Horace Howard Furness


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, embarked on a journey to Europe with Atherton Blight, and then studied in Germany. After returning to the United States, he was admitted to the Philadelphia Bar in 1858, 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:
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:
He died on August 13, 1912, and was interred at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia.

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.
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Volumes edited by H. H. Furness, Jr.

  • Merchant of Venice
The Modern Language Association of America continues the "New Variorum" project with the goal of definitively annotating all 38 of Shakespeare's plays.

Other works

  • . Philadelphia: privately printed.
  • ·
  • , edited by H. H. F.. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin

Honors

Furness was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society on April 16, 1880. He was the recipient of honorary degrees from Harvard University, University of Halle, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and University of Cambridge. He was elected a member of the American [Academy of Arts and Letters] in 1905.

Personal

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 in 1896 became a partner in the firm of his uncle, Frank Furness. He built Furness Cottage at the Jekyll Island Club, Georgia, where his family vacationed from 1889 to 1895. He was permanently blinded in one eye in 1898, after a ball hit him during a game of racquets. 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.

Legacy

  • Horace Howard Furness High School in South Philadelphia is named for him.
  • 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."