William Winter

William Winter 1836-1917, American drama critic, biographer, and poet, b. Gloucester, Mass., grad. Harvard Law School, 1857. A member of the literary bohemians who met in Pfaff's Cellar in New York City in the 1850s, he summed up his memories of them—Bayard Taylor, Walt Whitman, and others—in Old Friends (1909). As drama critic for the New York Tribune (1865-1909), Winter vigorously opposed the advent of dramatic realism. His many studies of theatrical personalities and his Other Days (1908) and The Wallet of Time (1913), theatrical reminiscences, are useful histories of the period. Winter's poetry was collected in 1909.

Winter, William (1836–1917), American dramatic critic, whose conservatism made him the transatlantic counterpart of Clement Scott. He was the most powerful dramatic critic of his time in the United States, probably because he rarely committed himself to an opinion at variance with that of the great majority of his readers. Although he admired English actors, he was antagonistic to such foreign visitors as Duse, Bernhardt, and Réjane, dragging irrelevancies concerning their private lives into his notices. He also denounced Ibsen (‘slimy mush’), Maeterlinck (‘lunacy’), and Shaw.

Winter, William (1836–1917), was a writer in his native Massachusetts, a bohemian journalist in the group at Pfaff's Cellar, and became dramatic critic of the New‐York Tribune (1865–1909). Although during the first 25 years he was respected as the Great Cham of the New York theater, he was later considered a relic of the Victorian era because of his romanticism, sentimentalism, insistence upon morality, and hatred of the rising realism. In addition to his daily columns, in part reprinted in The Wallet of Time (1913), he wrote such theatrical reminiscences as Other Days (1908) and Old Friends (1909), and biographies of such theatrical figures as Joseph Jefferson, Henry Irving, Edwin Booth, Ada Rehan, Richard Mansfield, and Belasco. Shakespeare on the Stage (2 vols., 1911, 1915) is a valuable work of theatrical scholarship, dealing with interpretations of Shakespearean roles by leading actors. He was the author of a great many occasional poems and of funeral verse on the deaths of important actors, which, because of his longevity, were so frequent that he came to be known as “ Weeping Willie.” His Poems were collected in 1909.