Horace Howard Furness in his library at "Lindenshade," Wallingford, PA, ca. 1900. Historic American Buildings Survey PA.23-WALF.2A-5, Library of Congress.

Horace Howard Furness (1833-1912) was the most important American Shakespearean scholar of the 19th century. As editor of the "New Variorum" editions of Shakespeare, he collected in a single source thousands of references, antecedent works, influences and commentaries. He devoted more than 40 years to the series, completing his annotation of 15 plays. His wife, Helen Kate Furness (1837-1883), annotated Shakespeare's poems. His son, Horace Howard Furness, Jr. (1865-1930), joined as co-editor for the later volumes, and continued the project after the father's death, annotating 5 additional plays.


The University of Pennsylvania Library (1891), now the Fisher Fine Arts Library

Furness was the son of the Unitarian minister and abolitionist William Henry Furness (1802-1896), and brother of the architect Frank Furness (1839-1912). He graduated from Harvard in 1854, studied in Germany, and was admitted to the Philadelphia Bar in 1859. In 1860, he joined the Shakspere [sic] Society of Philadelphia, an amateur study group that took its scholarship seriously. As he later wrote: "Every member had a copy of the Variorum of 1821, which we fondly believed had gathered under each play all Shakespearian lore worth preserving down to that date. What had been added since that year was scattered in many different editions, and in numberless volumes dispersed over the whole domain of literature. To gather these stray items of criticism was real toil, real but necessary if we did not wish our labour over the text to be in vain."[1]


He was a long-serving trustee of the University of Pennsylvania (1880-1904), and chairman of the building committee for its library (1887-91), designed by his brother. (Following a 6-year restoration, the library was rededicated in 1991, as the Anne and Jerome Fisher Fine Arts Library.) The university's Horace Howard Furness Memorial, Rare Book and Manuscript Library[2] honors both the father and son.


Horace Howard Furness High School in South Philadelphia is named for him. The Helen Kate Furness Free Library[3] in Wallingford, PA is built on the former grounds of his country house, "Lindenshade."

References

Agnes Repplier, "Horace Howard Furness," The Atlantic Monthly, November 1912.

Talcott Williams, "Appreciations of Horace Howard Furness: Our Great Shakespeare Critic," The Century Magazine, November 1912.

James M. Gibson, The Philadelphia Shakespeare Story: Horace Howard Furness and the New Variorum Shakespeare (New York: AMS Press, 1990)

  1. ^ Horace Howard Furness, "How did you become a Shakespeare Student?" Shakespeariana, vol. 5 (October 1888), pp. 439-40.
  2. ^ Horace Howard Furness Memorial, Rare Book and Manuscript Library
  3. ^ Helen Kate Furness Free Library
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