FURNESS

furness, horace howard (1833- ), american shakespearian scholar, was born in philadelphia on the 2nd of november 1833, being the son of william henry furness (1802-1896) minister of the first unitarian church in that city, a powerful preacher and writer. he graduated at harvard in 1854, and was admitted to the bar in 1859, but soon devoted himself to the study of shakespeare. he accumulated a collection of illustrative material of great richness and extent, and brought out in 1871 the first volume of a new variorum edition, designed to represent and summarize the conclusions of the best authorities in all languages--textual, critical and annotative. the volumes appeared as follows: _romeo and juliet_ (1871); _macbeth_ (1873) (revised edition, 1903); _hamlet_ (2 vols., 1877); _king lear_ (1880); _othello_ (1886); _the merchant of venice_ (1888); _as you like it_ (1890); _the tempest_ (1892); _a midsummer night's dream_ (1895); _the winter's tale_ (1898); _much ado about nothing_ (1899); _twelfth night_ (1901); _love's labour's lost_ (1904). the edition has been generally accepted as a thorough and scholarly piece of work; its chief fault is that, beginning with _othello_ (1858), the editor used the first folio text as his basis, while in others he makes the text of the cambridge (globe) editors his foundation. his wife, helen kate furness (1837-1883), compiled _a concordance to the poems of shakespeare_ (1872).