Arthur Henry Bullen

Who was Arthur Henry Bullen?

Arthur Henry Bullen, often known as A. H. Bullen, was an English editor and publisher, a specialist in 16th and 17th century literature, and founder of the Shakespeare Head Press, which for its first decades was a publisher of fine editions in the tradition of the Kelmscott Press.

His father George Bullen was librarian at the British Museum. A. H. Bullen's interest in Elizabethan dramatists and poets started at the City of London School, before he went to Worcester College, Oxford to study classics. His publishing career began with a scholarly edition of the Works of John Day in 1881 and continued with series of English Dramatists and a seven-volume set of Old English Plays, some of which he had discovered in manuscript and published for the first time. He was also the first person to publish some early lyric poems. Bullen wrote more than 150 articles for the Dictionary of National Biography, lectured on Elizabethan dramatists at Oxford University and taught at Toynbee Hall.

In 1891 he and H. W. Lawrence went into partnership as the publishers Lawrence & Bullen. This lasted until 1900 when Bullen moved on to publish as A. H. Bullen. With Frank Sidgwick as partner, he then formed the Shakespeare Head Press and published a collected Shakespeare and collected Yeats from their base in Stratford-on-Avon. Bullen was admired by literary figures like Swinburne and was well known in his time for his enthusiastic scholarship and for rediscovering forgotten works of literature, like those of Thomas Campion. Because he modernised as he published, his texts are not used as standard editions by scholars today. After Bullen's death the press was continued by a partnership including Basil Blackwell, the Oxford bookseller. It continues today as an imprint of Wiley-Blackwell, now printing on normal commercial presses. It is not to be confused with an Australian imprint of the same name, publishing mostly children's books, sold in the 1970s by Kerry Packer's group to the American Western Publishing Company and now part of Random House.