Nevill Coghill

His father was Sir Egerton Coghill, 5th Baronet Coghill was educated at Haileybury, and read History and English at Exeter College, Oxford. In 1924, he became a Fellow of the college, a position he held until 1957, In 1927, he married Elspeth Nora Harley, with whom he had a daughter; the marriage was dissolved in 1933. In 1948, he was appointed Professor of Rhetoric in Gresham College. He was Merton Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford from 1957 to 1966. He died in November 1980, aged 81. == Later career ==

His Chaucer and Langland translations were first made for BBC radio broadcasts. Coghill was well known during his time as a theatrical producer and director in Oxford; he is noted particularly as the director of the Oxford University Dramatic Society 1949 production of The Tempest. He was an associate of the literary discussion group the "Inklings", which was attended by a number of notable Oxford Dons, including J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, as well as Oxford alumnus Owen Barfield. In 1968, Coghill collaborated with Martin Starkie to co-write the West-End and Broadway musical Canterbury Tales. The musical was a great success internationally, receiving four Tony nominations. In 1973, the same team collaborated on a sequel, The Homeward Ride, comprising more of Chaucer's Tale. In a memoir, American academic Reynolds Price writes: Nevill himself was born in 1899, served in the First War, married, fathered a daughter, then separated from his wife and lived a quietly homosexual life thereafter. He later spoke to me of several romances with men, but he apparently never established a residence with any of them; and until his retirement from Oxford, he always lived in his college rooms. == Works ==

• The Pardon of Piers Plowman (1945) • The Masque of Hope (1948) • Visions from Piers Plowman (1949) • The Poet Chaucer (1949; 2nd ed. 1967) • The Canterbury Tales: Translated into Modern English (1952) • Geoffrey Chaucer (1956) • ''Shakespeare's Professional Skills'' (1964) • Langland: Piers Plowman (1964) • Troilus and Criseyde: Translated into Modern English (1971) • ''Chaucer's Idea of What Is Noble'' (1971) • Collected Papers (1988) • Doctor Faustus (adaptation), (1967) ==See also==