Obsessed with Shakespeare

I am reading and soon will be reviewing The Shakespeare Wars, Ron Rosenbaum’s new book chronicling the dirty little wars that rage among scholars and editors of the Bard. As in his previous books and his column in the New York Observer, “The Edgy Enthusiast,” Rosenbaum has a loving obsession with footnotes, digressions, and scholarly arcana, and has produced a book that both pursues those obsessions and embodies them. While reviewing the history of modern editions of Hamlet, he celebrates the accomplishments of yet another of those Victorian over-achievers with three names: Horace Howard Furness (1833-1912). Here’s Rosenbaum on Furness’ edition of Hamlet:

“…a thrilling testament to the enduring power of Hamlet and Hamlet enigmas to engage the intellect and imagination, to the seductive lure of the textual and thematic labyrinth of the play. To plunge into one of the Furness Variorum’s multipage, tiny-type footnote compendiums of commentary is to lose oneself in the pleasures of the penumbral Hamlet, the extratextual Hamlet.”

A native of Philadelphia, Furness was editor of the New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, and incrementally published 14 of the plays between 1871 and 1913. Horace Howard Furness High School in South Philadelphia is named after him. His son, Horace Howard Furness, Jr. (1865–1930), succeeded him as editor of the project and donated his father's Shakespearean library to the University of Pennsylvania. The Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library is now part of the Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library at that university. It has a useful, well-written web site, including a photograph of Furness, who resembles William Howard Taft, seated grandly at his desk. After Horace Junior’s death, the Variorum project was carried on by editors and publishers of the Modern Language Association.

My university library has an incomplete set of the New Variorum, but it does include the 14th (!) edition of Furness’ two-volume, 902-page Hamlet, which Rosenbaum dotes on. Footnotes frequently sprawl across four or five pages. Judging from his preface, written in March 1877, Furness was not only obsessive but pugnacious and funny. Here is the final paragraph:

“In conclusion, let me add that I do not flatter myself that this is an enjoyable edition of Shakespeare; I regard it rather as a necessary evil, -- so evil that I should sometimes question the propriety of its existence were it not that I am encouraged by the words of Dr Johnson, for whose Preface to his edition of Shakespeare advancing years add only increasing admiration.

“`Let him,’ says Dr Johnson, `that is yet unacquainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and who desires to feel the greatest pleasure that the drama can give, read every play, from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all his commentators. When his fancy is once on the wing, let it not stoop at correction or explanation. When his attention is strongly engaged, let it disdain alike to turn aside to the name of Theobold and of Pope. Let him read on through brightness and obscurity, through integrity and corruption; let him preserve his comprehension of the dialogue and his interest in the fable. And when the pleasures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt exactness and read the commentators.”

Imagine such humility on the part of a literary scholar today.