Professor Maynard Mack

Maynard Mack, English scholar: born Hillsdale, Michigan 27 October 1909; Instructor in English, Yale University 1936-40, Assistant Professor 1940-45, Associate Professor 1945-48, Professor 1948-65, Sterling Professor 1965-78 (Emeritus); married 1934 Florence Brocklebank (one son, two daughters); died New Haven, Connecticut 17 March 2001.

Maynard Mack, English scholar: born Hillsdale, Michigan 27 October 1909; Instructor in English, Yale University 1936-40, Assistant Professor 1940-45, Associate Professor 1945-48, Professor 1948-65, Sterling Professor 1965-78 (Emeritus); married 1934 Florence Brocklebank (one son, two daughters); died New Haven, Connecticut 17 March 2001.

Maynard Mack, Sterling Professor Emeritus at Yale University, is best known to the world of learning for his studies of Pope and Shakespeare. His purpose in his writings about both these poets is to give them an immediacy of presence, so that they can be responded to outside their position in literary history and heard as men speaking to mankind in the humanistic terms we can all recognise.

In the case of Pope, Mack shifted the emphasis that had placed him as a representative poet of an "Augustan Age", whose general characteristics provided the framework within which he could be discussed. This was a convenient pedagogy for courses in "18th-century studies". It did not, however, give the lover of poetry much insight into the unique quality of Pope's verse. When Mack published his edition of An Essay on Man in 1962 I cannot have been the only reader to discover suddenly that Pope's subject matter and his versification were inseparable and that one could only make sense when put in conjunction with the other. He was not, we discovered, simply rehearsing the philosophic commonplaces of the time but responding to the pressure of these ideas in order to say something uniquely his own.

When Mack was studying the manuscripts of Pope's poems or looking for the marginalia in books from his library his aim was not just to complete the record but to find how the final form of the language in the poems emerged, slowly and tortuously, as the best means to express the complexities and contradictions in his understanding of what he is doing.

Mack was the editor of six of the 12 volumes of The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope (1939-69), including, after the death in 1965 of its general editor, John Butt, the index volume, and the author of a 700-page biography, Alexander Pope (1985).

His lectures on Shakespeare were the high points in the university experience of many Yale students. America seems to be full of people who remember the jokes, the perceptions, the dazzle of the occasion as if they were still there. But it is difficult to do for Shakespeare, as the object of continuous re-appropriation, what Mack achieved for Pope. Particularly in Europe, his humanism, his confidence in what he called "everybody's Shakespeare", seemed too little attuned to a "Theatre of Cruelty" culture that was waiting for Godot or the Revolution. His King Lear in Our Time (1965) was accused of sentimental simplification - to which the only answer is that all critical approaches are simplifications (that is what they are for).

Maynard Mack was born in 1909 in Hillsdale, Michigan, where his father was a college teacher. His family moved shortly thereafter to Oberlin, Ohio, and there he received his school education. He entered Yale as a freshman in 1928, and quickly showed his literary bent, becoming editor of the undergraduate Yale Lit. and the Harkness Hoot, and being named Class Poet. In 1936 he joined the English Faculty in Yale, rose like a star and became the recipient of all the honours Yale could confer on him. He is commemorated at Yale in the Maynard Mack Lectures given on Shakespearean subjects, past lecturers including John Barton, Claire Bloom, Arthur Miller and Edward Albee, and in the Maynard Mack Chair, endowed in 1996.

The quality of humanistic optimism in Maynard Mack's nature was not simply a matter of literary judgement. He had a profound distrust of closed systems, of dogmatism and hierarchy.

In spite of his brilliant success as a lecturer he was very suspicious of teaching by lecture. He thought that the best kind of teaching was that which was most like a conversation among friends, where there is no predestined end-point and where the subject can veer across boundaries or mutate into something completely different.

He sought to loosen the system of requirements in the university curriculum and was instrumental in setting up interdisciplinary courses. He promoted a scheme whereby a student could avoid standard requirements by undertaking a close study of a single topic. He hoped to secure an arrangement by which students of English could expand their interests by having a further year in which they could learn about anthropology, sociology, political science, art history.

Inside the English department he was the leader of a young faculty group who changed the way English literature was taught at Yale and in consequence gave the department a major role in the promotion of the New Criticism. His determination that contemporary criticism and contemporary verse should be made continuously present in the curriculum was finally fulfilled when he secured the appointment to the department of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren.

Mack's commitment to the idea of education as a liberating force did not stop at the gates of the university. He served a term as vicepresident of the New Haven school system. With his colleague Bernard Knox, he set up a series of four-part television programmes in the Humanities designed to be shown in New England high schools. It is reported that the series was seen by 8,500 students in 137 schools across the region. But (as is the way) the grant money was not renewed and the project got no further. For Maynard Mack, however, the loss of a battle was usually a first step to winning a war.