MEMOIR OF SIR SIDNEY LEE
The present volume of the Dictionary includes the biographies of persons of note who died in the period 1912-1921. It therefore contains no life of Sir Sidney Lee, who died 3 March 1926. An article upon him will be included in the next decennial volume, which is intended to appear about 1935.
It seemed to the present editors that as a memoir of George Smith, the founder of the Dictionary, was prefixed to the First Supplement, although he died some months later than the date fixed as the limit of that work, so it was desirable to preface this volume with some account of the second Editor of the Dictionary. It also seemed desirable that this preface should take the form of an explanation of the nature of the task which occupied so large a part of Lee’s life, and of its connexion with his writings in general.
Sidney Lee was born 5 December 1859. His father, Lazarus Lee, was a London merchant. He was educated at the City of London School under Dr. Edwin Abbott, obtained an exhibition at Balliol College, Oxford, and matriculated in October 1878. He was awarded a third class in classical moderations in 1880, and a second class in modern history in Trinity Term 1882. He matriculated and took his degree as Solomon Lazarus Lee, but subsequently changed the first name and dropped the second altogether. Whilst still an undergraduate he wrote two articles on Shakespearian subjects which attracted the attention of scholars. One, entitled ° The Original of Shylock’, which appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine for February 1880, was an attempt to show that the trial of Dr. Lopez in 1594 for a plot against Queen Elizabeth suggested the study of Jewish character which Shakespeare embodied in The Merchant of Venice. The other was a new study of Love's Labour's Lost, printed in the same periodical for October 1880.[1] Through these articles he became known to Dr. Furnivall, who commissioned him to edit the romance of Huon of Bordeaux (translated from the French by Lord Berners about 1580) for the Early English Text Society; the first volume of this appeared in 1883. Lee was thinking of applying for a lectureship in English which was about to be established at the university of Groningen, when the foundation of this Dictionary afforded him an opportunity for employment in England.
There was great need of such a Dictionary. The present generation scarcely realizes the difficulties which the lack of such a tool imposed upon scholars. Standard foreign collections of universal biography gave very unsatisfactory lives of Englishmen. English collections of the same kind—those of Chalmers and Rose for example—were obsolete or very imperfect. As for a collection of national biography, the seven folio volumes of Biographia Britannica, published in 1747-1766, were long out of date, and the
- ↑ These developed into two papers printed in the Transactions of the New Shakspere Society: ‘The Topical Side of the Elizabethan Drama ’, 22 October 1886, and ‘Elizabethan England and the Jews’, 10 February 1888.
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