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Brander Matthews

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James Brander Matthews
Matthews circa 1910
Matthews circa 1910
Born(1852-02-21)February 21, 1852
New Orleans, USA
Died(1929-03-31)March 31, 1929
New York City, USA
OccupationProfessor of Dramatic Literature
NationalityUSA
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Brander Matthews

James Brander Matthews (February 21, 1852 – March 31, 1929) was an American writer and educator. He was the first full-time professor of dramatic literature at an American university and played a significant role in establishing theater as a subject worthy of formal study in the academic world. His interests ranged from Shakespeare, Moliere, and Ibsen to French boulevard comedies, folk theater, and the new realism of his own day.

Biography

Matthews born to a wealthy family in New Orleans and graduated from Columbia College in 1871, where he was a member of the Philolexian Society and the fraternity of Delta Psi, and from Columbia Law School in 1873. He disliked the law, never really needed to work for a living (given his family fortune), and later turned to a literary career. From 1892 to 1900 he was a professor of literature at Columbia and thereafter held the Chair of Dramatic Literature until his retirement in 1924. He was known as an engaging lecturer. His influence was such that a popular pun claimed that an entire generation had been "brandered by the same Matthews."

During his long tenure at Columbia, Matthews created and curated a "dramatic museum" of costumes, scripts, props, and other stage memorabilia. Originally housed in a four-room complex in Philosophy Hall, the collection was broken up and sold after his death. However, its books were incorporated into the university library and its dioramas of the Globe Theatre and other historic dramatic venues have been dispersed for public display around campus, mainly in Dodge Hall. Matthews was also remembered as the inspiration for the now-destroyed Brander Matthews Theater on 117th Street, between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive. An English professorship in his name still exists at Columbia.

Teaching

Matthews' students knew him as a man well-versed in the history of drama and as knowledgeable about continental dramatists as he was about American and British playwrights. They also knew him as an opinionated man with a somewhat conservative bent. Playwright S.N. Behrman, who studied with him in 1917, recalled in his memoirs, "One day I made the mistake of bringing into class a copy of [the liberal magazine] The New Republic. I had, actually, a contribution in it. Matthews looked at The New Republic and said, 'I am sorry to see you wasting your time on that stuff.' As a staunch Republican and intimate of Theodore Roosevelt's, he had his duty to do." He could also be "easy and anecdotal," Behrman acknowledged, and he was respected on campus as a man-of-the-world. [1] He lived for the theater and made clear his belief that theater was a performance art, first and foremost, and that plays as literary texts should never be viewed in the same light. Yet in the classroom he was an exacting guide to stage craftsmanship.

Other students recalled him as a teacher who elicited "mingled affection and impatience"[2] and who conducted himself in a manner that never attempted to hide his privileged background, connections, and connoisseurship. His conservatism became more pronounced in his later years: he was adamant about not admitting women to his graduate courses[3] and, according to Mark van Doren, taught an "ancient" American literature elective that he refused to revise over the decades. He was a natural target for the World War I-era generation of writers and activists. Reviewing Matthews' autobiography in 1917, liberal journalist (and Columbia graduate) Randolph Bourne complained that for Brander Matthews "literature was a gesture of gentility and not a comprehension of life."[4] In On Native Grounds, he was characterized by Alfred Kazin as a "literary gentleman."[5]

Matthews taught a number of students who went on to have major careers in the theater, including S.N. Behrman and drama critic Stark Young.

Activities

Matthews lived an active life off-campus. He was one of the founders of the Authors' Club and of the Players' Club and one of the organizers of the American Copyright League. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1913. In 1906, he was named the first chairman of the Simplified Spelling Board and served as president of the Modern Language Association of America in 1910. In 1907, the French government decorated him with the Legion of Honor for his services in promoting the cause of French drama.

Professional and Personal Friendships

Brander Matthews was not a typical academic. He was friends with many notable men in his time, e.g., Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Theodore Roosevelt.[6] His relationship with Twain had a bantering quality (Twain, in his famous essay "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," lambastes Matthews' statements concerning Cooper's literary merits), while his friendship with Howells was earnest and supportive. Matthews' correspondence with Roosevelt, which extended from the 1880s through the White House years, was posthumously published. They shared a temperamental affinity as well as an interest in the cause of simplified spelling.[7]

Despite his complacent persona in later years, wearing mutton-chop whiskers long after that style has passed, Matthews was always an intensely social man. He invited students to his West End Apartment for evenings of conversation. In the 1890s he was a charter member of an informal group called "the Friendly Sons of Saint Bacchus," which met in a bohemian cafe in Greenwich Village for entertainment and readings. Other members of the group included the erudite and cosmopolitan critic James Gibbons Huneker and the rowdy Ash can painter George Luks, two New Yorkers notorious for their hard drinking, whose presence would suggest that the "sons" were not devoted to purely intellectual pastimes.[8] Huneker shared Matthews' desire to see drama accepted as a subject for serious criticism and, like his academic friend, lobbied for more attention to be paid by American audiences to the advanced European dramatists.[9] The two had crossed paths in Europe when Matthews was doing research for his first book, The Theatres of Paris.

Works

  • The Theatres of Paris (1880)
  • French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century (1881; revised in 1891 and 1901)
  • Margery's Lovers (1884)
  • Love at First Sight (1885)
  • Actors and Actresses of the United States and Great Britain (five volumes, 1886), with Laurence Hutton
  • In the Vestibule Limited (1892)
  • Americanisms and Briticisms (1892)
  • The Decision of the Court (1893)
  • Vignettes of Manhattan (1894)
  • Studies of the Stage (1894)
  • The Gift of Story-Telling (1895) (Harper's New Monthly Magazine Oct 1895)
  • His Father's Son (1895), a novel
  • Aspects of Fiction (1896; revised in 1902)
  • An Introduction to the Study of American Literature (1896)
  • Studies in Local Color (1898)
  • A Confident To-Morrow (1900)
  • The Action and the Word (1900)
  • The Historical Novel and Other Essays (1901)
  • Parts of Speech, Essays on English (1901)
  • The Philosophy of the Short-Story (1901)
  • The Development of the Drama (1903)
  • American Character (1906)
  • The Short Story (1907)
  • Americans of the Future and Other Essays (1909)
  • Molière: His Life and Works (1910)
  • Introduction to the Study of American literature (1911)
  • Shakespeare as a Playwright (1913)
  • On Acting (1914)
  • The Oxford Book of American Essays (1914)
  • These Many Years (1917): autobiography
  • Principles of Playmaking (1919)
  • Playwrights on Playmaking (1923)

References

  1. ^ S.N. Behrman, People in a Diary (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972). p. 8.
  2. ^ Green, p. 84.
  3. ^ Green, p. 49.
  4. ^ Thomas Bender, New York Intellect (New York: Knopf, 1987), p. 232.
  5. ^ Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York: Harcourt, 1942), p. 61.
  6. ^ Green, p. 83.
  7. ^ Nathan Miller, Theodore Roosevelt: A Life (New York: William Morrow, 1992), PP. 422-423.
  8. ^ Arnold Schwab, James Gibbons Huneker: Critic of the Seven Arts (Berkeley: Stanford University Press, 1963), p. 113.
  9. ^ Schwab, p. 151.

Sources

  • Green, Ashbel (ed.). My Columbia: Reminiscences of University Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
  • Oliver, Lawrence J. Brander Matthews, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Politics of American Literature, 1880-1920. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992.

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Gilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

Further reading

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