Oscar James Campbell, Jr.

Oscar James Campbell Jr. (August 16, 1879 – June 1, 1970) was an American academic, known as a scholar of Shakespeare and as the author of The Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare.

Biography Campbell was born August 16, 1879, in Cleveland, Ohio. He was the son of Oscar James and Frances Amelia (Fuller) Campbell; his father was a lawyer.

He attended the University of Michigan for two years, and then Harvard University for his bachelor's (1903), master's (1907), and doctoral (1910) degrees. One of the book's advancement, according to Alice Walker, is that it proposes the (somewhat odd) plays under discussion not as biographical material, but rather offers a generic and formal discussion of the essential unity of the old and the new satire.

In Shakespeare's Satire (1943) he continues this thesis (which was by no means accepted by all critics, including Hoyt Hudson), that a new comedy evolved out of the combination of earlier satire (a bitter and biting genre, often full of personal attacks on named people) and its subsequent (classical) outgrowth, comedy. Bertram Jessup praises the book, or at least the "good" half of it, though he believes that Campbell's thesis, that critics have consistently overlooked the satirical qualities of Shakespeare's work, leads him to some "extravagant" conclusions, and misreadings of the characters of Falstaff, Benvolio, and the titular character of Coriolanus: "To trim Coriolanus down from his dark but genuine tragic height of too absolute nobility to a proper figure for mere scorn and derision will seem to many readers to require not merely re-interpretation, but also re-writing of the play. The interpretation of Falstaff as 'a Puritan fallen from grace' may be innocent, but it does seem gratuitous. However, to remake Benvolio, the man of good will, as he shows himself in his every appearance, into "the pugnacious Benvolio" (italics mine), needs much more ground than that of the 'satiric portrait' of the certainly mercurial Mercutio, quoted from the first scene of the third act of Romeo and Juliet".

In his review of Campbell's 1950 The Living Shakespeare, an edition for the American student of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets (essentially a reprinting, with minor editorial changes and a new introduction and notes, of the Globe edition), editor and scholar Edward Hubler notes, in an otherwise favorable review, that Campbell's ideas about satire do not find universal acceptance. Referring to statements in that edition, he summarizes Campbell's views: "The essence of this point of view is expressed here. Troilus and Cressida is a satire, and the end of the play is 'completely satiric.' The catastrophe of Coriolanus, 'utterly devoid of grandeur and dignity, awakens less pity and terror than scorn. He follows that with "other less acceptable statements" from Campbell, to conclude that "the student should be told that this is an excellent book written from a marked point of view."

Reader's Encyclopedia The Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare (1966) presents material on Shakespeare and Shakespeare scholarship alphabetically, including "full-length critical and historical essays". It has extensive sections on performance histories of his plays until 1963, and on the publication history of Shakespeare's work and the important criticism since 1709, as well as other information on Elizabethan playwrights and the theater of the time. Reviewer Arnold Colbath called it "the convenient desk book for those who teach Shakespeare, and for all those who study and think about him". When in 1990 Charles Boyce published Shakespeare A to Z, a very similar kind of book, reviewer Christine Guyonneau noted that, for all its merits, "it cannot replace [Campbell's] classic".

The Sonnets, Songs and Poems of Shakespeare Campbell published this edition of Shakespeare's poetry when he was already with emeritate. Robert E. Knoll, in a brief review, suggests that "the editors make a clearer distinction between aesthetic and biographical questions". The book proposes that William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, was the sonnet sequence's Fair Youth, and that "the Dark Lady is Mary Fitton or 'another Elizabethan charmer with exactly the same nature.

English education While at Michigan, Campbell wrote a paper that argued against some of the criticism of content and the value of the Ph.D. degree in English; however, he also noted that in his opinion "in certain influential quarters a rather undue enthusiasm for everything medieval exists and that docile students are induced to wade through masses of stupid and essentially insignificant material produced in that time".

Publications

Patterns for Living, an Anthology (1934); revised edition published in 1943,