Kittredge's edition of Shakespeare was the standard well beyond his death and continues to be cited occasionally. He was also arguably the leading critic of
Geoffrey Chaucer of his time and is considered largely responsible for introducing Chaucer into the canon of college English. His essay on "Chaucer's Discussion of Marriage" (1912) has traditionally been credited with introducing the idea of the "marriage group" in the
Canterbury Tales, though he was not the originator of this phrase. Through his historical researches Kittredge also identified
Thomas Malory, author of ''
Le Morte d'Arthur'' (1485), and hitherto an obscure figure, with a knight and member of Parliament who served with the Earl of Warwick, a discovery that paved the way for further researches into Malory by Edward Hicks, to whose 1928 book on Malory's turbulent career Kittredge supplied the introduction. Kittredge's work on
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was influential as well. Kittredge also collected
folk tales and
songs, writing extensively on the folk lore of
New England and on the New England
witch trials. He also wrote and co-wrote introductory Latin and English grammar text books. While still teaching at Phillips Exeter he undertook the general editorship of popular English masterpieces for the general public published by the
Atheneum Press. At Harvard he collaborated with E. S. Sheldon in editing eleven volumes of the
Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, which appeared in 1907, and was a founding member and supervisor of the Harvard University Press. His popular book, written in collaboration with J. B. Greenough,
Words and their Ways in English Speech (1901) met with great success and served as a storehouse for teachers. Kittredge was also responsible for the revision of the English used in a translation of the Psalms for the Jewish Publication Society, issued in 1903. According to his biographer, "Neither Child nor Kittredge, trained classicists and able linguists, had themselves bothered to undergo the limitations of a Ph. D. degree". There is a widely circulated story that when asked why he did not have one, Kittredge was supposed to have replied, "But who would examine me?" However, according to
Clifton Fadiman, "Kittredge always maintained that the question was never asked, and if it had been he would never have dreamed of answering in such a manner." On May 17, 1932, during a lecture tour of England, Oxford University conferred on him a D.Litt.
honoris causa. Burdened with no illusions about his erudition, or the lack of it in others, he famously remarked, "There are three persons who know what the word 'Victorian' means, and the other two are dead."
Influence on literary studies Kittredge and Child belonged to the
philological school of scholarship pioneered in 19th century German universities. Philology, especially in its early years, had been conceived as a "total science of civilization, an ideal originally formulated for the study of classical antiquity and then transferred by the German Romanticists to the modern languages. When the various modern language departments were introduced into American universities in the 1880s, speakers at the first meeting of the Modern Language Association in 1883 had been concerned to counter the popular perception that "English literature is a subject for the desultory reader in his leisure hours rather than an intellectual study for serious workers", a mere "accomplishment", whereas when "a boy studies Greek you know he has worked hard". Philology "met the desire for facts, for accuracy, and for the imitation of the scientific method which had acquired such an overwhelming prestige" in the United States. It had yielded the
discoveries of the Grimms and others, tracing the step-by-step relationships of classical and modern European to ancient Indian languages and their evolutionary development. A former Harvard graduate student, James H. Hanford, reminisced how under Kittredge, Undergraduate Shakespeare students were required to read six plays extremely slowly and to virtually memorize the texts. "It is the purpose of this course", Kittredge used to remark, "to find out what Shakespeare said and what he meant when he said it." His manner with his graduate students was entirely different. With them he was extremely collegial and invited them to his home for weekly fireside gatherings. There, in dim light, the students read papers which, with his encouragement, would often form the nucleus of subsequent dissertations. As chairman of the Division of the Modern Languages Division of Harvard, a position he inherited from Child, Kittredge was in a position to set graduate degree requirements and he insisted that graduate literature candidates master several foreign languages, as he himself had done. Neither he nor Child wished the modern languages to replace the study of Greek and Latin, and Kittredge would oppose Harvard president Charles W. Eliot's efforts to abolish Greek as a requirement for graduation. Kittredge's administrative power, vast erudition, prestige, and the histrionic attitude he assumed with undergraduates provoked resentment. A notable critic was his colleague,
