Alfred W. Pollard

• 1. Introduction

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  Alfred William Pollard could not teach. A pronounced stammer closed that path after he left Oxford. In 1883, he took a post at the British Museum as a junior assistant in printed books. He stayed for nearly forty years.

  By the time he stepped down, the study of Shakespeare would never look quite the same. How had the plays passed from stage to page in the first place? Which early printed editions could editors actually trust? What did the physical form of a book reveal about its origins? Pollard spent a lifetime developing the tools to answer those questions.

  Born at 1 Brompton Square, Kensington, on the 14th of August 1859, he was the youngest son of a physician named Edward William Pollard.

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• 2. A Scholar's Formation

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  King's College School on the Strand admitted Pollard in 1870. He spent seven years there. At the age of 15, he won the school's scholarship for classics. During those years at King's, he developed his interests in Chaucer and Shakespeare and befriended the painter Walter Sickert.

  In November 1876, he sought a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. He did not win it. Instead, he was awarded a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford, to study literae humaniores. The degree suited him. He took first classes in classical moderations in 1879 and in literae humaniores in 1881. He graduated with a double first, earning his B.A. in 1881 and his M.A. in 1885.

  At Oxford, Pollard began a friendship he later described as "the best thing I got from Oxford." The friend was the poet A. E. Housman. That friendship endured for the rest of their shared lives.

  The edition of Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel that appeared in 1888 gave early notice of the editorial direction his work would take.

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• 3. Keeper of Printed Books

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  In 1893, Pollard became honorary secretary of the Bibliographical Society. He held that post for forty-one years, stepping down in 1934. For thirty of those years, from 1903 to 1934, he edited the society's journal, The Library. In 1929, the society awarded him its gold medal.

  His advancement at the British Museum followed a steady course. He was promoted to assistant keeper of printed books in 1909. A decade later, in 1919, he became Keeper. That same year, the University of London appointed him professor of English bibliography.

  The Globe edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales appeared in 1898, one of many texts Pollard edited during his museum years. A collection of Fifteenth Century Poetry and Prose followed in 1903. His four-volume edition of Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur came out in 1910-11.

  Edmund Kerchever Chambers and R. B. McKerrow were among his closest professional colleagues. Through them, Pollard found himself drawn into the most contested debates in Shakespeare scholarship.

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• 4. The Shakespeare Question

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  Shakespeare's plays were printed in dozens of different editions between 1594 and 1685. Not all of them could be equally reliable. Pollard's 1909 study of the folios and quartos is recognized as an important milestone in Shakespearian criticism.

  In 1916, Pollard published a study of a newly identified Shakespeare quarto of Richard II. A year later, Shakespeare's Fight with the Pirates examined how the plays had moved from stage to page, and how that process had been corrupted.

  In 1923, Pollard delivered the Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy. It appeared as The Foundations of Shakespeare's Text. That same year, he joined four other scholars to tackle one of the most debated questions in Shakespeare studies. The question was whether certain manuscript pages in the play of Sir Thomas More were written in Shakespeare's own hand. His co-authors were W. W. Greg, Edward Maunde Thompson, John Dover Wilson, and R. W. Chambers.

  All through these decades of Shakespeare work, a parallel project had been taking shape. Its goal was a catalogue of every book printed in the English language through 1640.

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• 5. The Short-Title Catalogue

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  Gilbert Richard Redgrave was Pollard's partner in that undertaking. In 1926, they published their Short-Title Catalogue, covering every book printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and English books printed abroad, from 1475 to 1640. The resulting reference work became known simply as the STC. It brought decades of Pollard's work with early printed materials to bear on a single enormous document.

  The English Bible occupied Pollard's attention alongside his work on early secular printing. He edited Records of the English Bible in 1911. That volume gathered the documents tracing how the Bible had been translated and published in English between 1525 and 1611. He also wrote a bibliographical introduction to a facsimile reprint of the 1611 King James Bible, produced to mark its three hundredth anniversary.

  These years of scholarly production ran parallel to a personal life that the First World War would devastate.

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• 6. Two Brothers

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  In 1887, Pollard married Alice England, a graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge. They had two sons and a daughter. The sons were Geoffrey Blemell Pollard and Roger Thompson Pollard. Both would die in the First World War.

  Geoffrey, a lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery, died near Le Baseé, France, on the 24th of October 1914. Roger, a lieutenant in the 5th Royal Berkshire Regiment, died on the 13th of October 1915. He was the second son Pollard lost.

  In 1916, Pollard wrote a memorial he titled Two Brothers. Accounts Rendered. He had it privately printed and distributed to friends. Sidgwick and Jackson published it for a wider audience in 1917. That was the same publisher who had issued his Messages of the Saints book series.

  Pollard survived for nearly three more decades. In 1935, a fall while gardening seriously affected him. He died at Wimbledon Hospital on the 8th of March 1944, aged 85, survived by his daughter. He was buried in the churchyard of St Mary's Church, Wimbledon, beside his wife Alice, who had died in 1925, nineteen years before him.

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