George Colman the Elder
George Colman (April 1732 – 14 August 1794) was an English
Early life
He was born in
Colman left school in due course for Christ Church, Oxford. There he made the acquaintance of the parodist Bonnell Thornton, with whom he co-founded The Connoisseur (1754–1756), a periodical which "wanted weight," as Johnson said, although it reached its 140th number. He left Oxford after taking his degree in 1755 and, having been entered at Lincoln's Inn before his return to London, he was called to the bar in 1757. The friendship he formed with David Garrick did not advance his career as a barrister, but he continued to practise until the death of Lord Bath, out of respect for his wishes.[1]
Plays
In 1760, Colman produced his first play,
Theatre ownership
Colman was the acting manager of Covent Garden for seven years, during which he produced several "adapted" plays of
Other works
Besides the works already cited, Colman was author of adaptations of
Selected plays
- Polly Honeycombe (1760)
- The Jealous Wife (1761)
- The Clandestine Marriage (1766)
- The Oxonian in Town (1767)
- The Suicide (1778)
- The Manager in Distress (1780)
- The Genius of Nonsense (1780)
- Tit for Tat (1786)
- The Village Lawyer (1787)
References
- ^ a b c d e Chisholm 1911.
- ^ The Diary of Sylas Neville 1767–1788, ed. Basil Cozens-Hardy. (London, OUP, 1950), p. 27.
- ^ Illustrated London News, Saturday 31 October 1896 p8 col2-3: Chapter XII
- ^ Dictionary of National Biography
- ^ Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson, "Colman, George, the elder (baptised 1732, d. 1794)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, UK: OUP, 2004) Retrieved 29 January 2017, pay-walled.
- Colman, George, New Brooms!, London, 1776. Facsimile ed., with The Manager in Distress (1780), introduced by J. Terry Frazier, 1980, Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, ISBN 978-0-8201-1353-1.
- public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Colman, George". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 6 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 695. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the
External links
- George Colman at James Boswell – a Guide
- Portraits from the National Portrait Gallery
- Works by George Colman at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about George Colman the Elder at Internet Archive
- Works by George Colman the Elder at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)