William Watkiss Lloyd

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For other persons named William Lloyd, see William Lloyd.

William Watkiss Lloyd (March 11, 1813 - December 22, 1893), was an English writer.

He was born at Homerton, Middlesex, and educated at Newcastle-under-Lyme independent school. At the age of fifteen he entered a family business in London, with which he was connected for thirty-five years. He devoted his leisure to the study of art, architecture, archaeology, Shakespeare, classical and modern languages and literature. He died in London.

The work for which he is best known is The Age of Pericles (1875), a work notable for its scholarship and thorough appreciation of the period with which it deals, but rendered unattractive by a difficult and at times obscure style. He wrote also:

  • Xanthian Marbles (1845)
  • Critical Essays upon Shakespeare's Plays (1875)
  • Christianity in the Cartoons [of Raphael] (1865), which excited considerable attention from the manner in which theological questions were discussed
  • The History of Sicily to the Athenian War (1872)
  • Panics and their Panaceas (1869)
  • an edition of Much Ado about Nothing, "now first published in fully recovered metrical form" (1884)--(the author held that all the plays were originally written in blank verse)

A number of manuscripts still remain unpublished, the most important of which have been bequeathed to the British Museum, amongst them being:

  • A Further History of Greece
  • The Century of Michael Angela
  • The Neo-Platonists

See Memoir by Sophia Beale prefixed to Lloyd's (posthumously published) Elijah Fenton: his Poetry and Friends (1894), containing a list of published and unpublished works.

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.