would be undertaken he could not pretend to know, and he returned with fresh ardour to his study of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan age as soon as the Dictionary and the Supplement were issued.
For the next eight years Lee’s time was almost exclusively devoted to those two subjects. The article on Shakespeare which he had contributed to volume li of the Dictionary had expanded into the Life of Shakespeare, published in 1898. The book reached its sixth edition in 1908, and was rewritten and enlarged to twice its original size in 1915. The history of Shakespeare’s native town, which Lee had originally published in 1885, was similarly revised and enlarged in 1906. A visit to America in 1908 resulted in the volume of lectures, entitled Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century, in which he attempted to show the working of the spirit of the Renaissance in English life. He wrote also, for an American periodical, a series of articles entitled, ‘The Call of the West’, which traced the influence of the discovery of America on thought and action in England. Lee also turned his attention to the text of Shakespeare. He published a facsimile reproduction of the first folio of Shakespeare’s Plays in 1902, and similar reproductions of the Poems and the Sonnets in 1905, followed in 1910 by an edition of Shakespeare in twenty volumes,[1] to which he contributed annotations throughout, prefaces to some of the plays, and a general introduction. At the same time he took up with vigour the study of comparative literature, writing a history of the Sonnet in Italy and France and an account of the development of that form of composition in Elizabethan literature. Last of all, in a series of lectures delivered at Oxford in 1909, entitled The French Renaissance in England, he showed in detail the debt of Tudor writers to French authors with regard both to form and ideas.
In 1910 the time came for the preparation of a second Supplement. Mr. Smith regarded the Dictionary not as an enterprise completed once for all, but as a work which was to be permanently maintained and continued. In Lee’s phrase it was to be ‘a living organism’. At stated intervals new biographies were to be added to commemorate those worthy of inclusion in the national record who had died since its last issue. To carry out her husband’s wishes Mrs. George Smith undertook to defray the cost of three more volumes to include persons deceased between January 1901 and December 1911.
Lee was engaged on the production of the Second Supplement from October 1910 to December 1912. It was a more laborious business than the first Supplement, for the three volumes dealt with 1,635 names instead of about 1,000, and contained over 2,200 pages as against 1,400. The editor’s labour was increased by the fact that he no longer had his old staff to help him. He had to find new assistants and to train them while the work was actually in progress. Of the regular contributors who had written about three-quarters of the original Dictionary, few were still available. About a score of them are commemorated in the Dictionary or the Supplements, and the list of the dead included men like Joseph
- ↑ Published originally by the University Press of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1907-1910, and reissued in England as The Caxton Shakespeare in 1910.
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