12. 



pupil e; 

 scholar ■ 



DR. ROLFE'S UNIQUE SCHOLARSHIP 

 Exact scholarship is the last peg in 

 rhe schoolroom on which the average 

 es to hang his hat, and a 

 10 can make it one of the first 

 : had gifts beyond the ordin- 

 ary. The audience of the late Professor 

 William J. Rolfe was enormous; but 

 ! significant than numbers was the 

 service he did for students almost with- 

 out their knowledge. He was an editor 

 concerned with making his com- 

 ments vital and true than with the 

 parade of his erudition. The youngster 

 in the hirh school made the discovery, 

 to his intense surprise, that the "notes" 

 he was expected to study with the text 

 i Shakspearean play were interesting 

 for their own sake. So far from finding 

 irksome, he would rather read 

 than not. This scholarship — he 

 did not then know it by that name- 

 pleased him in the high schools; In un- 

 dergraduate days he learned from it that 

 to be thorough and solid was not neces- 

 sarily to be dull; and it pleased him 

 again as often as he returned In later 

 years to the convenient little brown vol- 

 with the familiar "Edited by W. 

 J. Rolfe" in gilt lettering' on the cover. 



Professor Rolfe popularized learning in 

 unlikely quarters, but still more he human- 

 zed scholarship. Shakspeare was to him 

 more than an intellectual exercise. This 

 scholar, oddly among his brethren, bore 

 constantly in mind that the raw material 

 if his craft was, more than any other 

 literature, the passions 

 n beings, and that those 

 to profit by his craft were chief- 

 ge when nothing so appealed and 



raw material 

 and wills of hu 

 who 

 ly of 



len. If 



I interested as living men and 

 anyone doubts that the teaching of youth 

 is a fine art, or that it is unworthy of his 

 best effort, let him take up a volume of 

 Rolfe's Shakspeare. In his critical notes 

 he used a style of concise writing and an 

 attitude of appreciation which earns the 

 title of artistry in scholarship, for he has 

 written one-line and two-line comments on 

 certain passages in "King Lear" and 

 "Macbeth" that break over scene and sit- 

 uation as sudden shafts of sunlight spring 

 a whole countryside into feature and color. 

 This is the work of a literary artist quite 

 as much as that of a scholar. 



His free omissions from the texts of ihe 

 plays have been held to lessen the value of 

 his work. It is equally true that for the 

 purposes o£ his editions certain excisions 

 were highly commendable, and that in his 

 choice of passages to be expurgated he was, 

 like all expurgators, inconsistent. It is 

 much easier, none the less, to find an un- 

 expurgated text, than another commentator 

 as pithy, pointed, illuminating and sfxact. 

 Professor Rolfe has contributed to the edu- 

 cation of thousands to whom he is not even 

 a name. He has added to the pleasure and 

 profit of thousands more to whom his name 

 was the first introduction to a delight In 

 our greatest dramatic poet. 



