Scribleriana

113 SCRIBLERIANA This issue is dedicated to Simon Varey. As we were going to press, he died on April4,2002. This issue could not have been done without him. He regularly reviewed essays and books carefully; he processed all of the copy— from its arrival to returning it for approvals; he was an extraordinary editor, learned, sensitive , and agile; whatever he turned to was capably done. And, on top of all this, he was wonderful to work with: pleasant, good-natured , fun. To provide better coverage, we welcome Douglas Lane Patey (Smith College) as a contributing editor. The sixth five-year Scriblerian Bibliography and Index, price $15 for individuals and $20 for institutions, will be available on October 1, 2002. Swift (150) and Sterne (113) lead the pack. Pope has 88 entries, Behn 62. But numbers cannot reveal value: one essay —the right one—can be crucial to your essay or book, or to a class. To order, please write to Roy S. Wolper, The Scriblerian, Dept of English, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, or rwolper2@comcast.net. Our thanks to John Freehafer, Kristen Masters , and Peter Tasch for their invaluable help with Volume XXXIV, Nos. 1 (Autumn 2001) and 2 (Spring 2002). We are especially indebted to Melvyn New for his caring and help—with this issue as well as ones before it. MAYNARD MACK Maynard Mack died on March 17, 2001, at the age of 90. As a scholar, he dominated two distinct fields in English Literature, Shakespeare and the eighteenth century, for at least forty years. He was Chairman of the Yale Department of English, president of the Modern Language Association, consultant to the BBC series of Shakespeare plays on film, and founding director of the National Humanities Center. Among his many publications, those for which eighteenth-century scholars are most grateful include three major works on Pope: a philosophically precise and deeply learned introduction to the Twickenham edition of An Essay on Man; a richly illustrated study of the poet’s self-fashioning, The Garden and the City; and a full-scale biography, Alexander Pope: A Life. Some of his short essays , such as ‘‘The World of Hamlet’’ and ‘‘The Muse of Satire,’’ have had more influence on how we think about literature than most critical books. I took Professor Mack’s graduate seminar on Shakespearein 1972, thelast yearhetaught at Yale. On the first day, he asked us whether we had come ‘‘to see the old fox run to earth at last’’—a remark betraying his awareness that his departure from the classroom distinctly marked the end of an era at Yale and in literary studies. Most of the students around the table were deeply engaged in what was to become literary theory; Mack’s assignments —memorizing Shakespeareanspeeches and reciting them with passion, constructing a theater history and prompt book for an ideal production of a play, and teaching a makebelieve undergraduate class—frustrated those eager to display their familiarity with Foucault . Yet this was the only course I took in graduate school that addressed the question of how we might teach literature to undergraduates , and the only course that treated the primary literature as something alive for readers beyond the academy. Ten years later, when chosen to give the annual ‘‘Life of Learning’’ lecture at the meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies, Mack explained the principles upon which such teaching was founded: Never forget that in your classroom there 114 will always be at least one student altogether your superior both in mind and in heart. Never forget, either, that there is, or should be, in that classroom a second teacher far more important than you are: a great text. Try not to get in the way of that traffic. . . . Be careful not to say anything so egregiously silly as that a great artist—or a great historian or a great philosopher or any other creator of a great text—endured all that toil, and often all that suffering, to make a work that refers to nothing but itself, that is about itself and not about the follies, grandeurs, and miseries of thehumanlot. Be even more careful not to show off—either your...