FURNESS, HORACE HOWARD American Shakespearian scholar, was born in Philadelphia on Nov. 2, 1833, the son of William Henry Furness (18o2-96), minister of the First Unitarian church in that city. He graduated at Harvard in 1854, and was admitted to the bar in 1859, but soon devoted him self to the study of Shakespeare. He accumulated a collection of illustrative material of great richness and extent, and brought out in 1871 the first volume of a new Variorum edition, designed to represent and summarize the conclusions of the best authorities in all languages—textual, critical and annotative. The volumes ap peared as follows: Romeo and Juliet (1871) ; Macbeth (1873, re vised by his son, 1903) ; Hamlet (2 vol., 1877) ; King Lear (188o) ; Othello (1886) ; The Merchant of Venice (1888) ; As You Like It (1890) The Tempest (1892) ; A Midsummer Night's Dream (1895) ; The Winter's Tale (1898) ; Much Ado about Nothing (1899) ; Twelfth Night (1901) ; Love's Labour's Lost (1904); Antony and Cleopatra (1907) and Cymbeline (1913). For his first volumes he made an independent text, but beginning with Othello he used the first folio. Few American scholars have shown such single-hearted devotion to a formidable task and few have so brightened erudition with unvarying gentleness, sanity and humour. Furness, made doctor by five leading American and for eign universities, was conservative in his methods, but sound in his judgments. He died at Wallingford (Pa.) on Aug. 13, 1912. His wife, Helen Kate Furness (1837-83), compiled A Concordance to the Poems of Shakespeare (1874) ; and his son and namesake (1865– ) was a partner in and successor to his father's work.