Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/71

 Furness 483 simply to put the reader face to face with Shakespeare, and his edition as a whole is justly recognized as combining scholarship with attention to the needs of the general reader. The New Variorum Shakespeare, edited by Horace How- ard Furness (1833-1912), began appearing in 1871. Furness was a member of the Shakespeare Society of Philadelphia (es- tablished 1 85 1 and the oldest Shakespeare society in exist- ence) ; under its influence he is said to have begun about 1862 a variorum text of Hamlet, and it may be that the plan for the New Variorum originated among the members of this Society. In any case, though Furness was a Harvard graduate, his tmdertaking belongs less to any university than to the social and urbane scholarship cultivated among Privat- gelehrten during the period of learned societies. He conceived the immediate need for his edition to be that the Cambridge edition of 1866 "did not give the history of variant readings in the hands of successive editors, and that it also neglected to record the first editor to adopt a generally accepted reading."^ These deficiencies the. Variorum supplies. After the first three volumes, whose text is composite, Furness in King Lear, his fourth volume, virtually followed the first Folio, and beginning with the fifth, Othello, printed the first Folio text itself, with all variants and emendations in the textual notes. Besides these there are notes explanatory and interpretative, as well as pre- fatory and appended editorial matter of various kinds, in- cluding much aesthetic criticism. Furness in fact was primarily interested, very much as Hudson was, in each play as a self- subsisting entity. Preoccupied thus with the inwardness of Shakespeare, he neglected some material that a variorum edi- tion ought to include — much of the later criticism that deals with Shakespeare's outwardness; with matters like chronology, verse tests, attributions, and types of personage, incident, and dramatic structure common to Shakespeare and his contempor- aries. Matter of this kind is being supplied in the later volumes edited by Horace Howard Furness, Jr. Even without it, the New Variorum is indispensable. Its special "note" is that it combines all the scientific apparatus that is necessary for the student with all kinds of criticism, which Fumess's humour and good judgment hold in clear solution. » Steeves, American Editors of Shakespeare, p. 362.