SHADWELL, THOMAS (c. 1642-1692) English play wright and miscellaneous writer, was born about 1642, at Santon Hall, Norfolk, according to his son's account. He was educated at Bury St. Edmund's School, and at Caius College, Cambridge, where he was entered in 1656. He then joined the Middle Temple. Shadwell's best plays are Epsom Wells (1672), for which Sir Charles Sedley wrote a prologue, and the Squire of Alsatia
For fourteen years from the production of his first comedy to his memorable encounter with Dryden, Shadwell pro duced a play nearly every year. These productions display a genuine hatred of shams, and a rough but honest moral purpose. They are disfigured by indecencies, but present a vivid picture of contemporary manners.
Shadwell is chiefly remembered—rather unjustly—as the un fortunate Mac Flecknoe of Dryden's satire, the "last great prophet of tautology," and the literary son and heir of Richard Flecknoe : The rest to some faint meaning make pretence, But Shadwell never deviates into sense.
True Widow (1679), and in spite of momentary differences, the two had been apparently on friendly terms. But when Dryden joined the court party, and produced Absalom and Achitophel and The Medal, Shadwell became the champion of the true-blue Protest ants, and made a scurrilous attack on the poet in The Medal of John Bayes: a Satire against Folly and Knavery (1682). Dryden immediately retorted in Mac Flecknoe, or a Satire on the True Blue Protestant Poet, T.S. (1682), in which Shadwell's personali ties were returned with interest. A month later he contributed to Nahum Tate's continuation of Absalom and Achitophel satirical portraits of Elkanah Settle as Doeg and of Shadwell as Or. In 1687 Shadwell attempted to answer these attacks in a version of the tenth satire of Juvenal. At the Whig triumph in 1688 he superseded his enemy as poet laureate and historiographer royal. He died at Chelsea on Nov. 19, 1692.
A complete edition of Shadwell's works was published by his son Sir John Shadwell in 172o. But see the modern critical edition, The
Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell (5 vols., 1928), edited by Montague Summers.
[Mahommed ibn Idris ash-Shafei] (767-820), the founder of the Shafilite school of canon law, was born in A.H. 150 (A.D. 767) of a Koreishite (Quraishite) family at Gaza or Ascalon, and was brought up by his mother in poor circumstances at Mecca. There, and especially in intercourse with the desert tribe of Hudhail, he gained a knowledge of classical Arabic and old Arabian poetry for which he was afterwards famous. About 170 he went to Medina and studied canon law (fiqh) under Malik ibn Anas. After the death of Malik in 179 legend takes him to Yemen, where he is involved in an `Alid conspiracy, carried pris oner to Baghdad, but pardoned by Harun al-Rashid. He was cer tainly pursuing his studies, and he seems to have come to Baghdad in some such way as this and then to have studied under Hanifite teachers. He had not yet formulated his own system. After a journey to Egypt, however, we find him in Baghdad again, as a teacher, between 195 and 198. There he had great success and turned the tide against the klanifite school. His method was to restore the sources of canon law which Abu ljanifa had destroyed by inclining too much to speculative deduction. Instead, he laid equal emphasis upon the four—Koran, tradition, analogy, and agreement. See further, under MOHAMMEDAN LAW. In 198 he went to Egypt in the train of a new governor, and this time was received as the leading orthodox authority in law of his time. There he developed and somewhat changed the details of his system, and died in 204 (A.D. 82o). He was buried to the south east of what is now Cairo, and a great dome (erected c. A.D. 1240) is conspicuous over his tomb.
See F. Wiistenfeld, Schafi'iten, 31 ff.; M. J. de Goeje in ZDMG. xlvii. io6 ff.; C. Brockelmann, Geschichte, i. 178 ff.; M`G. de Slane's trans]. of Ibn Khallikan, ii. 569 ff., Fihrist, 209, Nawawi's Biogr. Dict.
56 ff. (D. B. M.)