author
John William Draper
1893–1976
A Shakespeare scholar with a sharp ear for language and form, he spent his career exploring how drama, poetry, and literary history speak to their audiences. His books range from studies of Hamlet and Shakespeare's comic art to broader work on Romanticism and the English funeral elegy.
1 Audiobook
Poems
by John William Draper
About the author
Born in 1893 and deceased in 1976, John W. Draper was an American literary scholar remembered especially for his work on Shakespeare and English literature. Records identify him as a professor of English at West Virginia University, and library catalogs show a long scholarly career devoted to criticism, literary history, and close reading.
His published books include The Hamlet of Shakespeare's Audience (1938), The Tempo-Patterns of Shakespeare's Plays (1957), and The Funeral Elegy and the Rise of English Romanticism (1967). Taken together, they show a critic deeply interested in how poems and plays are shaped, heard, and received.
Although he shares a name with the much earlier nineteenth-century scientist John William Draper, this John W. Draper belonged to a different field entirely. His legacy is that of a careful teacher and scholar whose work helped generations of readers think more closely about Shakespeare, Romanticism, and the life of literary form.