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Winter, William
Winter, William (1836–1917), critic. The most influential and widely read theatre critic of his era, he was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard. He came to New York in 1859 to become literary editor of The Saturday Press, then served as drama critic for the Albion. In 1865 he was appointed the Tribune's critic, a post he held until his retirement in 1909, after which he contributed articles to various magazines. His early criticism was learned, basically sound, and open‐minded, but with the rise of realism in the 1880s he became increasingly unaccepting of new theatrical movements and was the often shrill leader of the anti‐Ibsenites. Winter came to conclude that morality was all‐important, and that no play, however meritorious, was worthy of patronage if it violated his rigid canons of right and wrong. He wrote numerous books on theatre, including Other Days (1908), Old Friends (1909), and The Wallet of Time (1913), as well as biographies of David Belasco, Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson, Richard Mansfield, and Ada Rehan. His penchant for composing memorial odes to dead actors earned him the nickname “ Weeping Willie.” Typical both of his style and of his later, crotchety views were his comments in his Mansfield biography, “The Ibsen movement . . . impressed me, from the beginning, as unhealthful and injurious. The province of art, and especially of dramatic art, is beauty, not deformity; the need of the world is to be cheered, not depressed; and the author who avows, as Ibsen did, that he goes down into the sewers,—whatever be the purpose of his descent into those insalubrious regions,—should be left to the enjoyment of them.”
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Gerald Bordman and Thomas S. Hischak. "Winter, William." The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. 2004. Encyclopedia.com. 28 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. Gerald Bordman and Thomas S. Hischak. "Winter, William." The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. 2004. Encyclopedia.com. (May 28, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O149-WinterWilliam.html Gerald Bordman and Thomas S. Hischak. "Winter, William." The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. 2004. Retrieved May 28, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O149-WinterWilliam.html |
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Winter, William
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.
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James D. Hart and and Phillip W. Leininger. "Winter, William." The Oxford Companion to American Literature. 1995. Encyclopedia.com. 28 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. James D. Hart and and Phillip W. Leininger. "Winter, William." The Oxford Companion to American Literature. 1995. Encyclopedia.com. (May 28, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O123-WinterWilliam.html James D. Hart and and Phillip W. Leininger. "Winter, William." The Oxford Companion to American Literature. 1995. Retrieved May 28, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O123-WinterWilliam.html |
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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. |
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Cite this article
"William Winter." The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.. 2011. Encyclopedia.com. 28 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. "William Winter." The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.. 2011. Encyclopedia.com. (May 28, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-Winter-W.html "William Winter." The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.. 2011. Retrieved May 28, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-Winter-W.html |
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Winter, William
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.
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PHYLLIS HARTNOLL and PETER FOUND. "Winter, William." The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre. 1996. Encyclopedia.com. 28 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>. PHYLLIS HARTNOLL and PETER FOUND. "Winter, William." The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre. 1996. Encyclopedia.com. (May 28, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O79-WinterWilliam.html PHYLLIS HARTNOLL and PETER FOUND. "Winter, William." The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre. 1996. Retrieved May 28, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O79-WinterWilliam.html |
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