Charlotte Porter, Poet-Lore, and the Early Evolution of American Shakespeare Studies

As editor of the first two American magazines devoted to Shakespeare, Shakespeariana and Poet-Lore, Charlotte Porter (1859–1942) gained considerable influence within the nascent yet unorganized field of American Shakespeare studies in the late nineteenth century. The bearing of Porter's work on the early evolution of this emerging field and its relation to the careers of the humanist scholars whose work and methodologies she supported is the subject of this essay, which analyzes her time as editor of the literary magazine Poet-Lore in its first two years of publication, 1889 and 1890. It argues that in curating multi-year discussions about a series of fraught questions regarding Shakespearean authorship and biography, Porter's stewardship of Poet-Lore decisively shaped, from a position outside the Academy, the contours of American Shakespeare studies. Specifically, by promoting the work of such well-known contemporaries as Horace Howard Furness, Porter emerged as a leading spokesperson for English literary history and its relevance to the American cultural imagination.