John Oxenford  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

John Oxenford (12 August 1812 – 21 February 1877), English dramatist, was born at Camberwell, London, England.

He began his literary career by writing on finance. He was an excellent linguist, and the author of many translations from German, notably of Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit (1846) and Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe (1850).

Schopenhauer

Bryan Magee, in his The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, described how Oxenford contributed to the promulgation of Schopenhauer's work. Oxenford's anonymous Westminster Review 1853 article, "Iconoclasm in German Philosophy," was written in order to present Schopenhauer as a critic of Hegel. It was translated and published in the Vossische Zeitung, which resulted in German readers showing enthusiastic and enduring interest in Schopenhauer's writings.

Drama

His first play was My Fellow Clerk, produced at the Lyceum Theatre in 1835. This was followed by a long series of pieces, the most famous of which was perhaps the Porter's Knot (1858) and Twice Killed (1835). About 1850, he became dramatic critic of The Times. He wrote a version of Last Days of Pompeii in 1872.

He died in Southwark on 21 February 1877.

His 1835 one-act A Day Well Spent, after expansion, translation, and rewriting, formed the basis of Thornton Wilder's play The Matchmaker, which itself was the basis of the stage musical and movie Hello, Dolly!.

Many references to his pieces will be found in The Life and Reminiscences of E. L. Blanchard (ed. C Scott and C Howard, 1891).




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "John Oxenford" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools