Horace Howard Furness was an American Shakespearean scholar of the 19th century.
Life and career
Horace Furness was the son of the Unitarian minister and abolitionist William Henry Furness, and brother of the architect Frank Furness. He graduated from Harvard University in 1854, then studied in Germany. 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. 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."
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 forty years to the series, completing the annotation of sixteen plays. His son, Horace Howard Furness, Jr., joined as co-editor of the Variorum's later volumes, and continued the project after the father's death, annotating three additional plays and revising two others. He was a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, a long-serving trustee, 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. 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. 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. For text, illustration, commentary and criticism, it leaves nothing to be desired. The editor combines with the patience and accuracy of the textural scholar, an industry which has overlooked nothing of value that has been written about Shakespeare by the best German and French, as well as English commentators and critics; and what is of no less moment he possesses in himself a rare delicacy of literary appreciation and breadth of judgment, disciplined by familiarity with all that is best in the literature of antiquity as well as of modern times, which he brings to bear on his notes with great effect."
New Variorum
Volumes edited by Horace Howard Furness
These volumes went through a number of reprints: the external links connect to the last online edition available.
In 1860 Furness married Helen Kate Rogers, heir to an ironmaking fortune and sister of University of Pennsylvania instructor Fairman Rogers. She compiled a concordance to Shakespeare's poems, published in 1874. They had four children:
Walter Rogers Furness, an architect, who became a partner in the firm of his uncle, Frank Furness, in 1896. He built Furness Cottage at the Jekyll Island Club, Georgia, where his family vacationed each year from 1889 to 1895. He was permanently blinded in one eye after a ball hit him during a game of racquets in 1898. From then on his life became worse and worse, descending into raging alcoholism. His wife, Helen Key Bullitt, died at age 47 in January 1914, and he died a month later at age 53, following a heart attack.
Horace Howard Furness Jr., who continued his father's work on the New Variorum project. Author of a play, .
William Henry Furness III,, an explorer and ethnologist. One of the University of Pennsylvania medical students depicted in Thomas Eakins's painting The Agnew Clinic. Undertook anthropological expeditions to the South Pacific with Hiram M. Hiller, Jr. and Alfred C. Harrison, Jr., and wrote books and articles about Borneo and Polynesia. Died unmarried.
Caroline Augusta Furness, also an ethnologist, she married University of Pennsylvania instructor Horace Jayne, and died from a heart attack at age 35 in 1909. Their children were Kate Furness Jayne and Horace H. F. Jayne, an art historian and museum director.
Horace and Kate Furness inherited her family's Philadelphia city house, at the SW corner of Locust Street & West Washington Square. Frank Furness altered the house in 1873, and designed the 1909 office building that replaced it. He also designed their country house, "Lindenshade" and its many expansions, including the 1903 fireproof brick library.
Horace Jr. donated his father's Shakespearean collection to the University of Pennsylvania, whose Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library honors both father and son.
William Henry Furness III donated the land for the Helen Kate Furness Free Library in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, built in 1916 on the former grounds of his parents' country house, "Lindenshade."
