Ninety years before Horace Howard Furness (1833–1912) was born, the great Philadelphian Benjamin Franklin founded the American Philosophical Society (APS). Furness would go on to have more in common with Franklin than simply living in the same city.
Furness was the son of influential theologian and Unitarian minister William Furness and would enjoy a philosophically rich upbringing. He began pursuing the study of law and literature. His inspiration for the latter seems to have come at the age of 14 years old when he witnessed the reading of the works of William Shakespeare by the renowned British actress Fanny Kemble.
A few years later, in 1851, while Furness was studying at Harvard, four Philadelphia lawyers and Shakespeare enthusiasts started a small group called the Shakspere Apostles (spelled to correlate with Stratford-upon-Avon records). Over the course of the decade, the group of four grew to 25 and changed their name to the Shakspere Society of Philadelphia.
Frances Anne “Fanny” Kemble, circa 1833, by Henry Brintnell Bounetheau after Thomas Sully. Fanny Kemble as Beatrice from Shakespeare’s play "Much Ado About Nothing." (Public Domain)
While the Shakspere Apostles were growing and structuring their organization, Furness graduated from Harvard (1854) and then spent the following two years traveling Europe, Asia, and Africa with his friend and future lawyer, Atherton Blight. After passing the bar exam, Furness received his license to practice law in 1859. He married Helen Kate Rogers the following year. He began practicing, but soon began developing difficulty hearing.
When the Civil War started in 1861, he tried to serve in the military, but his hearing impairment kept him from the battlefield. Furness decided to join the Philadelphia branch of the United States Sanitary Commission, which provided food, clothing, and supplies to wounded soldiers and their families. Throughout the war, Furness also helped raise money for the commission. Sometime during the war, Furness became a member of the Shakspere Society of Philadelphia. According to the Society, “A period of unprecedentedly incisive scholarship that is of particular interest began in the early 1860s, when Horace Howard Furness became secretary of the Society.”
The Society claims that “Furness pushed the group’s members to analyze and discuss their texts with a depth and rigor the group had never attempted. One result of this scholarly fervor is a line-by-line exegesis on ‘The Tempest,’ based on the minutes of their 1864–1865 season, published in 1866 as ‘Notes of Studies on The Tempest: Minutes of the Shakspere Society of Philadelphia for 1864–65.’”
When the war ended, Furness found himself at a career crossroads. His hearing had become worse, making a career in legal practice an impossibility. Instead of studying law, he chose to study literature, specifically the works of Shakespeare.
The Variorums
Frontispiece and title page of "Macbeth" from H.H. Furness's "A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare." Internet Archive. (Public Domain)
Apparently encouraged by his fellow attorneys and Shakespeare dilettantes, Furness branched out on a course to provide readers, actors, and critics with “the ultimate scholarly resource” for Shakespeare’s many works. Thus began his “variorum” editions. A variorum is defined as “an edition of an author’s works (or of a single work) containing explanatory notes by various commentators and editors.”
Furness’s first variorum edition, produced in 1871, was on the tragedy “Romeo and Juliet.” It was the beginning of what would become known as the “Furness Variorum,” as Furness would go on to produce variorums for “Macbeth” (1873, with a revised edition in 1903), “Hamlet” (two volumes in 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), “Much Ado About Nothing” (1899), “Twelfth Night” (1901), “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (1904), “Antony and Cleopatra” (1907), “Richard the Third” (1908), “Cymbeline” (1913), “The Tragedy of Julius Caesar” (published posthumously in 1913), as well as a collection of Shakespeare’s poems.
A Great Man, A Great Task
Furness at his desk. Library of Congress. (Public Domain)
According to the renowned writer and lexicographer William A. Neilson, Furness’s “colossal undertaking … accomplished much more than the supplementing of the work of the Cambridge editors on the text. It summarized with great skill and conciseness … all the criticism, textual, exegetical, and appreciative, down to Dr. Furness’s own day.”
As Talcott Williams, the famed journalist and first director of the Columbia University Pulitzer School of Journalism, noted: “Only a great man can accomplish a great task. For fifteen of Shakspere’s most familiar plays, Horace Howard Furness condensed the criticism of three centuries for each play in a single volume, save ‘Hamlet,’ which has two. From 6000 to 8000 works have been published on Shakspere. All on each play is brought within the compass of its volume. Who holds this volume holds the fruits of all past criticism and comment on the play. Mere industry can do much, but mere industry could never build the monument of these volumes.”
Across the Atlantic (or the pond as the British say), Sir Sidney Lee, the 19th-century Shakespearean scholar and editor of the British “Dictionary of National Biography,” in his work “A Life of William Shakespeare,” stated, “Nowhere, perhaps, has more labour been devoted to the study of his works than that given by Mr. H.H. Furness of Philadelphia to the preparation of his ‘New Variorum’ edition.”
‘One Touch of Shakespeare’
Frontispiece and title page from "Appreciations of Horace Howard Furness," 1912, by Talcott Williams and Agnes Repplier. Library of Congress. (Public Domain)
Furness became the most respected Shakespearean scholar in America, and one of the most respected in the world. He was lauded with honorary degrees from Harvard, Columbia, Pennsylvania, Halle in Germany, and Cambridge in England. In 1880, the year his fifth volume was released, he was elected as a trustee for the University of Pennsylvania and was elected as a member of Franklin’s American Philosophical Society. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters as one of its first members. Shortly before his death, he was awarded a gold medal from the Pennsylvania Society of New York (interestingly, considering the society’s name, he was the first from Pennsylvania to receive the award).
For Furness, though, it was not about the awards and recognition. It was always about the work, Shakespeare, and helping people of every level, understand the Bard. Shortly after his death, Jean Jules Jusserand, the former French Ambassador to the United States and an International Member of the APS, eulogized his fellow member, stating, “A member of the American Philosophical Society, founded in his own city by Franklin ‘to promote useful knowledge,’ Furness was true to the motto of the society and lived the life of a true philosopher. I call him Furness, without Doctor or any other title, not because he is no more, but to obey a request of his. ‘I do not like titles in the republic of letters,’ he wrote me in the early times of our acquaintance; ‘if you will drop all to me, I will do the same to you. One touch of Shakespeare makes the whole world kin.’”
His variorum work continued through his son by the same name. Shortly after Horace Howard Furness Jr.’s death in 1930, the “New Variorum Editions of Shakespeare” was adopted by the Modern Language Association of America as an ongoing project, and has continued for more than 90 years with some of the world’s leading Shakespearean scholars contributing variorums.
To further honor Furness and his efforts, the University of Pennsylvania established the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library, or more commonly known as the Furness Shakespeare Library, which, according to the library, “focuses on Shakespeare’s works, their history and theatrical context, and the long tradition of Shakespearian criticism.”
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Dustin Bass is an author and co-host of The Sons of History podcast. He also writes two weekly series for The Epoch Times: Profiles in History and This Week in History.
