Elizabethan Club
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Elizabethan Club is a literary discussion club at Yale University. Its library contains Elizabethan folios and quartos, sketches and engravings, including a first folio of Shakespeare and first editions of Milton's Paradise Lost, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Francis Bacon's Essayes.
It is housed in an old Federal building, the Leverett Griswold House, built circa 1810 at 459 College Street. The club began during the literary renaissance at the university between 1909 and 1920, and attracted such book collectors as William Lyon Phelps, Chauncy Tinker, and John Berdan. Cole Porter, initially rejected as a member, signified his indignation with the song "The Lizzie", and eventually was admitted. The club, dedicated to conversation, teas, and Elizabethan literature, has a small garden in the rear to facilitate the enjoyments of crumpets, finger sandwiches, and croquet. The club accepts about fifteen members from the sophomore, junior, and senior classes yearly. Dues are $10 for life.
The Elizabethan Club Library was founded in 1911 by a gift of books (and $100,000) from Alexander Smith Cochran, who had graduated in 1896, and has some three hundred volumes of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, including the first four folios of Shakespeare, the Huth Shakespeare quartos, and first or early quartos of all the major dramatists. The books are made available to scholars through the Beinecke Library.
Other famous members have included William F. Buckley, Jr.
[edit] References
- Holden, Reuben A., Yale: A Pictorial History, Yale University Press, New Haven and London. 1967.
- Parks, Stephen, The Elizabethan Club of Yale University and Its Library, New Haven and London, 1986.
- Pinnell, Patrick L., The Campus Guide: Yale University, Princeton University Press, 1999.
