Charles William Wallace

Born 1865-02-06 Hopkins, MO (United States of America)

Died 1932-08-07

Wallace joined the faculty at the University of Nebraska in 1901 and became Professor of English Dramatic Literature in 1912. A prodigious researcher, in his time he became a very famous Shakespeare scholar, with his discoveries of new Shakespeare documents reported in the European newspapers and the New York Times. In the summers 1904-1909 and then year-round on leave in London from 1909-1916, he and his wife, Hulda Berggren of Wahoo, Nebraska, sifted through over five million Elizabethan legal and administrative documents, finding early court cases involving Shakespeare and discovering new sources on Shakespeare and the theater, including evidence of Shakespeare's financial interest in the Globe Theater. He was also famed for his work on Elizabethan child actors.

His contemporaries in the University of Nebraska English Department included Louise Pound, Prosser Hall Frye, and Lucius Adelno Sherman.

See:
J W Robinson, “Shakespeare and Nebraska: Charles William Wallace, 1865-1932, and the ‘Great Index of the World,’” Nebraska History 60 (1979): 1-20. Accessed on-line via the Nebraska State Historical Society.

dsc

Places Lived

Lincoln, NE

Author Of

Nonfiction

Keywords

Literary Scholarship; Shakespeare

Education

Bachelor of Science Degree in Education, 1885, Western Normal College, Shenandoah, IA
Bachelor of Arts Degree, 1898, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE
Graduate Studies at the University of Nebraska, the University of Chicago, and the Universities of Heidelberg and Freiburg in GERMANY.

Occupation

Professor
Shakespeare Scholar

Places Worked

University of Nebraska

Bibliography

Spider-webs in Verse : A Collection of Lyrics for Leisure Moments Spun at Idle Hours. 1892.
The Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars, 1597-1603. 1908.
The Evolution of the English Drama up to Shakespeare. 1912.

We appreciate corrections and additions to our information about authors, but please read the following guidelines and caveats carefully.

The Nebraska Authors database is based on publicly available sources. Unless you are the author contacting us in person, it helps us if you cite the source or sources of your information. We cannot include unsourced information in the database.
We may be appreciative of information we choose not to include in the publicly available database.
To include an image on an author profile, please send jpg attachment to nebraskaauthors@lincoln.ne.gov. A photo-release agreement is required before the image will be published on this site.
Because of the way we are staffed, expect corrections or additions to take time, sometimes up to three months.
While we initially included some actual links to external URLs in the database, we will in the future no longer provide functioning links. We will instead record the presence of specific external materials in language that we hope will help intelligent users find it themselves. Web rot, in which actual materials remain online but undergo changes in their URLs, is too demanding in terms of staff time for us to hope to keep external links current.

Please copy, fill out the form below, and email it to heritage@lincoln.ne.gov to suggest a change.