https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2019/8/14/shakespeare-scholar-david-bevington-beloved-studen/
Maybe @marlowe1 (and other U of C grad of course) can share his experience of sitting in Professor Bevington’s class.
He arrived as a visiting Prof from the University of Virginia during my last year. He had a big reputation even then. I remember him as a smiling affable gentleman of slight build and somewhat patrician bearing who occasionally checked out materials from me when I was clerking at the reference desk in the Modern Language Reading Room of Harper Library. The memorials all show that he was that very same sort of pleasant and comfortable fellow in his life as a teacher and no doubt also even as a scholar of towering accomplishment. I regret never having had a course from him.
Something that neither that Maroon piece nor any other obit mentioned is that his mother, Helen Bevington, a writer of fiction and poetry and a Prof at Duke (as was David’s father), was a graduate of the College in the 1920’s. I have to think that his interest in joining the Chicago faculty and his very warm and sympathetic relations with students showed the influence of his mother - not to mention his choice of a scholarly career and a field of studies within it. Perhaps too that easiness in his skin revealed in the Maroon obit could only come from having imbibed virtually with his mother’s milk an ethos of sociable academic studiouness. It was in effect the family business. I note that his mother returned at some point to the city of Chicago and that she died there after a long life. It must have been very satisfying to her not only to see her son achieve eminence but to do it at the place she had begun her own ascent into the intellectual life. Perhaps he was teaching courses in classrooms where she once took such courses. I chatted briefly with Professor Bevington at an alumni event. I wish I had thought to ask him about that.
One of the Bard’s most acute expositors has died. I particularly recommend his commentary and notes on “Troilus and Cressida” in the New Arden (3rd edition) of Shakespeare. Incidentally one of the general editors of that edition, David Scott Kastan, who became a formidable scholar in his own right, was an early student of Bevington’s and a classmate of mine. I talked Kastan into taking Norman Maclean’s course on Wordsworth. Maclean’s charms did not take with Kastan, but Bevington’s did. The world lost a Wordsworthian and gained a Shakespearian.
RIP David Bevington. Long live the Bard!