College and Research Libraries


570 College & Research Libraries 

can teach students about the library as it 
exists now, and we can communicate the 
notion that libraries are organized system­
atically and that these systems can be 
learned, but we cannot pretend that the 
skills we teach will be valid for life.-Eva 
Sartori, University of Nebraska, Lincoln. 

Bristol, Michael D. Shakespeare's America, 
America's Shakespeare. London, New 
York: Routledge, 1990. ix, 237p. $40 
(ISBN 0-415-01538-3). LC 89-6057. 

Gibson, James M. The Philadelphia Shake­
speare Story: Horace Howard Furness and 
the Variorum Shakespeare. New York: 
AMS Press, 1990. viii, 308p. alk. paper, 
$42.50 (ISBN 0-404-62293-3) LC 87­
45801 (AMS Studies in the Renaissance; 
23) 
Shakespeare is one of the most success­

ful products ever imported into America; 
so successful, in fact, that the interna­
tional Shakespeare industry (comprised 
of scholarship, production, and tourism) 
is now largely supported by Americans, 
with the Japanese beginning to run a 
strong second. The history of America's 
adoption of Shakespeare is examined in 
two new books that complement each 
other in their coverage and style. Michael 
Bristol's Shakespeare's America explores the 
philosophical and cultural background 
that gave rise to Shakespearemania in the 
nineteenth century and that has sup­
ported its various manifestations down to 
the present day. James Gibson's The Phila­
delphia Shakespeare Story focuses on the life 
and work of one man who almost single­
handedly shifted the responsibility of 
Shakespeare scholarship from the Old 
World to the New. 

A professor of English at McGill Univer­
sity, Bristol approaches his subject with a 
degree of critical jargon that some outside 
the academy may find offputting. It is 
worth bearing with him, however, be­
cause his Marxist slant gives rise to a 
healthy degree of scepticism. His probing 
questions about the reasons for America's 
bardolatry impinge on the current argu­
ment about the canon, which has recently 
made its way out of the ivory tower and 
onto the pages of the popular press. Bris­
tol points out that the term "Shake-

November 1990 

speare'' is used in at least three different 
ways: to refer to the historic person, to 
"the man and his works," and "to some 
kind of socio-cultural or spiritual origin, 
source, or presence." The last of these he 
links with the nostalgic bent of much 
scholarship in the humanities. America's 
adoption of Shakespeare in the nine­
teenth century provided ''an otherwise 
lacking depth of cultural tradition'' for the 
new nation, "in relation to the European 
longue dunk" 

It was Emerson who most clearly voiced 
the American attraction to Shakespeare's 
''originality,'' ''expressive autonomy,'' 
and "moral sentiment, a natural impulse 
towards higher forms of emulation or of 
self-interest,'' which seemed to coincide 
with the promise offered by life in the 
New World. Bristol goes on to show how 
Emerson's ideas were adopted and 
adapted by prominent American Shake­
spearian scholars, including George Ly­
man Kittredge, Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, 
and Hardin Craig, down to the present. 

Emerson also had a profound influence 
on both Horace Howard Furness and 
Henry Clay Folger, and it is Bristol's chap­
ter on "The Function of the Archive" that 
will most interest librarians. He begins by 
discussing the paradox of libraries: the 
conservative principles of their construc­
tion ''as the expression of large monopo­
listic accumulations of wealth and 
power," which contrarily make possible 
"the creation of radical, action-orienting 
research programs." He touches on the 
funding of public libraries by the Carnegie 
Foundation during the later nineteenth 
century and explores in more detail the 
concurrent development of great private 
libraries, such as those of Furness and 
Folger. 

