Horace Howard Furness

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 -- 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.

Horace 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, but his growing deafness interfered with the practice of law. 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." [Horace Howard Furness, "How did you become a Shakespeare Student?" Shakespeariana, vol. 5 (October 1888), pp. 439-40.]

Furness 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, it was rededicated in 1991, as the Fisher Fine Arts Library.) He was the advisor for doctoral candidate 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).] Horace Jr. donated his father's Shakespearean collection to the University of Pennsylvania, whose Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library [ [http://www.library.upenn.edu/collections/rbm/furness.html Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library] ] honors both father and son.

An 1890 review in Blackwood's Magazine may indicate the esteem in which British critics held Furness's scholarship: "In what is called 'The Variorum Edition of Shakespeare,' America has the honor of having produced the very best and most complete edition, so far as it has gone, of our great national poet." [Quoted in "Horace Howard Furness," Dictionary of Literary Biography (Thomson Gale, 2005-06)]

The Modern Language Association of America [ [http://www.mla.org/variorum_handbook New Variorum continues ...] continues the "New Variorum" project with the goal of definitively annotating all 38 of Shakespeare's plays.

Horace Howard Furness High School in South Philadelphia is named for him. The Helen Kate Furness Free Library [ [http://www.hkflibrary.org/ Helen Kate Furness Free Library] ] in Wallingford, PA is built on the former grounds of his country house, "Lindenshade," on land donated by Furness.

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) [ [http://perseus.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/JC/index.var.html Julius Caesar New Variorum text] ]

Macbeth (revised)

Merchant of Venice (revised)

King John (1919)

Coriolanus (1928)

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)