America's first editor of Shakespeare, staunch reviewer for the Christian Examiner and the North American Review, Oliver William Bourn Peabody pursued a varied career as attorney, legislator, man of letters, professor, and finally, Unitarian minister. A critic with a strongly moralistic cast and a sound respect for eighteenth-century literary values, Peabody's primary importance to modern readers lies with his edition of Shakespeare, the first published in the United States that demonstrated any effort to compare a contemporary text with folios and quartos, an effort that led literary historian Jane Sherzer to dub him "father of American textual criticism." His conservative reviews for the North American may have caused some critics to term that publication reactionary; however, it is more likely that Peabody's twin brother held such views, leading Harry Hayden Clark to blame both brothers for "extreme truculency" and hostility to romanticism.

Near the end of a century...