Bristol shows how Furness's library and 
editorial project were tied to the social re­
lationships among American and British 
intelligentsia at the time, and to the found­
ing of the English Department at the Uni­
versity of Pennsylvania. This institution­
alizing of literary study would provide the 
death knell to the gentleman scholar. Bris­
tol then explores the relationship between 
Folger's private collecting project and the 
public politics of his library's Washington 



setting and goes on to discuss the changes 
in the philosophy governing development 
and use of the collection under its early li­
brarians, Joseph Quincy Adams and Louis 
B. Wright. He reminds us that "special­
ized research libraries exert a shaping in­
fluence on scholarly research through pol­
icies that decide not only what is worth 
collecting but also what constitutes a com­
plete and coherent body of materials." In 
the end, however, although "Libraries 
can lock their doors1 or . . . restrict access 
to their resources . . . libraries as orga­
nized collections of books and other arti­
facts cannot directly control what their cli­
ents will produce." 

While Bristol examines the philosophi­
cal background and cultural context of pri­
vate collecting in the nineteenth century, 
James Gibson provides a detailed and 
readable account of one Shakespeare col­
lector, Horace Howard Furness. The son 
of a prominent Abolitionist Unitarian min­
ister, and himself a student of law, Fur­
ness carne from a genteel and cultured, 
though not scholarly, background. He 
was thus typical of many "gentleman 
scholars'' of the period, though what be­
gan for him as a kind of hobby grew into a 
lifelong obsession that would have been 
the death of many university men. His ini­
tial dabbling with the Bard at meetings of 
the Shakespeare Society of Philadelphia 
(all males, mainly of the legal persuasion) 
led to his first venture at editing a Shake­
spearian text (Romeo an1 Juliet, 1871) and 
eventually to his establishment of the first 
fifteen volumes of the monumental vario­
rum Shakespeare. 

In a period in which Henry Clay Folger 
was just beginning his collection, no 
American library had the resources to sup­
port such a scholarly undertaking as the 
variorum. Furness accordingly set out to 
form his own collection. His first attempt, 
a bid to purchase ''the Shakespearian por­
tion of the library of Thomas Pennant Bar­
ton,'' failed when a decision was reached 
not to split the collection but to sell the 
whole to the Boston Public Library. Fur­
ness received help in his endeavor, how­
ever, from the British Shakespeare scholar 
and bibliographer, J. 0. Halliwell-Phil­
lipps, who not only provided Furness 

Recent Publications 571 

with materials from his own collection, 
but also recommended the London book­
dealer, Alfred Russell Smith. Through 
Smith, Furness purchased many of his 
treasures, including the First, Third, and 
Fourth Folios from the Corser Library sale 
in 1871; he also obtained the 1611 Hamlet 
and three Pavier Quartos, "which had be­
longed to the Shakespearian editor 
Edward Capell." By the mid-1870s he had 
over 2,000 volumes, and "his collection of 
German and French editions of Shake­
speare . . . {was] judged to be the most 
complete in the United States." 

Along with the history of these 
nineteenth-century Shakespearian collec­
tions and of the social relationships 
among scholars and bibliophiles in this 
period, librarians will find much to profit 
from in Bristol's description of the chang­
ing cultural climate that has given rise to 
the various movements in Shakespeare 
criticism down to our day.-Georgianna 
Ziegler, University of Pennsylvania, Philadel­
phia, ·Pennsylvania. 

Kimball, Roger. Tenured Radicals: How 
Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Educa­
tion. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. 
204p. $18.95 (ISBN 0-06-016190). LC 89­
45049. 
American educational institutions have 

come under much scrutiny in recent 
years, often in the form of trenchant criti­
cism of aims and objectives, as well as of 
methods. While much attention has been 
focused on elementary and secondary ed­
ucation, higher education has certainly 
not been spared. Allan Bloom's The ·Clos­
ing of the American Mind set the tone for an 
ongoing controversy, of which academic 
librarians need to be aware. 

Roger Kimball, managing editor of The 
New Criterion, attempts here to ride this re­
cent wave of criticism. Kimball is espe­
cially critical of ''recent developments in 
the academic study of the humanities," 
especially deconstruction, feminist stud­
ies, and other movements to undermine 
the traditional canon of liberal studies. He 
regales us with illustrations of the obscu­
rity or just plain silliness of many of the 
latest modes of criticism, especially liter­
ary criticism, but his indictment goes