Helen Archibald Clarke and Charlotte Endymion Porter

Helen Archibald Clarke and Charlotte Endymion Porter were American writers, editors, and literary critics whose joint and individual publications, focused largely on William Shakespeare and the poet Robert Browning, both reflected and shaped the tastes of the popular literary societies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Clarke was born into a deeply musical family, and music early became an abiding love. Her father, Hugh A. Clarke, was professor of music at the University of Pennsylvania from 1875, and she attended that institution as a special student for two years, before women were formally admitted to the school, receiving a certificate in music in 1883. Helen Charlotte Porter, who later dropped her first name and adopted the middle name Endymion, graduated from Wells College, Aurora, New York, in 1875, studied for a time at the Sorbonne in Paris, and in 1883 became editor of Shakespeariana, a journal published in Philadelphia by the Shakespeare Society of New York. The two women met when Clarke’s article on music in Shakespeare was accepted for Shakespeariana by Porter; a second mutual interest, in Browning, cemented their friendship. In 1887 Porter resigned from Shakespeariana and a short time later became editor of the Ethical Record.

In 1889 Clarke and Porter launched a new monthly, Poet Lore, “devoted to Shakespeare, Browning, and the Comparative Study of Literature.” The magazine found an immediate and growing audience among the proliferating literary clubs and societies across the nation, most if not all of them sharing the Victorian literary standards and interests of the editors. In 1891 they moved Poet Lore to Boston when a publisher there offered them free office space in exchange for three pages of advertising per issue. In 1896 the magazine became a quarterly. Much of the critical and commentary material published in the magazine was written by the editors themselves, singly or in collaboration. Its contents faithfully followed the original dedication, leaning heavily on Shakespeare and Browning studies. Nevertheless, over the years Poet Lore also introduced to a wide American audience the works (usually translated by the editors) of Henrik Ibsen, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, August Strindberg, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Selma Lagerlöf, Paul Bourget, Gerhart Hauptmann, Maxim Gorky, Maurice Maeterlinck, Arthur Schnitzler, Rabindranath Tagore, and other moderns. Little American writing found its way into Poet Lore.

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Clarke and Porter also published a two-volume edition of Browning’s poems in 1896; a volume of Clever Tales (1897), a collection of short stories they had translated; an edition of Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1898); a 12-volume complete edition of Browning’s works in 1898; Browning Study Programmes (1900); a six-volume edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s works in 1900; and the 12-volume “Pembroke” edition of Shakespeare in 1912. Clarke’s dramatization of Robert Browning’s Pippa Passes was staged in Boston in 1899, and Porter’s version of his Return of the Druses was done in 1902.

In 1903 they sold Poet Lore, and, although they continued for many years as editors of the magazine, they gave increasing time to other projects. Porter spent several years preparing a 40-volume First Folio Edition of Shakespeare (1903–13) and in 1919 published Lips of Music, a collection of verse. Clarke, who in 1892 had published a book of songs entitled Apparitions, also wrote Browning’s Italy (1907), Browning’s England (1908), A Child’s Guide to Mythology (1908), Longfellow’s Country (1909), Hawthorne’s Country (1910), The Poets’ New England (1911), and Browning and His Century (1912), along with a number of musical cantatas and operettas for children. Both women were active in a number of organizations, including the Boston Browning Society, the American Music Society (which they founded), and the American Drama Society (later the Drama League of America). After Clarke’s death Porter lived mainly at their former summer home on Isle au Haut in Penobscot Bay, Maine.