English man of letters, born in London on the 5th of December 1859. He was educated at the City of London school, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated in modern history in 1882. In the next year he became assistant-editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. In 1890 he was made joint-editor, and on the retirement of Sir Leslie Stephen in 1891 succeeded him as editor. He was himself a voluminous contributor to the work, writing some 800 articles, mainly on Elizabethan authors or statesmen. While he was still at Balliol he wrote two articles on Shakespearian questions, which were printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine, and in 1884 he published a book on Stratford-on-Avon. His article on Shakespeare in the fifty-first volume (1897) of the Dictionary of National Biography formed the basis of his Life of William Shakespeare (1898), which reached its fifth edition in 1905. Mr. Lee edited in 1902 the Oxford facsimile edition of the first folio of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, followed in 1902 and 1904 by supplementary volumes giving details of extant copies, and in 1906 by a complete edition of Shakespeare’s Works. Besides editions of English classics his works include a Life of Queen Victoria (1902), Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century (1904), based on his Lowell Institute lectures at Boston, MA, in 1903, and Shakespeare and the Modern Stage (1906). He was knighted in 1911. His lectures on The French Renaissance in England and Great Englishmen of the 16th Century were published in 1910; and his later works include Principles of Biography (1911) and Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance (1915). He became president of the English Association in 1917 and dean of Arts in the university of London in 1918.
