E. K. Chambers

Sir Edmund Chambers Kerchever KBE, CB ( born March 16, 1866 in West Ilsley, † 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 of the Anglican Church and his mother the daughter of a Victorian theologian. He attended Marlborough College studied at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Even as a student he won awards and wrote an excellent job of literary forgeries. He worked after graduation in a school board and married in 1893 Eleanor Brown. He died in 1954.

Work

Chambers worked on education projects and adult education in the overseas colonies. He is best known for his work but left outside of the school board, from 1926. He was in the period 1906 to 1939 the first President of the Malone Society, and occupied himself with the publication of poetry and published about King Arthur. His most famous work was a large-scale study of the history and conditions of the English theater in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He worked on it for almost three decades. In 1903, he began working at The Medieval Stage, by submitting a systematic study of the medieval theater, but also dealt with such topics as Ménestrel and the mystery play. In the preface of the second volume The Elizabethan Stage, which appeared twenty years later, he called his work "little book on Shakespeare ." The 1923 four -volume work published extensively treated the Elizabethan theater and is still considered the standard work on the theater of this era. WW Greg described it as a book that hardly anyone could really appreciate. In 1930, his two-volume work was published about the life and work of Shakespeare. Retired to Chambers dealt with Coleridge and Matthew Arnold and devoted himself to the study of medieval history.

Honors

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

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 )
  • S. T. Coleridge (1938 )
  • Shakespearean Gleanings (1941 )
  • Matthew Arnold ( 1947).

Secondary literature

  • Wilson, John Dover. " Obituary of Sir Edmund Chambers Kerchever 1866-1954. " Proceedings of the British Academy 42 (1956).
Beer (Devon) Corpus Christi College (Oxford) English Renaissance theatre W. W. Greg J. Dover Wilson Integrated Authority File
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