Speaking of literary scholars--and I think on the whole world wide web no one is getting in my way--there is an anecdote about George Lyman Kittredge that I will enjoy telling.
Kittredge taught the English language, Renaissance English literature, and Chaucer at Harvard for more than 40 years, ending in 1936. If Nobel prizes were awarded for literary criticism, he probably would have won two, for he was both the foremost Shakespeare scholar and the foremost Chaucer scholar of his time. His one-volume edition of Shakespeare's complete works, published in 1936, was for years the gold standard in the field, and you will see references to Kittredge's Shakespeare in the textual notes to all good modern editions. With regard to Chaucer, it was Kittredge who first proposed a "marriage group" in the Canterbury Tales. The pilgrims, Kittredge argued, do not just tell stories; they tell stories that are meant as answers to, or commentaries upon, the tales of other pilgrims; and the great topic of these related stories, introduced by the Wife of Bath and taken up in turn by the Clerk and the Merchant before receiving final treatment in the tale of the Franklin, is marriage.
It was for Kittredge to make this case and for the rest of the scholarly world to wonder why no one else had ever thought of it. One of the happy conditions of modern life is that anyone with access to the internet can commune with the mind of George Lyman Kittredge.
Oh, yes--the anecdote. Shakespeare of course is a colossus and whole careers are devoted to the study of obscure byways, some of them I think invented so as to have something new to say, in his world. A huge, fundamental problem is the matter of the words that Shakespeare actually wrote, since the earliest editions are patched together from various unreliable sources, including playhouse prompt books and the memory of actors and spectators. Kittredge, in comprehensive fashion, solved this problem better than it had ever before been solved--a monumental achievement that might have been the work of a lifetime, but Kittredge also made the single greatest contribution in the history of Chaucer studies. Yet he never took a Ph.D. When asked once why not, he is supposed to have replied: "Who would examine me?"
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