Horace Howard Furness

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Horace Howard Furness bigraphy, stories - American Shakespearean scholar

Horace Howard Furness : biography

November 2, 1833 – August 13, 1912

Horace Howard Furness (November 2, 1833 – August 13, 1912) was the most important American Shakespearean scholar of the 19th century.

Honors

Furness was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in 1880. He was the recipient of honorary degress from Harvard University, University of Halle, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and University of Cambridge. from Historical Society of Pennsylvania. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1905. from American Academy of Arts and Letters.

New Variorum

Volumes edited by Horace Howard Furness

  • Romeo and Juliet (published 1871)
  • Macbeth (1873)
  • Hamlet vol. 1 (1877)
  • Hamlet vol. 2 (1877)
  • King Lear (1880)
  • Othello (1886)
  • Merchant of Venice (1888)
  • As You Like It (1890)
  • The Tempest (1892)
  • A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1895)
  • The Winter’s Tale (1898)
  • Twelfth Night (1901)
  • Much Ado About Nothing (1904)
  • Love’s Labors Lost (1904)
  • Anthony and Cleopatra (1907)
  • Richard III (1908)
  • Cymbeline (1913) (published posthumously)

Volumes edited by H. H. Furness, Jr.

  • Julius Caesar (1913)
  • Macbeth (revised)
  • Merchant of Venice (revised)
  • King John (1919)
  • Coriolanus (1928)

Life and career

He 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 University in 1854, then studied in Germany.Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "Horace Howard Furness," Harvard Memorial Biographies, Volume 1. After returning to the United States, he was admitted to the Philadelphia Bar in 1859, but his growing deafness interfered with the practice of law. He married Helen Kate Rogers, sister of Fairman Rogers, and heir to an enormous ironmaking fortune. They had four children.

In 1860, he joined the Shakspere 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."Horace Howard Furness, "How did you become a Shakespeare Student?" Shakespeariana, vol. 5 (October 1888), pp. 439-40.

The University of Pennsylvania Library (1891), now the [[Fisher Fine Arts Library ]] As editor of the "New Variorum" editions of Shakespeare—also called the "Furness Variorum"—he collected in a single source 300 years of references, antecedent works, influences and commentaries. He devoted more than 40 years to the series, completing the annotation of 15 plays. With his wife, Helen Kate Furness (1837–1883), he authored A Concordance to Shakespeare’s Poems (1874). His son, Horace Howard Furness, Jr. (1865–1930), joined as co-editor of the Variorum’s later volumes, and continued the project after the father’s death, annotating 5 additional plays.

He was a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, a long-serving trustee (1880–1904), and chairman of the building committee for its library. Designed by his brother Frank, Horace selected the Shakepearean quotes for the 1891 building’s leaded glass windows.Following a 6-year restoration, Frank Furness’s University of Pennsylvania Library was rededicated in 1991, on the occasion of its centennial, as the Fisher Fine Arts Library. He was the advisor for doctoral student Emily Jordan Folger who, with her husband Henry Clay Folger, would co-found the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.Joseph Quincy Adams and Paul Cret, The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington (Amherst College, 1933). He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.