Alfred W. Pollard

Alfred William Pollard ( born August 14, 1859 in London, † March 8, 1944 ) was an English literary critic and Shakespeare scholar.

Life and work

Pollard attended King 's College School in London and the St John 's College at the University of Oxford. In 1883 he joined the staff at the British Museum, where an assistant in the Department of letterpress. In 1919 he became curator. A year later he became a professor of English book Science at the University of London. From 1893 to 1934 he was secretary of the Bibliographical Society, and from 1903 to 1934 editor of The Library, the journal of the Society. In 1929 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Bibliographical Society.

Pollard wrote studies on many different areas of English literature and worked with numerous scholars. He gave Thomas Malory's Le Morte d' Arthur and the Fifteenth Century Poetry and Prose Collection. out. He was friends with the poet AE Housman and a close colleague of Shakespeare scholar Edmund Kerchever Chambers and RB McKerrow.

Selected Works

• Records of the English Bible. The Documents Relating to the Translation and Publication of the Bible in English, 1525-1611. Oxford University Press, London, 1911.
• Shakespeare folios and quartos. A Study in the Bibliography of Shakespeare's Plays., 1909.
• A New Shakespeare Quarto. Richard II in 1916.
• Shakespeare 's Fight with the Pirates, And the problem of the transmission of his text., 1917.
• The Foundations of Shakespeare's text. In 1923.
• With WW Greg, Edward Maunde Thompson, John Dover Wilson and RW Chambers: Shakespeare's Hand in the Play of Sir Thomas More. In 1923.
• Early Illustrated Books. A History of the Decoration and Illustration of Books in the 15th and 16th Centuries. , 1927.
• English Miracle Plays, Moralities and Interludes; Specimens of the pre- Elizabethan drama. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1927.
• The Trained Printer and the Amateur, and the Pleasure of Small Books. In 1929.
• By Henrietta C. Bartlett: A Census of Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto. , 1939.

Secondary literature

• Henry R. Woudhuysen: AEH, AWP: A Classical Friendship. Tunbridge Wells, Kent, Foundling Press and Bernard Quaritch, 2006 [ A. E. Housman and Alfred W. Pollard.
• Gwendoen Murphy and Henry Thomas: A Select Bibliography of the Writings of Alfred W. Pollard. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1938.
• John W. Cousin, DC Browning: Everyman's Dictionary of Literary Biography. English and American. 3rd Edition, Dent [u a ], London [u a ] 1962
• W [ illiam ]. A [ rthur ]. Munford: Who was who in British librarianship, 1800-1985. A dictionary of dates with notes. Library Association, London 1987
• Min Lee (ed.): British Chambers biographies. The 20th century. Chambers, Edinburgh 1993