Charles Tyler Prouty

Background

He was born on May 30, 1909 in Washington, District of Columbia, United States, the son of Ward Prouty and Claire Eleanor Streeter.

Education

He graduated from high school in 1926 and subsequently attended Dartmouth College in Hanover, as had his grandfather and one of his uncles. Prouty majored in English and in 1931 received his B. A. Graduate work took him to Cambridge University in England, where he earned three more degrees: a second B. A. (1933), an M. A. (1938), and a Ph. D. (1939).

Career

In 1933 and 1934, between periods of study at Cambridge, Prouty taught English at the Suffield School in Connecticut. He accepted a teaching position at Lehigh University, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he remained as instructor of English until 1938.

He continued the work on the Elizabethan theater he had begun during his graduate studies and led to publication of his first book, the biography George Gascoigne: Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier, and Poet (1942). From 1940 to 1948, Prouty was on the faculty of the University of Missouri in Columbia, rising rapidly through the ranks from assistant to associate professor and, in 1946, to professor of English.

During World War II he served for three years (1942 - 1945) as a research analyst in the office of the Chief Signal Officer of the United States War Department.

Prouty was appointed professor of English at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1948 and remained on that faculty until his death.

In 1954 he chaired Yale's Shakespeare Festival, a multimedia celebration including plays, lectures, exhibitions, and musical programs, which drew on the talents of individuals and groups from throughout the university. Thousands of spectators attended the festival. Also in 1954, the Yale University Press published Prouty's Contention and Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI, a critical bibliography singled out by the Shakespeare Association of America as the "only important work of the year" in its field.

Finally, in what was certainly a stellar year, Prouty, in cooperation with other Shakespearean scholars, brought out the Yale University Press 1, 000-page photographic facsimile edition of the 1623 First Folio (1954). His introduction to the work summarized all that was then known about the history of the publication of Shakespeare's plays and succinctly outlined those issues yet to be resolved. In 1955 Prouty, working with Maynard Mack and a small group of colleagues, inaugurated the Yale Summer Shakespeare Institute, which he continued to direct until its termination in 1962.

Several of his best works, such as The Sources of Much Ado About Nothing (1950) and The Contention and Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI, gave detailed comparative analyses of texts.

The single most exciting and significant event of Prouty's scholarly career was the discovery, announced in 1952, of detailed plans, drawings, and perspectives of Trinity Hall, a London building used as a playhouse as early as eight years before Shakespeare's birth and destroyed in 1790. Prouty published the complete documentation of his find in An Early Elizabethan Playhouse (1953). He also was a trustee of the American Shakespeare Theater in Stratford, Connecticut, a member of the advisory council of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

He died while visiting Fort Lauderdale, Florida, shortly before his intended retirement from Yale.

Achievements

• Charles Tyler Prouty was recognized as one of the outstanding Elizabethan specialists of the time. His service to Yale University as both teacher and scholar was outstanding, he championed the university publication and presentation of works from and about the Elizabethan era. He also was the author of An Early Elizabethan Playhouse (1953), where he discoveried detailed plans, drawings, and perspectives of Trinity Hall. Besides, he was the famous editor of the Yale Shakespeare, a highly regarded series of the Bard's individual plays, and The Life and Works of George Peele He was awarded the department's Commendation for Meritorious Civilian Service.

Works

More photos

• book

  • George Gascoigne: Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier, and Poet

    (Gascoigne, George, -- -1577.)

  • The Contention And Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI
  • The Yale Shakespeare Festival Lectures, Shakespeare: Of an Age and for All Time
  • Studies in the Elizabethan theatre

Views

Prouty's overriding purpose during years of research on the structure and conventions of the Elizabethan stage was to sharpen understanding of the actual production of drama, as it had been then and might be again. His intent was not simply to add to the sum of knowledge, but rather to show Shakespeare's creativity in action.

Membership

Prouty was a member of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, Britain's Bibliographic Society, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Connections

On August 29, 1936, he married Ruth Patterson Belew; they would have no children.

Father:

Ward Prouty

Mother:

Claire Eleanor Streeter

Spouse:

Ruth Patterson Belew

coworker:

Maynard Mack