All Scholars

A.E. Haigh was brilliant student at school and at Oxford, where he won virtually every scholarship and award available to him. He won the Gaitsford Prize for Greek Verse in 1876 and Prose in 1877, the Stanhope Prize in 1878 and the Craven Scholarship in 1879. Following graduation, he devoted his career to teaching at Oxford, stressing precision in both the rendering of language and the use of theatrical context and tradition. His wide reading in English and well as European literature lent a depth to his judgements. His favorite subject for lectures was Greek theatre and he eventually accumulated his lecture notes and research into two learned and highly readable accounts. The Attic Theatre (1889) and The Tragic Drama of the Greeks (1896) demonstrated his characteristically serviceable scholarship, scrupulous care, a deep knowledge of the subject, and an easy style, but little that was new. Typical of the respectful response to his work was that of Mortimer Lamson Earle of Bryn Mawr on Tragic Drama of the Greeks: "He has tried to say not new things, but always true ones; he has read much and intelligently; he writes clearly and sensibly; he is not carried away by new theories, because they are new; and he has covered the wide ground of his subject with tolerable evenness. But a book of this commanding form that contains little that is strikingly novel, or new will, rightly or wrongly, disappoint scholars, glad though they may well be to recommend it to their students." (38) His 1892 edition of Virgil with T.L. Papillon (1841-1926) was widely respected as a school text.