Frederick Gard Fleay

Frederick Gard Fleay (5 September 1831 – 10 March 1909) was an influential and prolific nineteenth-century Shakespeare scholar.

Life

Fleay, the son of a linen draper, graduated from King's College London (1849) and Trinity College, Cambridge (1853), where he received mathematical training that was key to his later achievements.

He was ordained in the Church of England (1856), and for twenty years pursued a career in education, as a teacher and headmaster. (Fleay left the Church in 1884.) He was a founder member of the Aristotelian Society in 1880.

He was an important and active figure in the foundation of the New Shakspere Society in 1873. At the Society's inaugural meeting on Friday 13 March 1874, Edwin Abbott Abbott read Part 1 of Fleay's seminal paper On Metrical Tests as Applied to Dramatic Poetry. Fleay's essay was a crucial early attempt to move away from impressionistic and qualitative approaches to the study of English Renaissance texts, and toward a more quantitative and fact-based approach. Fleay concentrated on rhymed versus unrhymed verse, and regular iambic pentameter lines versus lines with a "feminine ending", an extra unstressed final syllable. While not the first researcher to take a quantitative approach, Fleay produced a more organised result, with tables of metrical characteristics in the verse of Shakespeare and other English Renaissance dramatists. "This labour-intensive method of analysis was peculiarly suited to the scientific and positivistic tenor of the times...."