author
Edward Payson Vining
1847–1920
Best known for one of literary history’s boldest Hamlet theories, this American writer mixed restless curiosity with a day job in the railroad world. His books wandered from Shakespeare to early transoceanic contact, making him an unusually wide-ranging figure of the late 19th century.
1 Audiobook
Time in the Play of Hamlet
by Edward Payson Vining
About the author
Edward Payson Vining (1847–1920) was an American writer and railroad executive. When his book The Mystery of Hamlet appeared in 1881, he was working as a general freight traffic manager at the Union Pacific Railroad, and the book became his most memorable literary claim to fame.
He is especially remembered for arguing that Shakespeare’s Hamlet was actually a woman in disguise, a reading unusual enough that it was later translated into German and published in Leipzig in 1883. He also wrote An Inglorious Columbus (1885), a study built around an ambitious theory about the Buddhist monk Hui Shen and early contact with the Americas.
Although he did not graduate from college, Vining later received an honorary A.M. from Yale in 1886 and an LL.D. from William Jewell College in 1908. His work has lasted less because readers agreed with him than because he had a talent for pursuing unusual ideas with real energy and confidence.