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James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps: The Life and Works of the Shakespearean Scholar and Bookman. By Marvin Spevack. New Castle, Del., and London: Oak Knoll Press and Shepheard-Walwyn, 2001. 624 pp. $49.95. ISBN 1-58456-051-7.
James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps is known chiefly as a book collector and the publisher and editor of a sixteen-volume limited-edition folio of Shakespeare's plays. He viewed himself as a literary archaeologist, and to this end he amassed one of the largest private collections of Shakespeareana ever assembled, the bulk of which is now housed at the Edinburgh University Library. In addition to writing more than six hundred books, articles, editions, and catalogs, he was also instrumental in developing Stratford-on-Avon as a permanent memorial to Shakespeare.
Marvin Spevack, himself the author of the Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare and A Shakespeare Thesaurus, refers to his new work as "a documentary life." The bulk of the documents upon which Spevack relies to construct his biography consists of more than sixteen thousand letters, the overwhelming majority of which are written to Halliwell-Phillipps, and of a daily, somewhat mundane journal kept by his wife, Henrietta. Despite the limited nature of his source material, Spevack's biography provides...