Edmund Kerchever Chambers

Sir Edmund Kerchever Chambers KBE , CB (born March 16, 1866 in West Ilsley ; died January 21, 1954 in Beer ) was an English literary critic and Shakespeare scholar .

life and work

Life

Chambers was born in West Ilsley , Berkshire . His father was an assistant priest in the Anglican Church and his mother the daughter of a Victorian theologian. He attended Marlborough College, studied at Corpus Christi College , Oxford. As a student he won prizes and wrote an excellent thesis on literary forgery. He worked on a school board after graduation and married Eleanor Brown in 1893. He died in 1954.

plant

Chambers worked on educational projects and adult education in the overseas colonies. But he became known for his work outside the school authority, which left in 1926. He was the first President of the Malone Society from 1906 to 1939 and was engaged in the editing of poetry and published on King Arthur . His most famous work was a large-scale study of the history and conditions of English theater in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He worked on it for almost three decades. In 1903 he began work on The Medieval Stage , providing a systematic study of medieval theater, but also dealing with subjects such as Ménestrel and the mystery play . In the foreword to the second volume, The Elizabethan Stage , which appeared twenty years later, he called his work "little book on Shakespeare". The four-volume work published in 1923 dealt in detail with the Elizabethan theater and is still considered the standard work on the theater of this era. WW Greg called it a book that hardly anyone could really appreciate. His two-volume work on the life and work of Shakespeare was published in 1930. In retirement, Chambers dealt with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Matthew Arnold and devoted himself to the study of medieval history.

Honors

Chambers was named Companion of the Order of the Bath in 1912 and Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1925 . In 1924 he became a Fellow of the British Academy . For his biography Samuel Taylor Coleridge he received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1938 .

Selected Works

• The History and Motives of Literary Forgeries (1891)
• Poems of John Donne (1896, editor)
• The Tragedy of Coriolanus (1898, editor)
• The Mediaeval Stage (2 volumes, 1903)
• Early English Lyrics (1907, editor)
• Carmina Argentea (1918, poems)
• The Elizabethan Stage (4 volumes, 1923)
• Shakespeare: A Survey (1925)
• Arthur of Britain (1927)
• William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (2 volumes; 1930)
• The Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse (1932, editor)
• The English Folk-play (1933)
• Sir Henry Lee (1936)
• Eynsham Under the Monks (1936)
• Sir Thomas Wyatt and Some Collected Studies (1937)
• ST Coleridge (1938)
• Shakespearean Gleanings (1941)
• English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages (1945)
• Matthew Arnold (1947).

Secondary literature

• Wilson, John Dover . Obituary of Sir Edmund Kerchever Chambers 1866–1954. Proceedings of the British Academy 42 (1956).

Web links

• Literature by and about Edmund Kerchever Chambers in the catalog of the German National Library
• Edmund Kerchever Chambers on Wikisource