Nevill Coghill

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

See Nevill Josiah Aylmer Coghill for the recipient of the Victoria Cross.

Nevill Coghill (1899–1980) was a British literary scholar, known especially for his modern English version of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Coghill was educated at Haileybury, and was a fellow of Exeter College, Oxford; a small bust of him may be found today in the college chapel. He served in the Great War after 1917. In 1948, he was made professor of rhetoric at Gresham College, London. He was Merton Professor of English Literature of the University of Oxford from 1957 to 1966. He died in November 1980.

His Chaucer and Langland translations were first made for BBC radio broadcasts. He was well known in his time as a theatrical producer and director in Oxford; he is particularly noted as the director of the landmark OUDS 1949 production of The Tempest. He was an associate of the literary group The Inklings with other famous Oxford Dons such as J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.

[edit] Works

  • The Pardon of Piers Plowman (1945)
  • The Masque of Hope (1948)
  • The Poet Chaucer (1949; 2nd ed. 1967)
  • Geoffrey Chaucer (1956)
  • Shakespeare's Professional Skills (1964)
  • Langland: Piers Plowman (1964)
  • Chaucer's Idea of What Is Noble (1971), ISBN 0-19-721485-1
  • Collected Papers (1988), ISBN 0-7108-1233-7

[edit] Further reading

  • Glyer, Diana (2007). The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community. ISBN-13: 978-0873388900.

[edit] See also

Languages