Life
1727-1805;
b. Clooniquin [var. Cloonyquin], Co. Roscommon; raised in London; ed.
St. Omer; lived George’s Quay Dublin, after father’s death at
sea; clerked for an uncle in Cork; returned to London; refused to travel
to Jamaica and disinherited by an uncle; turned to stage; fnd. ed. Gray’s
Inn Journal, 1752-54 (first iss. 21 Oct.), in opposition to the Spectator,
contributing as ‘Charles Ranger’; appeared as Othello at Covent
Garden (18 Oct. 1754); wrote nineteen of plays, chiefly farces, beginning
with The Apprentice (1756); refused entrance to Middle Temple actor
in 1757, but accepted by Lincoln’s Inns through influence of Henry
Fox and others; The Upholsterer; or, What News?; appeared at Smock
Alley in 1757-58; enjoyed success with The Orphan of China (1759),
a tragedy adapted from Voltaire’s L’Orphelin de la Chine;
also adapted Three Weeks after Marriage (1760), after Molière;
issued a novel, Isabella, or the Memoirs of a Coquette (1761);
ed. Fielding’s Works (1762); bar, 1762 and acted as principal
pleading barrister with Dalrymple, representing appellants in successful
law suits to terminate perpetual copyright in books then pertaining to
booksellers who acquired such texts as Paradise Lost for ‘a
Bottle and a fowl’; supplied preface to Goldsmith’s The Goodnatur’d
Man (1768); wrote The Grecian Daughter (1773), tragedy based
on the classical story of Valerius Maximus about the filial piety of the
dg. who breast-fed her father in prison; retired from bar, through
deafness, 1788; Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson
(1792); Life of David Garrick (1801), (1801); trans. Tacitus,
4 vols. (1793), ded. Edmund Burke; granted pension under George III and
made commissioner of Bankruptcy, 1803; d. 18 June, Knightsbridge, London;
bur. Hammersmith; a biography was written by his executor, Dr. Jesse Foote
(1811); there is a portrait by Nathaniel Dancer in the [Irish]
National Portrait Collection. RR CAB DNB PI NCBE DIB
DIW DIL OCEL JMC FDA OCIL
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Works
The Works of Arthur Murphy, 7 vols. (London: T. Cadell 1786);
Richard B. Schwartz, ed. & intro., The Plays of Arthur Murphy
[Eighteenth-century English Drama] (NY: Garland Publ. [q.d.), 438pp. [367,
xxix, 100pp.; incl. reprint of the 1798 edn. of Arminius].
Bibliographical
details
The Works of Arthur Murphy, 7 vols.
(London: T. Cadell 1786): VOL. 1 - The Orphan of China; Zenobia; The Grecian
Daughter; Alzuma. VOL. 2 - The Apprentice; The Upholstered; The Old Maid;
The Citizen; No One’s Enemy But His Own; Three Weeks After Marriage.
VOL. 3. The Way to Keep Him; All in the Wrong; The Desert Island. VOL.
4: Know Your Own Mind; The School for Guardians; The Choice; News from
Parnassus. VOL. 5-6 - Gray’s-Inn Journal [noS. 1-104]. VOL. 7 - A
Poetical Epistle to Dr. Johnson; The Expostulation; Prologues, Epilogues,
&c.; The Game of Chess: A Poem ... from the Scacchia of Vida; Templum
famę: A Latin Poem, from the Temple of fame of Mr. Pope; Pope’s Ode
on Solitude, tr. into Latin; Busy Curious Thirsty Fly, in Latin; Gray’s
Churchyard Elegy, in Latin; The Rival Sisters; Prologue, occasioned by
the Death of Mr. Henderson; Postscript.
Plays: Editions
Separate editions, The Apprentice: A Farce in Two Acts (London
1756, 1756, 1764); Do. (Belfast: James Magee 1773); Do.
(London: Bell’s 1784); and Do. [other edns.] in British
Stage, Sharpe’s British Theatre [q.d.] and Cawthorn’s
Minor British Drama (1811), also in collections of Inchbald, Dibdin,
London Stage, British Drama, and Dicks’s No. 207 [1877];
The Spouter or the Triple Revenge: A Comic Farce in Two Acts
(1756); Arminius: a Tragedy in Verse in Five Acts (London 1798);
The Citizen: A Farce in Two Acts and Prose (1793, 3rd edn. 1770);
Do. (Dublin: A Leathley 1774), 12o., and Do. (London 1784,
1786, 1804, &c), also in collections of Sharpe, Cawthorn, Inchbald,
Oxberry, Cumberland, et al.; The Desert Island: Three Act Dramatic
Poem after Metastasio (1760), and Do. [Dutch trans. (1774);
The Grecian Daughters, Tragedy in Five Acts (2nd edn. 1772; edns.
to 1874), and Do. in Italian as Eufrasia, o la Figlia Greca
(Pisa 1787); Hamlet: A Tragedy in Three Acts (1811); The
Orphan of China (1759 & edns., incl. Dublin: G. & A. Ewing
1759), and Do. (Dublin: Leathey 1761); The Rival Sisters: A
Tragedy in Five Acts (London 1793), and Do. (Dublin: P. Wogan
1793), 79pp.; The School for Guardians: A Comedy (London 1767),
and Do. (1797; 2 edns.); ... &c.
Collected Editions, Works of Arthur Murphy, 7 vols. (London: T. Caddell 1786); John Pike Emery, ed., The Way to Keep Him and Five other plays by Arthur Murphy (NY UP 1956); George Taylor, ed. & intro., Plays by Samuel Foote and Arthur Murphy (Cambridge UP 1984).
Other Works
Poetry, The Examiner: A Satire in Verse (London 1761) [orig.
‘The Expostulation’ but altered on title-page]; Seventeen
Hundred and Ninety One: A Poem in imitation of 13th satire of Juvenal
(1791). Fiction, Isabella, or the Memoirs
of a Coquette (Dublin: James Hoey 1761).
Criticism, Essay on the life and Genius of Henry Fielding, in The Works of Henry Fielding, Vol. I (1762, 1771, 1783, 1784, 1806, 1821, 1871); Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson (1792, 1793, 1796, 1801, 1806, 1810; also 1824, 1825), Do., in G. B. Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies (1897); and Do. [abridged], in Rev. W. P. Page, ed., Selected Miscellanies of Johnson (1897); Works of Samuel Johnson, LLD, with an Essay on his Life and Genius [new edn.] 12 vols. (London: G. Woodfall 1816); The Works of Sallust, translated into English by the late Arthur Murphy [with a ‘Life of Sallust’ by Thomas Moore] (London: J. Carpenter 1807), 40pp., and Do. [2nd edn.] (Dublin: Gilbert & Hodges 1810), [2]+37pp. Miscellaneous, Charles Ranger [pseud. A.M.], ed., The Gray’s Inn Journal (1753- ; rep. 1756).
Miscellaneous, Addisoni Epistola missa ex Italia ad illustram Dominum Halifax, anno 1701 (1799) [Addison’s Italian letters to Halifax trans. into Latin hexameters]; Beauties of the Magazines (1772) [essays], 12o; Do. (1775), 8o; Boswell’s Life of Johnson to which are [sic] added anecdotes by A. Murphy (1835); ed., Man of the World by Charles Macklin, (1793); ed., The Works of Cornelius Tacitus, with an Essay on the Life and Genius of Tacitus, 4 vols. (London: G. C. J. & J. Robinson 1793; rep. 1807, 1829, 1832, 1908) [infra]; trans., The Bees: A Fourteenth-century Poem (1799) [viz., J. Vanière, Praedium Rusticum]; trans., [Bishop of Alba], A Game of Chess [1867], bilingual in Latin & English]; All in the Wrong: A Comedy in Five Acts (London: P Valliant 1761; Dublin 1762; Cork 1765; London 1775, 1787), also in collections of Jones, Bell, Inchbald, Dibdin, Oxberry, and Cumberland to 1829 and Dicks [1875]; [George Daniel], ed., All in the Wrong, with Biographical and Critical notes [q.d.]; Do., trans into German by F. L. Schroeder, as Die Eifersuchtign, oder Kenirer hat Recht, Ein Lustspiel in vier Aufzügen (German Stage [q.d.]) Alzuma: A Tragedy in Five Acts and Verse (3 edns. 1773), rep. in A Collection of New Plays (1774).
Bibliographical
details
Works of Samuel Johnson, LLD, with
an Essay on his Life and Genius [new edn.] 12 vols. (London: G. Woodfall
1816), Vol. 1, 328pp.; Vol. 2. [philological tracts], 423pp.; Vol. 3,
426pp; Vol. 4 [The Rambler], 402pp.; Vol. 5 [The Rambler,
cont.], 406pp; Vol. 6 [Rambler, conclusion], 336pp.; Vol. 7 [The
Idler], 336pp.; Vol. 8 [Journey to Western Islands of Scotland],
66pp.; Vol. 9 [Lives of the English Poets], 408pp.; vol. 10 [Lives,
cont.], 353pp.; vol. 11 [Lives, conclusion], 336pp.; Vol. 12 [Lives
of Eminent Persons], 432pp. See also Works of Johnson, new
edn. 2 vols. (Henry Bohn 1862); The Englishman from Parts [1756]
(Augustan Reprint Society [No. 17] 1969), 35pp.
