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The Westfälische Wilhelms-University of Münster is home to one of the largest English Departments in Germany. This lively department has a diverse student body and an active research community. Our teaching and research remit is broad, covering literary and cultural studies, book studies, linguistics and didactics. We offer a range of BA and MA programmes as well as PhDs.
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In Memoriam Marvin Spevack (1927-2013)
The English Department joins Shakespeareans, scholars, and students around the world in mourning the death of Professor Dr. Marvin Spevack, who passed away on 6 February 2013 in his home in Münster at the age of 85. He is survived by his wife Dr. Helga Spevack-Husmann. Professor Spevack was scholarly productive until his death: his latest book, A Shakespearean Constellation, is forthcoming this year and was already in the press when he died.
Marvin Spevack was born in New York. After his undergraduate studies at the City College New York and Harvard University he received his PhD from Harvard in 1953 with a doctoral dissertation on “The Dramatic Function of Shakespeare’s Puns”. Professor Spevack was a Fulbright Lecturer in Münster and Munich (1961-63), before he became Chair of English Philology at the English Department in 1964. In addition to serving in multiple official functions on the department-level as well as on the university-level, he was, from 1974 until his retirement in 1989, also one of the directors of the “Institutum Erasmianum” (now “Institut für Buchwissenschaft und Textforschung”).
When Professor Spevack came to Münster, the project which made him internationally known was already on his mind: his pioneering computerized concordance to Shakespeare founded his reputation as one of the first (if not the first) scholar ever to utilize the computer for research in the humanities. Spevack’s nine-volume Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare (Hildesheim and New York, 1968-80) and soon after the one-volume Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA, 1973) not only broke new ground for other computerized research in non-numerical disciplines but has also become, since then, the basis and model for electronic Shakespeare scholarship world-wide. Moreover, his Shakespeare Thesaurus (Hildesheim and New York, 1993) is the first in a row of similar attempts at classifying Shakespeare’s vocabulary.
It seems natural that a philologist and man of letters like Marvin Spevack would also become an editor. Among the Shakespeare plays he edited, the facsimiles of Shakespeare: The Second, Third and Fourth Folios (Cambridge, 1985), the New Variorum Edition of Antony and Cleopatra (New York, 1990), and the New Cambridge Edition of Julius Caesar (Cambridge, 1988; 2nd ed. 2004) need to be singled out.
Before and after his retirement, Professor Spevack was a versatile, enthusiastic, and productive scholar. In addition to his substantial contributions to Shakespearean scholarship, his enormous output of publications in other fields testifies to his range of interests as well as to his eloquence and beautiful prose. Among his numerous articles and books are, for example, studies on the Beat Generation or on Tennessee Williams; editions of theatre texts as far apart from each other as Lord Byron’s play Werner or a series of Renaissance Latin Drama in English (13 plays associated with Oxford, 19 plays associated with Cambridge); pieces about ongoing changes in the secondary education systems as well as about communication and new media, such as “English, Literature in English, and Globalization” (2001), “Cyberethnicity” (1996) or “Shakespeare@computer.horizons” (2002); and items on dictionaries and book or library studies, such as “The Persistence of Shakespeare in Modern Dictionaries” (1988), “The ‘World’ of the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary” (1990) or “The Impact of the British Museum Library” (2006) and “The Disraeli Library at Hughenden Manor” (2010).
In the course of his professional career, Marvin Spevack received not only numerous invitations to teach at prestigious institutions but also several awards and fellowships. Thus, he was Senior Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library (1970 and 1998); Guggenheim Fellow (1973-74); Honorary Research Fellow at University College, London (1980-81 und 1995); Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College Cambridge (1984); Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Edinburgh University (1991); Andrew Mellon Foundation Fellow of The Huntington Library (1992); Fellow at the Centre for the Book of The British Library (1994-95).
Although Marvin Spevack’s research focus has always been English Studies and especially Shakespeare, he understood his venia legendi for “English Philology” to include also such areas as American Studies, Book Studies and Lingustics. Therefore, he was a true “generalist” who taught also American Literature or aspects of historical linguistics and lexicography. Marvin Spevack was a dedicated, charismatic, and inspiring teacher who was deeply humane and outgoing; his openness for unorthodox topics—always based, however, on serious and sound research—was famous and his great sense of humor proverbial. He had the admirable ability to convey complicated matters in an understandable and accessible style. On the occasion of his sixtieth birthday he was honored by colleagues, friends and students with a festschrift: Shakespeare–Text, Language, Criticism: Essays in Honor of Marvin Spevack, ed. Bernhard Fabian and Kurt Tetzeli von Rosador (Hildesheim, 1988).
Since the 1990s, Professor Spevack has turned to literary figures of the nineteenth century and written books like James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps: A Classified Bibliography (Hildesheim, 1997), James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps: The Life and Works of the Shakespearean Scholar and Bookman (New Castle, Delaware, 2001), Isaac D’Israeli on Books: Pre-Victorian Essays on the History of Literature (London, 2004), Curiosities Revisited: The Works of Isaac D’Israeli (Hildesheim, 2007), Sidney Lee: Biographer, Shakespearean, Comparatist, Educator (Hildesheim, 2009), and The Works of Francis Turner Palgrave: A Descriptive Survey (Münster, 2012). He also selected and edited A Victorian Chronicle: The Diary of Henrietta Pillipps (1999). Marvin Spevack’s last book combines his two foremost interests—Shakespeare and the Victorians—in A Shakespearean Constellation: J. O. Halliwell-Pillipps and Friends (forthcoming 2013).
Professor Dr. Marvin Spevack will be greatly missed and remembered for his brilliant teaching and scholarship as well as for his humanity and generosity.
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