Andrew Scott Cairncross (25 March 1901 – 17 December 1975)^[1] was a Scottish-American scholar of Shakespeare and the English literary renaissance.

Cairncross is best known for his 1936 book The Problem of Hamlet (London: MacMillan), which makes a number of controversial arguments about Hamlet — arguing, for example, that the play was written around 1588–89 (rather than twelve years later, as most scholars insist), and that the so-called Ur-Hamlet, to which frequent allusion occurs starting in 1589, is actually an early draft of Shakespeare's play.^[2]

Cairncross was born in Lesmahagow, Scotland, to Andrew Cairncross and Margaret Matin. He earned his M.A. and D.Litt. (1932) from the University of Glasgow and worked as a schoolteacher and headmaster in his native Lanarkshire until retiring in 1961. He immigrated to the United States in 1963 at the invitation of Hardin–Simmons University, and within a year was a visiting professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. In 1964, he finished a three-volume work on Henry VI, published by Harvard University Press.^[3][4]

He was a visiting professor at Baylor University in the spring of 1974. He died in Bryan, Texas in 1975.^[5]

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