James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps: The Life and Works of the Shakespearean Scholar and Bookman (review)

What on earth would James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps (1820-79) have done with access to e-mail?¹ I raise this question because of the vast quantity of surviving correspondence on which Professor Marvin Spevack has largely based this biography of the greatest of Victorian Shakespeareans. The fifteen thousand letters to Halliwell-Phillipps (preserved in Edinburgh University Library) vastly outnumber the fifteen hundred letters from him (in the Folger Shakespeare Library). And of course they tell only part of the story, because Halliwell-Phillipps maintained his collections with an eye to posterity, carefully classifying and preserving selected letters and "'destroying everything that could possibly annoy any one'" (464-65). Spevack has also used a wealth of other materials, among them Mrs. Henrietta Halliwell-Phillipps's four-volume manuscript diary (1836-75) and his own bibliography of Halliwell-Phillipps's publications, both of which Spevack has edited elsewhere.² One often notes similarities between a biographer and his subject; here, Spevack shares with Halliwell-Phillipps a love of huge scholarly labors! One will never want to know more about the antiquarian than can be learned in this volume—in fact, one occasionally wishes that the biography were shorter. Spevack at times overestimates his subject, writing of his "more than six hundred printed books, editions, and articles" (x); however the Classified Bibliography presents details of only 559 publications (still, a massive list!)

Why should we, twenty-first-century Shakespeareans, have an interest in the activities of a scholar who died in 1889? Do we want all this detail? The book aims at presenting the life and works of a man whose literary career spanned over fifty years, whose range and variety of activities was truly remarkable, and whose energies can only leave us breathless. A first answer to these questions is that a work dealing with the history of scholarship allows those of us who are "professional" Shakespeareans to take a look at ourselves. Marshaled by faculty deans and department chairs, cajoled and cudgeled by publication counts, performance indicators, teaching evaluations, and other "measures," we find little opportunity or encouragement for real individuality (other than, I suppose, a taste for different post-isms). Things were vastly different for Halliwell-Phillipps and his contemporaries, and Spevack supplies valuable insights into Victorian scholarly society. Rogues and scoundrels abounded, such as the sly forger John Payne Collier, and perhaps Halliwell-Phillipps himself, whose alleged theft of manuscripts from Trinity College, Cambridge, remains an unsolved mystery. Antagonisms raged unchecked in the proliferation of scholarly societies that spawned and died; here the fulminous F. J. Furnivall's anger at Halliwell-Phillipps is finely related, along with other antagonisms incurred and suffered. How unlike, say, the Shakespeare Association of America! My second response to these questions is that scholarship is a process, a continuing of history into the future; to read an account such as this makes one reflect on Halliwell-Phillipps's enduring contributions and wonder how our own scholarship or reputation will endure in 2250.

Halliwell-Phillipps's contributions are particularly related to Shakespeare's biography and his origins in Stratford-upon-Avon. Between extolling Shakespeare's native wood-notes wild and emphasizing his skills in business, Halliwell-Phillipps's publications helped to right the balance of Romantic bardolatry toward Victorian materialism; interestingly, the past twenty-five years has seen a comparable shift toward our own less-sentimental view of a less-gentle Shakespeare. Although he did research in the records of the central government, Halliwell-Phillipps found his main focus elsewhere, and it remained for the twentieth century to unlock the riches of the Public Record Office and other repositories. Halliwell-Phillipps looked mainly at provincial records, particularly those of Stratford-upon-Avon; his connections with Stratford, his volunteer labors to catalogue its records, and his...