Oliphant, Elizabethan scholar, journalist and playwright, was the son of English-born Felix Edwin Oliphant and his wife Mary Bullers, nee Frost. He was.educated at Scotch College and the University of Melbourne, but did not graduate. Oliphant became an assistant librarian at the Melbourne Public Library in 1884 and in December 1888 resigned and went to Europe. He wrote a novel, The Mesmerist (1890), essays on Beaumont and Fletcher and developed his knowledge of European music. Oliphant returned to Australia in 1892, and after a stint as editor of the Korumburra Times in Victoria and the daily Mt. Lyell Standard in Tasmania he became associate-editor of the Australian Mining Standard (1903-1906) and its editor-in-chief (1911-1918). In between these appointments he was editor of the Money Market Review in London. Oliphant's Germany and Good Faith : a study of the
history of the Prussian royal family (1914) positioned him to be a leading anti-German propagandist during World War I. He went on to become leader-writer for the Melbourne Herald after 1918.
Oliphant was president of the Melbourne Shakespeare Society from 1919 to 1921 and wrote plays himself. In 1925 he went to America, was appointed a lecturer at Stanford University, California, and subsequently lectured on his own special department at other leading universities in the United States. His most important work, The Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, an Attempt to
Determine Their Respective Shares and the Shares of Others (1927) was published by the Yale University Press. He also produced an edition of forty-five plays, Shakespeare and His Fellow Dramatists (1929) and Elizabethan Dramatists Other Than Shakespeare (1931). He had returned to Melbourne by 1932 and did some public lecturing and broadcasting. Oliphant engaged in regular readings of short stories on Australian Broadcasting Commission radio. In 1932 he was also appointed Sidney Myer lecturer in Elizabethan literature at the University of Melbourne, and held this position until his death.
Apart from poetry, Oliphant left plays and short stories in manuscript. Bradley (1988): comments: 'Of his several plays remaining in manuscript, two, "The Taint" (1915) and "The Superior Race" (1916), heavily moral social-problem melodramas, were produced by Gregan McMahon (q.v.) at the Playhouse. His defence of the latter play against Melbourne prudery in the Bulletin probably missed the point of the critics' reserved reception.' Miller (1940): 841 observed that 'The soundness of Oliphant's researches gave him high standing as an authority on Elizabethan textual criticism.'
(Source: David Bradley, 'Oliphant, Ernest Henry Clark (1862 - 1936)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 11, MUP, 1988, p. 79; Miller, E. Morris, 'Ernest Henry Clark Oliphant (V.)', Australian Literature from Its Beginnings to 1935 (1940): 841).
