Nevill Coghill

Nevill Henry Kendal Aylmer Coghill (19 April 1899 – 6 November 1980) was an Anglo-Irish literary scholar, known especially for his modern-English version of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. He was an associate of the literary discussion group the "Inklings", which included J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.

Early life and education 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. 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)