STAUNTON, Howard (1810-1874), Shakespearean scholar and writer on chess, was born about 1810. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, but left the university without taking a degree and settled in London, devoting much of his attention to the study of the English dramatists of the Elizabethan age. In conjunction with this he also took a great interest in the stage, and as an amateur once played Lorenzo to the Shylock of Edmund Kean. Between 1857 and 1860 he edited in monthly parts an edition of Shakespeare published by Routledge, which has been several times reissued, and must be ranked as superior, as regards both text and notes, to any previously published. His skill as a Shakespearean commentator, combining in a remarkable degree the acuteness and caution which qualified him to excel in chess, and disciplined to rare perfection by a thorough mastery of the literature of the period, is still more strikingly shown in his papers in the Athenaeum on “Unsuspected Corruptions of Shakespeare’s Text,” commenced in October 1872. These formed part of the materials intended to be made use of in an improved edition of Shakespeare’s works which he proposed to prepare, but which for a variety of reasons was never published. In 1864 he published a facsimile of the Shakespeare folio of 1623, and a finely illustrated work entitled Memorials of Shakespeare. He was also the author of the Great Schools of England,—an Account of the Foundation, Endowments, and Discipline of the Chief Seminaries of Learning in England, 1865. An account of his career as a chess-player, and a notice of his chief publications on the game, will be found under the heading Chess (vol. v. pp. 601, 603). He died in London 22d June 1874.