Furness, Horace Howard

Furness, Horace Howard (1833–1912),
American scholar and editor. His New Variorum edition of Shakespeare began in 1871 with Romeo and Juliet. Furness had published eighteen volumes of his New Variorum when he died in 1912, and the work was continued by H. H. Furness, Jr., J. Q. Adams, and H. E. Rollins. After 1936 it was issued under the auspices of the Modern Language Association of America. The comprehensiveness of the volumes is indisputable, although in the nature of things each passing year produces an exponential growth in the amount of annotation to be included, inevitably slowing down the rate of completion.

Tom Matheson