Oxford, Cambridge, Berkeley -and Burton-upon -Trent

Oxford, Cambridge, Berkeley – and Burton-upon -Trent? Hugh Macrae Richmond “Location as Destiny” is a phrase that came to my mind after I composed a narrative of my relations with Emmanuel College at the University of Cambridge over seventy years. I discovered how it determined my career at several key points: my first class in the English Tripos final exams; my Milton documentary and scholarship, our funding of a Humanities graduate endowment, and my overall intellectual conditioning. It occurred to me to duplicate a record of any similar effects of my subsequent doctorate at Wadham College, Oxford. However, the outcome has proved quite different, despite shared derivations from the culture of Burton-upon-Trent Grammar School, which had provided both colleges with recruits, who were conditioned by service as its head prefects, like myself. I have thus come to realize that my career depends ultimately on Wulfric, a Mercian warlord who, no doubt driven by a bad conscience over massacred Danes at nearby Tutbury, founded a Benedictine monastery at Burton around the year 1000. The bridge at Burton (mentioned by Shakespeare’s Hotspur) marks the Danes’ highest navigable point of the River Trent, and Burton turns out to have two other inheritances surviving into the twenty-first century: the distinctive beer produced by its gypsum-soaked water and the monastery school refounded around 1520. I studied there for ten years, so that in a sense as a Midlander I am by this inheritance a Mercian—the kingdom which evolved into our modern England. This deep-rooted cultural background gave me sympathetic insight into the many similar locations afforded by my military service: in Wales, Cornwall, Cheshire, Hampshire, Lincolnshire Yorkshire, etc. However, in another sense my context is quite different, almost alien, because on my mother’s side I derive from the tiny village of Melvaig in Wester Ross, also originally Danish. My grandfather was a crofter, and our summers were spent at the home of my mother’s sister, wife of a crofter, He built his own home, though inaccessible to electricity and running water—seemingly barbarians, as my mother was often treated in England. Yet as a qualified teacher she usually replied that Scotland had free universal education while most of England was still illiterate. Indeed, post-Roman culture seeped into England at first from Ireland; the Christianization of the British Isles began via islands in the Scottish Hebrides like Iona. When my parents retired to Wester Ross and my father fell ill, as an Anglican, he was visited by the Episcopal Bishop of the Iles, who turned out to be a native of a tiny island with a school of twenty or so. When I expressed surprise at his origins, he claimed his school had produced an ambassador to Australia and a member of Parliament as well l as his bishopric. I was thus something of an aberration in Anglo-Saxon Burton. Moreover, by accident, when my school in Burton sent one of the first student groups to France after World War II, I was ill. When the French Director of education asked for a late recruit, I was the only candidate left—and I began a life-long French acculturation, which has governed much of my scholarship. I spent many of my summers in France, culminating in a year in Lyon as an Assistant d’anglais in the Lycée du Park’s dormitory school sited spectacularly on the River Saone. Later, needing proficiency in a second foreign language for my B.A., I chose Italian as a resource for my Renaissance specialization in the Cambridge English Tripos. I took a diploma in advanced Italian from the University of Florence: I later returned to that city for a productive research leave. So, I never quite matched authentic English stolidity, combining Scottish moral rigor with hints of French intellectual sophistication, and even Italian “sprezzatura.” This provocative blend earned me the reputation of a maverick in the American academic world that was both useful and yet costly. I stood out and clashed with the norms, even in so multicultural an environment as the University of California at Berkeley, where I was marginalized for most of my career, despite high visibility. The range of my backgrounds secured me many grants, leading to eighteen books, hundreds of essays and reviews, forty drama productions, and creation of both a systemwide and departmental Shakespeare research unit. To this multi-cultural context my stay at Wadham provided reinforcement for an existing pattern, since my thesis supervisor was J. B. Leishman, who covered a remarkable range of cultures: a translator of Horace—and Rilke, which inspired me to spend a summer term from Wadham at the University of Munich. Later I was invited as a Distinguished lecturer to Karls-Franzen, University (Graz, Austria) as a Distinguished Lecturer, and I gave similar presentation to universities in