Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Bullen, Arthur Henry
BULLEN, ARTHUR HENRY (1857–1920), English scholar, the second son of George Bullen, LL.D. [q.v.], by his first wife, Eliza Martin, born in London 9 February 1857, was educated at the City of London School under Dr. Edwin Abbott, and at Worcester College, Oxford, where he matriculated as an open classical scholar in 1875. He was noted even at school for his knowledge of the Elizabethan and nineteenth-century writers, and especially of Lamb and Swinburne, for an extraordinary memory and ear for poetry, and faculty of reciting it. The magnificent collection of seventeenth-century English books in Worcester College library confirmed his early tastes. He was a good Greek and Latin scholar and took a first class in classical moderations, but only a third in literae humaniores, for which he read little except English literature. On leaving Oxford he taught in a school at Margate, but soon abandoned teaching for literary work. He wrote many articles for the early volumes of this Dictionary, chiefly on English authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period of which Sir Leslie Stephen pronounced his knowledge to be ‘very remarkable, and, in some respects, probably unsurpassed’. During the years 1881-1890 he produced, in four dozen volumes, the bulk of his life-work as an editor, including the dramatic works of Day, Marlowe, Middleton, Marston, Nabbes, Peele, and Davenport, the sixteen plays (five of them from manuscripts) in the four earlier volumes of Old English Plays, the poems of Thomas Campion (whom he rescued from obscurity), and his well-known collections of Elizabethan and Caroline lyrics. In February, and March 1889 Bullen delivered in Oxford lectures (never published) on Drayton, Dekker, Campion, and Breton; but after the failure of his application in that year for the chair of English at University College, London, he set up as publisher, a career for which he had excellent literary intuition but small business capacity. In partnership with H. W. Lawrence (1891-1900) and subsequently with F. Sidgwick (1902-1907), he issued a large number of works, including the poets of the ‘Muses’ Library’ series. In 1904 he founded at Stratford-on-Avon the Shakespeare Head Press, which he carried on until his death. Here from 1904 to 1907 he edited and printed, with brief but not unimportant notes, the ten volumes of his Stratford Town Shakespeare. During 1906 he edited for Lord Northcliffe the revived Gentleman’s Magazine, to which he contributed much original matter; but his main work was now the publishing of other men’s books. His influence on younger scholars was stimulating and fruitful, and to him English scholarship is indebted for such works as R. B. McKerrow’s edition of Nashe and W. W. Greg’s Henslowe’s Diary. He died at Stratford 29 February 1920. He had married in 1879 Edith, daughter of William John Goodwin, head of the map department of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, by whom he had two sons and three daughters. Weeping-Cross, a posthumous volume of short poems by him, with a portrait, appeared in 1921.
As an editor Bullen modernized his texts, but did great work in publishing early plays and lyrics, many of which he himself discovered in manuscript. As a textual critic his greatest achievement was the interpretation of the mysterious ‘Oncaymaeon’ of Doctor Faustus, i. i. 12, which had baffled all previous editors, as the Aristotelian ὄν καὶ μὴ ὄν. Recognized early by Swinburne and J. A. Symonds, and by such European scholars as Beljame, Jusserand, and Delius, his work gradually won him fame at home, and he enjoyed a civil list pension for some years before his death. His unflagging energy in popularizing the dramatists and song writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has had an influence on English scholarship, and on English poetry, which it is easier to appreciate than to define.
[Letters; printed testimonials at the British Museum; memoir (by the writer) prefixed to Bullen’s third (posthumous) edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1921; private information.]