Horace Howard Furness
| Horace Howard Furness | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | November 2, 1833 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Died | August 13, 1912 Wallingford, Pennsylvania |
| Spouse(s) | Helen Kate (Rogers) Furness |
| Children | Walter Rogers Furness Horace Howard Furness Jr. William Henry Furness III Caroline Augusta (Furness) Jayne |
| Parent(s) |
William Henry Furness Annis Pulling (Jenks) Furness |
Horace Howard Furness (November 2, 1833 – August 13, 1912) was an American Shakespearean scholar of the 19th century.
Horace Furness 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 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. He married Helen Kate Rogers, sister of Fairman Rogers, and heir to an ironmaking fortune. They had four children.
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."
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. 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 three additional plays and revising two others.
He 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. 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.
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