The Works of Cornelius Tacitus, with an Essay on the Life and Genius of Tacitus, by Arthur Murphy, Esq.. 4 vols. (London: for G. C. J. & J. Robinson, Paternoster Row 1793), ded. Edmund Burke [‘with a patriot spirit standing forth the champion of Truth, of your Country, and the British Constitution’, p.vi.], notes supplements & maps.
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Criticism
Richard Ryan, Biographia Hibernica:
Irish Worthies (1821), Vol. II, pp.445-49.
Howard A. [Hunter] Dunbar, The Dramatic Career of Arthur Murphy [Revolving Fund, No.14] (NY: MLA 1946; London: OUP 1946).
John Pike Emery, Arthur Murphy (Philadelphia: Temple UP 1946), port. & bibl.; Robert Donald Spector, Arthur Murphy (Boston: Twayne Publ. 1979);
See also Philim Moculloch [pseud.], The Murphiad (1761), called ‘a very nasty production’ [Arnott/Lowe]
Peter Kavanagh, Irish Theatre (Tralee 1946).
G. C. Duggan, The Stage Irishman (1937).
W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (1984), p.91.
Donald W. Nichol, ‘Murphy’s Law’, [feature-article] on ‘the man who won the first decisive battle in the literary property wars’, Times Literary Supplement (April 19 1996), p.15-16.
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Notes
Dictionary of National Biography, calls him son of Richard,
and Jane French; b. 27 Dec., Clomquin [sic] Co Roscommon; at Boulogne
with aunt, Mrs Arthur Plunkett, in 1736; sent to English college at St.
Omer under name of Arthur French, remaining 6 yrs.; sent by uncle Jeffery
French to serve Edmund Harold, a merchant in Cork; refused to go to Jamaica
and offended uncle, April 1749; transferred to London banking house, Ironside
& Belchier; made friends with Sam. Foote; worked on Gray’s
Inn Journal [no pseud. mentioned], 1752-54; disappointed in legacy;
£300 in debt; appeared on stage as Othello to Ryan’s Iago and George
Ann Bellamy’s Desdemona, Covent Garden, 18 Oct. 1754; prologue by
himself; Apprentice (DL 2 Jan 1756), deriding ambition to act of
uneducated; publ. anon. with connivance of Garrick The Spouter
(1756), which incl. under transparent disguises Garrick, Rich, Theo. Cibber,
Foote, and John Hill, the latter three satirised coarsely as Slender,
Squint-eyed Pistol, and Dapperwit; his Englishman from Paris stolen
by Foote and turned into Englishman returned from Paris (CG 3 Feb.
1756), though a continuation of Foote’s Englishman in Paris;
Upholsterer, What News? (30 March 1757), a Mossop benefit; altered
in 1763, and additional scene by Joseph Moser printed in European Magazine,
Vol. LIII - it deals with meddling tradesmen neglecting their own business
for politics; edited The Auditor in opposition to North Briton
[ed. by John Wilkes, assisted by Richard Churchill]; Orphan of China
(DL 21 Apr. 1759), after Voltaire, 9 nights; acted in Dublin as recently
as 1810; The Desert Island, dull dramatic poem after Metastasio
(1760); The Way to Keep Him, 3 acts (performed and printed, 1760),
produced again in 5 acts (10 Jan 1761), Garrick playing Lovemore both
times, and the chars. of Sir Bashful and Lady Constant being added; rep.
1761; All in the Wrong, adapt. Molière’s Cocu Imaginaire
(DL 15 1761), prod. by Foote and Murphy in a Drury Lane summer season;
What We Must All Come To (1764), from the Guardian, No.
