G. B. Harrison (George Bagshawe Harrison) Biography

British scholar and critic, born in Hove, Sussex, educated at Queens' College, Cambridge. In 1924 he began lecturing at King's College, University of London, subsequently holding professorships at Queen's University, Ontario, and the University of Michigan. Among his many works on Shakespeare and his period were Shakespeare's Fellows (1923), Elizabethan Plays and Players (1940), and Shakespeare's Critics: From Jonson to Auden (1964); England in Shakespeare's Day (1928) and Shakespeare at Work (1933) are highly regarded as introductions to the social and cultural contexts of Shakespeare's work. He also produced numerous editions of Elizabethan and Jacobean documents, notably Thomas Nashe's Pierce Pennilesse, His Supplication to the Divell, 1592 (1924), An Elizabethan Journal (three volumes, 1928, 1931, 1933), A Jacobean Journal (two volumes, 1941, 1950), and The Letters of Queen Elizabeth I (1935). Harrison was general editor of the Penguin Shakespeare between 1937 and 1959. His other publications included The Day before Yesterday (1938), a journal for the year 1936; Julius Caesar in Shakespeare, Shaw, and the Ancients (1960); and Profession of English (1962), which reflects on the objectives and procedures of literary studies.