fleay, 1831-1909, was known (and often mocked) in his own time as "the industrious Fleay," and his scholarly output proves his contemporaries to be right on both counts. Of modest birth, he graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1853. He was one of the founders of the New Shakspere Society in 1873 were his papers were frequently on the program and where he both promoted and energized Shakespeare scholarship. He put his collegiate focus on math to work on the metrics of dramatic poetry, and he put his relentless energy into histories of the early modern English stage. In A Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama he frequently offered an opinion on the subject matter and narrative of lost plays and thus became the starting point for subsequent discussion of those plays.