Bayreuth, Bamberg, Vienna, Prague, Munich, and Moscow. Leishman was also an expert on Renaissance verse, producing standard references on Shakespeare, Donne, and Marvell. My thesis covered the origins of English Renaissance verse, tracing themes through numerous languages from classical Greece and Rome onwards. Indeed, critics of my scholarship complain that it necessarily defies summation and accuracy by covering such vast fields to the indignation of specialists. The international status of Oxford University itself had a marked impact on me. In addition to Rhodes scholarships, it also attracted a cosmopolitan clientele, among whom in my first year was a graduate of Louisiana State University who had earned a Fulbright fellowship to the same English graduate program I was in. Her ancestral roots in France included Lyon, where I had just spent my year as Assistant d’anglais. These influences combined to stress the emphasis in my thesis on 16th century French poetry by authors such as Marot and Ronsard, which in turn meant that our whole family spent many periods in France happily researching cultural backgrounds in Paris, the Loire Valley, and the Midi. I also spent much research time writing my book on landscape. During my family’s later whole year when I was rejoined to Wadham, I subsequently largely drafted Puritans and Libertines: Anglo-French Literary Relations in the Reformation. My fluency in French also meant that I had the resources for talking to my wife’s grandmother in the archaic French which I encountered in the Massif Central on my adventures from Lyon. However, to find two academic jobs we needed to find a metropolitan area with diverse academic institutions, which turned out to our surprise to be the San Francisco Bay Area. My wife joined HolyNames, a liberal arts college led by an order of French nuns, founded in Quebec. There she was Professor of English, Chair, and Dean of Academic Affairs. Several of her books about medieval literature also drew on French heritage. So, in an improbable way my French studies at Burton Grammar School coordinated with my French requirement at Cambridge, my new connections with Louisiana, my thesis at Wadham, and my publications at U. C. Berkeley. I continued these Renaissance / Reformation preoccupations in the English Department at U.C. Berkeley, but the pivot of both our careers was Oxford University whose staff openly favored our conjunction and facilitated many aspects of our future, particularly the Oxford Professor of French Ian McFarlarne, then fellow of Wadham. Our daughters also gained from travelling everywhere with us and living in many foreign countries, so that their expertise in languages seemed essential to them. Returning to Oxford for an M.Litt. our elder daughter now has a working knowledge of ten languages and headed the Comparative Literature Department at the University of Texas at Austin for twenty-one years. Our younger daughter pursued French provincial culture and heads a program on international design at Oxford University. Our close family, including their husbands, hold degrees from such institutions as Oxford (3), Cambridge (1), Columbia (2), Bryn Mawr / Haverford (2), Harvard (2), London (Courtauld, 4), Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge (2), University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1), U.C. Berkeley (2). This range gives a distinctive international note to all our research and teaching, above all favored by our family’s frequent and extensive stays in Oxford under the aegis of Wadham. I have recently concluded that the Humanities have suffered precisely because of the technicalities of locally specialized scholarship which appeals only to a narrow audience, while the coverage of major literature and culture invites a sense of broader discoveries about human nature. This is why my books concentrate on themes such as Shakespeare’s concern about defining viable sexual relations, or discoveries such as Petrarch invited by his seclusion in nature, or the overthrow of excessively dominant critical authorities such as Foucault. Such an appeal may account for the success of our website, Shakespeare Staging, which has gained fifteen million page visits. It repositions English Renaissance drama in the contemporary context of Spanish Golden Age theatre, to which it offers surprising affinities and illuminating contrasts, explored in our documentary Shakespeare and the Spanish Connection. These topics are also detailed in my recent book: Shakespeare’s Tragedies Reviewed, which places them in the broadest European context from Euripides onward. The cosmopolitan influence of Oxford still saturates our family’s whole experience with influences such as that of France, in particular. While we have had many exhilarating experiences elsewhere, my wife and I have both always recalled our time in Oxford as the happiest and most determinant of our places of study. 1