ABSTRACT
Sir Edmund Kercherver Chambers (1866-1954) was a historian of the English stage, first President of the Malone Society (1906-39) and a civil servant, becoming Second Secretary in the Department of Education 1921-6. He edited numerous English classics, including Early English Lyrics (1907) and The Oxford Book of SixteenthCentury Verse (1932), and wrote The Medieval Stage (2 vols, 1903), The Elizabethan Stage (4 vols, 1923) and Shakespeare (2 vols, 1930), as well as biographies of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Matthew Arnold. He reviewed Grierson’s edition of Donne’s poems, applauding the recent recovery of Donne’s reputation (Modern Language Review, 9 (1914), 269).
