George Lyman Kittredge (February 28, 1860 – July 23, 1941) was a professor of English literature at Harvard University. His scholarly edition of the works of William Shakespeare was influential in the early 20th century. He was also involved in American folklore studies and was instrumental in the formation and management of the Harvard University Press. One of his better-known books concerned witchcraft in England.
Early life and education
Kittredge was born in Boston on February 28, 1860. His father, Edward "Kit" Lyman Kittredge, participated in the California Gold Rush of 1849, been shipwrecked, and had walked 700 miles across the desert before returning to Boston to marry a widow, Mrs. Deborah Lewis Benson, and start a family. Their precocious and bookish son George attended The Roxbury Latin School, which then had about a hundred pupils. George consistently led his class in marks and won a scholarship to Harvard, which he entered in 1878.
As a freshman, George lived at home in Boston and walked to Harvard every day to save money. Kittredge garnered highest honors and joined several clubs, wrote light verse, and won Bowdoin prizes for his essays and translations, including one from English into Attic Greek. He also became a member of the editorial board of the Harvard Advocate, the college literary magazine. In 1881 Kittredge was the prompter and pronunciation coach in a celebrated undergraduate theatrical performance of Sophocles's Oedipus Rex in the original Greek, attended by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, William Dean Howells, Charles Eliot Norton, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and classicist B. L. Gildersleeve of Johns Hopkins University. In 1882, Kittredge was elected Ivy Orator, and charged to deliver a humorous speech to his graduating class. Graduating with Kittredge that year was Philadelphian Owen Wister, who authored the first Western novel, The Virginian.
Career
Lack of money prevented Kittredge from immediately pursuing graduate studies. From 1883 to 1887, he taught Latin at Phillips Exeter Academy. About six feet tall and, at 140 pounds, slightly built, Kittredge impressed his prep-school students with his exacting standards, sense of humor, and apparent ability to converse fluently in Latin.
Harvard University
Kittredge joined the faculty at Harvard as an instructor in the autumn of 1888. He was soon promoted and in 1896 succeeded Professor Francis James Child as Professor of the Division of Modern Languages, which included languages other than Latin or Greek. He and Child had shared the teaching of Harvard's English 2 course of William Shakespeare, which Kittredge took over solely in 1896 following Child's death. Because Child had died without quite finishing his work of ballad scholarship, Child's publishers asked Kittredge to see the project through to publication and to supply a short introduction to the five-volume opus. Later, Kittredge helped expand ballad and folklore studies to include American folklore, serving in 1904 as president of the American Folklore Society. Kittredge also took over Child's graduate course in the English and Scottish popular ballad.
English 2, a Shakespeare class for which Kittredge became well known at the university, was a lecture course of about 275 Harvard students. Other courses and subjects which Kittredge taught or co-taught were English 28, a survey course covering Chaucer, the epic, and the ballad; Historical English Grammar, and Anglo-Saxon, a prerequisite for his course in Beowulf. In the German department, Kittredge taught Icelandic, Old Norse, and, for many years, a course in German mythology. His graduate courses included Germanic and Celtic Religions, which he co-taught with F. N. Robinson, a Celticist, English Metrical Romances, including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Orfeo, and Child's ballad course.
Kittredge's students included Oscar James Campbell Jr., Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John A. Lomax, whose lectures and collection of cowboy ballads Kittredge later supported, and the folklorists Robert Winslow Gordon, James Madison Carpenter, William S. Burroughs and Stith Thompson. Among the most popular of Harvard's teachers throughout his career, Kittredge's students affectionately nicknamed him "Kitty". Kittredge was named Gurney Professor of English at Harvard in 1917. He retired from teaching in 1936 and continued to work on his edition of Shakespeare until his death in 1941, in Barnstable, Massachusetts.
Radcliffe College
Women were not admitted to Harvard University until several decades after Kittredge's lifetime, but Kittredge made trips to Radcliffe College to teach a Shakespeare course for women that was similar to Harvard's English 2.