173, hissed from the stage, revived 30 March 1776, and freq. played as
Three Weeks after Marriage; [..] Murphy a favourite of society,
a guest at noble houses, a man much respected and courted, used to walk
arm in arm with Lord Loughborough; ‘much loved’ by Johnson;
irascible corr. with Garrick, easily appeased; d. 18 Jun., Knightsbridge;
bur. Hammersmith; executor Jesse Foote; ports. by Nathaniel Dance, eng.
by W. Ward; lived with Miss Ann Elliot, uneducated girl of natural abilities
whom he brought on the stage; he wrote her biography (1769); he transferred
her money to relatives at her death; invariably took his plots from prev.
writers; ed. Works of Fielding with slight attention [to] chronology;
minor works incl. The Examiner [orig. The Expostulation],
a satire by Arthur Murphy (London 1761), written in answer to The Murphiad,
a mock-heroic poem (London 1761); ‘Ode to the Naiads of Fleet Ditch’,
by Arthur Murphy (London 1761), a furious attack on Churchill who in his
Apology had derided Murphy and his Desert Island [q.d.].
Bibl, the principal source of information for all the foregoing, Foote,
Life of Arthur Murphy (1811), itself founded on his papers, incl.
an autobiographical manuscripts.
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Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations gives samples from Murphy though he is omitted from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1953 & Edns.).
Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature (Washington: Catholic Univ. of America 1904), contains extract from Three Weeks After Marriage, and notes that his Orphan of China (1759), made Mrs Yates a favourite; All in the Wrong (1761 [sic]), also a success for Mrs Yates, and a financial success for Murphy; Know Your Own Mind, and The Way to Keep Him, held stage for years; The Grecian Daughter, trag., Three Weeks after Marriage, and The Citizen, comedies, also successful; Life and Genius of Johnson. In 1793 appeared trans. of Tacitus, with an essay on his life and genius, frequently reprinted; Life of Fielding, and Life of Garrick, his least talented work; Arminius (appeared 1798), in favour of the pending war, for which granted pension of £200; died in June.
Peter Kavanagh, The Irish Theatre (Tralee 1946) lists The Apprentice, farce (1756); The Spouter, or The Triple Revenge, farce, unacted (1756); The Upholsterer or What News?, farce (1758); The Orphan of China, trag. (1759); The Desert Island, dram. poem (DL 24 Jan. 1760); The Way to Keep Him, com. (1760); All in the Wrong, com. (1761) [Dublin Edn. 1762]; The Old Maid, farce (1761); The Citizen, farce (1763); No One’s Enemy but His Own, com. (1764); What We Must All Come To, farce (1764); The Choice, farce (DL 1764; in Works, 1786); The School for Guardians, com. (1767); Zenobia, trag. (1768); The Grecian Daughter, trag. (1773); Alzuma, trag. (1773); News from Parnassus, prelude (1776; in printed Works, 1786); Know Your Own Mind (1788); The Rival Sisters, trag. (1793; in Works, 1786); Arminius, unacted trag. (1798); Hamlet with Alterations, burl., unacted [1811].
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Stephen Brown, Ireland in Fiction [Pt. I] (Dublin: Maunsel 1919), Mr. Murphy (?Arthur Murphy, 1727-1805, playwright, author of The Grecian Daughter and All in the Wrong, &c.), Isabella, or the Memoirs of a Coquette (Dublin: James Hoey 1761), a novel: ’just the reminiscences of an old lady who had been an inveterate flirt and turned over a new leaf in age’ [Brown].
Sir Paul Hervey, ed., The Oxford Companion to English Literature [4th edn.] (OUP 1967), summarises Three Weeks after Marriage (1760), a play concerning the disillusionment of Mr Drugget, a rich retired tradesman, who has married his eldest dg. to Sir Charles Rackett, and now plans to marry second Nancy to Lovelace, another penniless man of fashion, though she is in love with Woodley, a rival suitor; he finally abjures all dealings with men of fashion]; The Way to Keep Him (produced 1764), on duty of wives to be bright and amiable and of husbands to be faithful.
Brian McKenna, Irish Literature, 1800-1875: A Guide to Information Sources (Detroit: Gale Research Co. 1978), lists The Works of Sallust, translated into English by the late Arthur Murphy (London 1807) as appearing in Prose Works of Thomas Moore [McKenna, p.286; see also Patrick Rafroidi, Irish Literature in English, 1980, Vol. 2, under ‘Moore: Miscellaneous Prose’: ‘Life of Sallust’, in The Works of Sallust, trans. Arthur Murphy (London: J. Carpenter 1807), 40pp.; 2nd edn. (Dublin: Gilbert & Hodges 1810), [2]+37pp.
