Sir Sidney Lee, Biographer of King Edward Vii, Dies

(Jewish Telegraphic Agency)

Sir Sidney Lee, one of the foremost Shakespearean scholars. died here yesterday at the age of sixty-six. It is understood that he had virtually completed a second volume of his life of King Edward VII, publication of the first volume of which was a British literary event last spring.

Sir Sidney Lee’s “Life of Shakespeare” is still a standard work, and he was the author of a number of other books on the literature of the Elizabethan period. He was chairman of the trustees of Shakespeare’s birthplace at Stratford.

Sidney Lee was of Jewish origin and was born in London on December 5, 1859. He was educated at the City of London School and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was graduated in modern history in 1882. At Balliol he was a favorite pupil of Dr. Jowett, the famous master of that college, and it is said that it was at Dr. Jowett’s suggestion that he changed his name from Solomon Lazarus to Sidney Lee.

Adopting the profession of letters, he became in 1883 an assistant of Leslie Stephen in the editorship of the monumeintal “Dictionary of National Biography.” Seven years later he was promoted to be joint editor, and on Sir Leslie’s retirement in 1891 he succeeded to the chief editorship.

Among his works were “Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s Autobiography,” “A Life of Queen Victoria,” “Elizabethan Sonners,” “Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century,” “America and Elizabethan England,” “The French Renaissance in England,” and “Principles of Biography.” He also edited “A Year’s Work in English Studies.”

Sir Sidney was the Lowell Institute lecturer in Boston in 1903. He was professor of the English language and literature at East London College of the University of London in 1913-1924, dean of the faculty of arts of the University of London in 1918-1922, president of the English Association in 1917, member of the Royal Commission on Public Records since 1910, chairman of the executive of the Shakespeare’s Birthday Trust at Stratford-on-Avon since 1904, registrar of the Royal Literary Fund in 1907, emeritus professor of English in the University of London and a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery in 1924. He was Clark lecturer in English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1901-1902, and lecturer for the Common University Fund at Oxford in 1909. He was a Fellow of the British Academy, a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a corresponding member of the Massachusetts Historical Society. He received the honorary degrees of Litt. D. from Oxford and from Victoriz University, Manchester, and LI- D. from Glasgow.