Karl Elze - Encyclopedia

GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES

KARL ELZE (1821-1889), German scholar and Shakespearian critic, was born at Dessau on the 22nd of May 1821. Having studied (1839-1843) classical philology, and modern, but especially English, literature at the university of Leipzig, he was a master for a time in the Gymnasium (classical school) at Dessau, and in 1875 was appointed extraordinary, and in 1876 ordinary, professor of English philology at the university of Halle, in which city he died on the 21st of January 1889. Elze began his literary career with the Englischer Liederschatz (1851), an anthology of English lyrics, edited for a while a critical periodical Atlantis, and in 1857 published an edition of Shakespeare's Hamlet with critical notes. He also edited Chapman's Alphonsus (1867) and wrote biographies of Walter Scott, Byron and Shakespeare; Abhandlungenzu Shakespeare (English translation by D. Schmitz, as Essays on Shakespeare, London, 1874), and the excellent treatise, Notes on Elizabethan Dramatists with conjectural emendations of the text (3 vols., Halle, 1880-1886, new ed. 1889).