SOURCE: Young, Thomas Daniel. “Lanier and Shakespeare.” In Shakespeare and Southern Writers: A Study in Influence, edited by Philip C. Kolin, pp. 49-61. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1985.

In the following essay, Young examines Lanier's public lectures on Shakespeare, which were posthumously published as Shakspere and his Forerunners: Studies in Elizabethan Poetry, and calls this criticism evidence that Lanier was “a child of his age.”

During the last few years of his relatively short life, while he was occupying the chair of first flutist in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Sidney Lanier gave a series of public lectures at the Peabody Institute and Johns Hopkins University on the development of English literature, some of which were devoted to Shakespeare and his time. These lectures were published twenty-five years after Lanier's death as Shakspere and His Forerunners: Studies in Elizabethan Poetry (1902). Although Lanier was genuinely interested in the development...