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Major US Shakespeare Editors of the 1800s |
Excerpted from Virginia Mason Vaughan, "Making Shakespeare American: Shakespeare's Dissemination in Nineteenth-Century America," Shakespeare in American Life exhibition catalog. Folger Shakespeare Library, 2007.
Gulian Crommelin Verplanck (1786–1870) produced the first fully illustrated American Shakespeare in three volumes, published between 1844 and 1847. Verplanck was cognizant of the work British scholars had done on textual matters, but he was not afraid to interject his own opinion and his notes indicate some original research. Verplanck was also the first American editor to try to determine the order in which the plays were written, but because he did not have adequate access to primary sources he remained dependent on the work of English scholars.1
Verplanck was succeeded as America's leading Shakespeare editor by Henry Norman Hudson (1814–86), a school teacher from New England. Hudson began his Shakespeare career by delivering lectures on the dramatist's works that were published in 1848. Following their success, Hudson turned to editing The Works of Shakespeare, which appeared in eleven volumes (1851–58). Hudson claimed that his texts were fully annotated, and he drew freely from outside sources, adding many of his own opinions to the notes. He also included introductions for each play with material taken from his lectures. Although Hudson's edition was popular with general readers, America had yet to produce a truly scholarly edition.
1 Alfred Van Rensselaer Westfall, American Shakespeare Criticism: 1604–1865 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1939), 131–32. The essay from which this excerpt is drawn is deeply indebted to Westfall's book and to Charles H. Shattuck's Shakespeare on the American Stage: From the Hallams to Edwin Booth (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976).
Gulian Verplanck. Library of Congress.
Henry Norman Hudson. Middlebury College Special Collections.