Oscar James Campbell Jr. (August 16, 1879 – June 1, 1970) was an American academic, known as a scholar of Shakespeare and as the author of The Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare.
Biography
Campbell was born August 16, 1879, in Cleveland, Ohio. He was the son of Oscar James and Frances Amelia (Fuller) Campbell; his father was a lawyer.
He attended the University of Michigan for two years, and then Harvard University for his bachelor's (1903), master's (1907), and doctoral (1910) degrees. Prior to starting his master's education, he taught English and law at the United States Naval Academy from 1904 to 1906. His mentor in graduate school was George L. Kittredge. Campbell was the first recipient of Harvard's Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, which allowed him to travel for a year to Europe, where he visited universities in Denmark, Germany, and England, and along the way became an authority on the 18th-century Danish playwright Ludwig Holberg. He later translated three of his plays, and wrote a monograph on Holberg, Comedies of Holberg (1914). When he went back to the US in 1911, he first taught in Annapolis and then at the University of Wisconsin, where he became associate professor. In 1921 he left for the University of Michigan, and stayed there until 1936, when he left for Columbia University. At Columbia, he was named chairman of the English Department in 1947, and retired with emeritate in 1950. He also held visiting appointments at Harvard (1929) and Yale University (1946–47), and had summer research appointments at the Huntington Library in California from 1934 to 1938.
Campbell was very fond of the theater, and "attended almost every play and musical that appeared in New York City"; for ten years he advised the committee at Columbia that awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
He remained an active scholar: his The Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare, which was praised by Thomas Lask, was published in 1966, the same year he left New York, with failing health, to go and live with his daughter in Louisiana. Shortly before his death in 1970 he published The Sonnets, Songs & Poems of Shakespeare, in which he argued that William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, was the sonnet sequence's Fair Youth. Campbell also edited the Bantam editions of Shakespeare's plays. He died, after a long illness, at his daughter's home, aged 90.
Personal and political
Campbell was a Unitarian. He married Emily Lyon, the daughter of a businessman, in 1907; they had four children. In 1952, he and a group of 95 colleagues at Columbia supported Adlai Stevenson II in his presidential candidacy; Stevenson was running against Dwight Eisenhower, who at the time was Columbia's president.
Academic work
Shakespeare and satire
Over the course of two monographs, Campbell developed the thesis that Shakespeare needs to be reevaluated in the light of the role of the "new" satire of his time, and that critics have underplayed the role of satire in his work.
In Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida" (1938), Campbell reads Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, three plays by Ben Jonson, and two plays by John Marston in the light of the 1599 Elizabethan interdiction against satire, and claims that Jonson in particular set out to produce a new satirical genre that would pass muster with the authorities and would combine the "proscribed satires and epigram", thus forming a "strange hybrid" of comedy and satire, according to critic Tucker Brooke. One of the book's advancement, according to Alice Walker, is that it proposes the (somewhat odd) plays under discussion not as biographical material, but rather offers a generic and formal discussion of the essential unity of the old and the new satire.