Irving Babbitt (a professor of French) and Babbitt's former student,
Stuart Sherman, who together founded so-called
"New Humanist" school of literary appreciation. In a famous article in
The Nation of 1913, Sherman accused Kittredge of pedantry and of squeezing the life out of his subject. Deep ideological disagreements lay at the bottom of these attacks. The New Humanists were social and cultural conservatives who conceived of literary studies as leading to moral improvement by providing a guide to conduct and "humane insight" through an appreciation of and reflection on the timeless beauties of prescribed "great works." Babbitt bitterly opposed the introduction of elective courses for undergraduates. Deeply suspicious of democracy, he envisioned the goal of a university education as the formation of a superior individual in whom the "will to restraint" would counter what he saw as the degenerate modernism he traced back to pernicious ideas of social progress initiated by
Rousseau and his followers. Kittredge and his students, on the other hand, situated the study of languages and literatures in their historical contexts, seeking to capture "the spirit of an age" and often ranging far afield of the traditional Western canon. For Kittredge, reading Chaucer illuminated the world of the Middle Ages, which Kittredge often stated had points in common with our own age and thus helped students understand the world in which we live. Often he guided his students into newly opening fields that he had not had time to investigate, such as Finnish and Celtic studies. According to David Bynum: In an age of literary ethnocentricity, Kittredge was as readily and as genuinely interested in Russian ballads or American Indian folktales as in the plays of Shakespeare ... Kittredge's intellectual hospitality toward "foreign" traditions and his equanimity toward "vulgar" ones appear in retrospect as the most important sources of his influence. For Babbitt, a self-proclaimed classicist, on the other hand, such disciplines as anthropology, folklore, and the medieval scholarship so dear to Kittredge, represented a dilution of the real goal of literary studies and a waste of time. Kittredge's students and colleagues defended him vigorously, however. One former student, Elizabeth Jackson, writes of Kittredge's sheer enthusiasm: "Kittredge taught Shakespeare as though every single human being could go on reading Shakespeare through time and eternity, going from strength to strength and rejoicing as a strong man to join a race." As the decade of the 1920s unfolded, the New Humanists began to seem increasingly irrelevant, and as the Depression of the 1930s hit, the intellectual climate turned decidedly leftward and other forms of criticism emerged, initially from writers outside the academy, some of which, in the coming decades would be incorporated as aspects of the New Criticism. Meanwhile, although there was continued chafing against the supposed antiquarianism of the philological school in some quarters, Kittredge's prestige and influence continued unabated, and the extensive list of language requirements for a Harvard graduate degree in English literature, including Old and Middle English, Old French, and Gothic, stayed in effect until his retirement in 1936, after which these requirements, viewed as onerous, were dropped. With the coming of the Cold War in the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s disagreements between the historical and "literary appreciation" schools in English literature studies were subsumed by the ascendancy of the
New Criticism which favored, like Kittredge, rigorous study of literary text, but sidestepped potential controversies over ideology by ruling out mention of historical context or social questions. In consequence, the concept of
philology itself fell into disrepute and never recovered, even after social engagement once again became respectable and the New Criticism gave way to
Structuralism,
Gender Studies,
postmodernism, and the
New Historicism. Thus, the context of Kittredge's prestige and his place in the history of English literature studies became obscured and forgotten, a situation which in recent years some scholars are attempting to rectify. As Jill Terry Rudy writes: In the process of overthrowing Kittredge's perceived pedantry in order to enshrine New Critical methods of rigorous research and institutional control over graduate training and doctoral degrees (without offering the concomitant grounding in cultural history and linguistic concerns that Kittredge promoted), New Critical literary scholars assured that the term philology itself would be denigrated and then ignored as their newly trained graduate students conquered the vocabulary and intricacies of critical scholarship (Wellek 1953). As suggested previously, the philosophical methods and ideologies that informed the early history of English department organization deserve continued conversation and critique rather than simply being erased or ignored. ==Personal life==