Dr. Ashley Horace Thorndike, PhD

Dr. Ashley Horace Thorndike

Thorndike was an American educator and expert on the works of William Shakespeare. He was the son of a clergyman Rev. Edward Roberts Thorndike, and the brother of Lynn Thorndike, an American historian of medieval science and alchemy, and Edward Lee Thorndike known for being the father of modern educational psychology.

He taught at Columbia University and wrote several notable textbooks, including Facts about Shakespeare (as co-author), Tragedy, and English Comedy. He died of a heart attack in Manhattan as he was walking home from a club dinner and later died in a taxicab. He was the brother of the medieval historian Lynn Thorndike. He introduced the term "revenge tragedy" in 1900 to label a class of plays written in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras.

In 1927 he delivered the British Academy's Shakespeare Lecture.

Selected Publications:

• The Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakespere (1901)
• The Elements of Shakespeare and Composition (1905)
• Tragedy (1908) with William Allan Neilson: The Facts about Shakespeare (1913); 1923 reprint
• Shakespeare's Theatre (1916)
• Literature in a Changing World (1920)
• English Comedy (1929); 1965 edition