Henry Norman Hudson reached prominence in the second half of the nineteenth century as a popular lecturer on Shakespeare, as an editor and critic of the plays, and as professor of Shakespeare at Boston University. Contemporary Shakespeare scholar S. Schoenbaum calls him one "of the two most notable nineteenth-century American authorities" on the playwright's life and art. Although Schoenbaum praises Hudson as one praises a trickle in the desert, Alfred van R. Westfall recalls H. H. Furness's 1929 assessment of Hudson as "our greatest aesthetic critic." Most commentators, like Furness, place Hudson in the school of "aesthetic" critics.

Hudson's Shakespearean editions do not pass twentieth-century examination; and his critical theorizing conveys more enthusiasm than philosophical substance. In explanatory notes, in theorizing, and in practical criticism, Hudson borrows ideas from Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the German romantics, and his reviewers justly criticize his frequent failure to acknowledge scholarly debts. The...