Scholar;
Born October 7, 1920;
Died April 10, 2008.
GK Hunter, who has died aged 87 after a long illness, was the Emily Sanford Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University and one of the world's leading authorities on Shakespeare and his age.
Hunter was born in Glasgow in 1920 and received his undergraduate education at Glasgow University, where he acquired the deep knowledge of the ancient classics that underpinned his life- long expertise in the literature of renaissance Europe. He obtained a DPhil at Oxford in 1950.
During the Second World War, Hunter served in the Royal Navy's convoy protection zone off northern Russia, and then in British naval intelligence in Sri Lanka, operating throughout the Pacific and learning (among other languages) Russian and Japanese. He then taught English literature at the universities of Hull, Reading and Liverpool, before becoming the founding professor of English at Warwick University in 1964.
Warwick was one of seven "new universities" founded in the UK in the 1960s with a mission of major curricular and pedagogic innovation.
Hunter devised a curriculum for English studies that was an important break from the Anglo-centric model ("From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf"), which was standard in most universities at the time.
He insisted that English be studied in the context of world literature, together with at least one literature in a language other than English (originally Latin, Italian, French or German). To achieve his hugely ambitious vision, he recruited a brilliant team of rising specialists, including Germaine Greer.
One of his graduate students at Warwick, Catherine Belsey, who herself became an eminent Shakespearean, wrote: "There was a sense that something important was going on. A new department was being built up from first principles, and what it did mattered. There was no complacency, no resting on old laurels, no easy imitation of existing systems."
At Warwick, Hunter also served as a pro-vice-chancellor, a senior administrative role. In 1974, he became, with Claude Rawson, an editor of the Modern Language Review, one of the oldest journals of literary scholarship, and its supplement, the Yearbook of English Studies.
Hunter moved to the US and Yale in 1976, becoming an honorary professor at Warwick for the rest of his life. He was named the Emily Sanford Professor at Yale in 1987 and served as chair of Yale's interdisciplinary graduate programme in Renaissance studies from 1985 to 1991. He retired from Yale in 1991, and he and his wife, Shelagh, moved from New Haven to Maine in 2007.
Hunter's many books and articles include John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier (1962), a work that laid foundations for later twentieth-century studies of courtliness and drama; a critical study of Milton's Paradise Lost (1980); and numerous scholarly editions of plays by Lyly, Marston and Shakespeare. His Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition (1978) brought together such important essays on the cultural dimensions of Elizabethan drama as Elizabethans and Foreigners and Othello and Colour Prejudice.
Hunter's English Drama 1586-1642 (1997) brought to completion the Oxford History of English Literature, a series that began in 1935 and that included volumes written by CS Lewis and JIM Stewart.
Among other honours, he was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978, and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy in 1988.
In the words of Claude Rawson, the Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale: "George Hunter was a beloved teacher and friend to generations of scholars, a person of great wisdom and charm, with a wry, acerbic wit that in no way conflicted with a generous and compassionate nature."
He is survived by his wife Shelagh, a distinguished scholar of nineteenth-century literature, children Mary, Andrew and Ruth, and seven grandchildren.
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