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British Library holds Addisoni Epistola missa ex Italia ad ilustram Dominum Halifax, anno 1701, auct. A Murphy (1799) [trans. into Latin hexameters]; Beauties of the Magazines ... consisting of essays by Murphy &c. (1772), 12o; Do., 1775, 8o; Boswell’s Life of Johnson to which are [sic] added anecdotes by Murphy (1835); Macklin’s Man of the World, ed. by A Murphy (1793); The Murphiad [mock heroic attack on Murphy] (1796[?]) [recte Arnott, by Philim Moculloch, presumed pseud.] (1761), ‘a very nasty production’ (acc. Lowe)]; The Works of Cornelius Tacitus, ed. Arthur Murphy, 4 vols. (1807, 1829, 1832, 1908); The Bees, 14th c. poem of J. Vanière, Praedium Rusticum, trans. Murphy (1799); Bishop of Alba, A Game of Chess, poem trans. by A. Murphy, Latin and English (1867 [sic]); Works of Arthur Murphy, 7 vols. (London: 1786); All in the Wrong, com. 5 acts (London: P. Valliant 1761; Cork 1765; Lon 1775, 1787), also in Jones, Bell, Inchbald, Dibdin, Oxberry, and Cumberland collections up to 1829; also in Dicks (?1875); All in the Wrong [reissue], with biographical and critical notes by D-. G. [George Daniel]; All in the Wrong, German trans. by FL Schroeder as Die Eifersuchtign, oder Kenirer hat Recht, Ein Lustspiel in vier Aufzügen [and prose], printed in German Stage; Alzuma, trag., verse, 5 acts (1773; 2nd & 3rd eds., 1773), also in A Collection of New Plays, 1774; The Apprentice , two-act farce (London 1756), further eds. in 1756, 1764; also Apprentice (Belfast: James Magee 1773), Bell’s ed. 1784; also in British Stage, Sharpe’s Brit. Theatre, Cawthorn’s Minor British Drama (1811); Inchbald, Dibdin, London Stage, British Drama, and Dicks’s, No. 207 (?1877); Arminius, trag. verse, 5 acts (London: J. Wright 1798); The Citizen, farce, 2 acts, prose (1793, 3rd ed. 1770); The Citizen (Dublin: A Leathley 1774), 12o; also London eds., 1784, 1786, 1804, 180 &c. incl. Sharpe, Cawthorn, Inchbald, Oxberry, Cumberland, et al.; The Desert Island, three act dramatic poem after Metastasio (1760), also Dutch trans. 1774; Essay on the life and Genius of Henry Fielding, in The Works of Henry Fielding, vol. I, 1762; and eds., 1771, 1783, 1784, 1806, 1821, 1871; Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson (1792), and eds., 1793, 1796, 1801, 1810, 1816, 1824, 1825; rep. in G. B. Hill, ed., Johnsonian Miscellanies (1897), also abridged version of the essay in Rev. WP Page, ed., selected Miscellanies of Johnson (1897); The Examiner, a satire in verse (Lon. 1761, orig. called ‘The Expostulation’ but altered on title-page; The Gray’s Inn Journal, by Charles Ranger [pseud. A.M.] (1753- ); also 1756; The Grecian Daughters, trag. in five acts (2nd ed. 1772); numerous eds. to 1874, also Italian trans. as Eufrasia, o la Figlia Greca (Pisa 1787); Hamlet with alterations, trag. in three acts (1811), see Foot, Life of Murphy; Orphan of China, numerous eds. include Do., (DUB: G&A Ewing 1759), and Do. (Dublin: Leathey 1761); The Rival Sisters (5 act trag. (London 1793; The Rival Sisters, adapted for theatrical representation &c. (Dublin: P Wogan 1793), 79pp.; The School for Guardians, comedy (London 1767), also 2 other eds. 1797; Seventeen Hundred and Ninety One, poem in imitation of 13th satire of Juvenal (1791); The Spouter or the Triple Revenge, a comic farce in two acts (1756); … &c. &c. Commentary incls. Jesse Foote the Elder, Life of Arthur Murphy (1811) [4o, 464., pls.; front, in Arnott]; Works of Johnson ... life and genius (1806); Howard A Dunbar, Dramatic Career of Arthur Murphy, MLA Revolving Fund No.14 (MLA 1946); John Emery, Arthur Murphy, with port. and bibliography (1946). Also, [?Arthur Murphy], Histoire de François Wills, ou le Triomphe de la bienfaisance [i.e., ‘The Triumph of Benevolence’], par l’auteur du Ministre de Wakefield [e.g., pretended Oliver Goldsmith]; traduction de l’anglois ... 2 pts. (Amsterdam: D. J. Changuion: Rotterdam: H. Beman, &c. 1773), 8o.
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)