William Witherle Lawrence

In his review of Shakespeare’s Problem Plays, a New York Times critic wrote that “the sanity of Professor Lawrence’s cool scholarship is refreshment to the soul.” Scholar he was, first and always, penetrating deep into medieval literature as well as the plays of Shakespeare, and “cool” in the sense that he never let his enthusiasms carry him into the realm of conjecture or into praise to the detriment of appraisal. His aim above everything—like the aim of every true artist—was clarity. He had as great a horror of vagueness and obscurity as he had of error.

“In the precision of his mind,” wrote one close friend, “and in the granite of his character, William Witherle Lawrence was a true son of his native state of Maine.” Born in Bangor, May 29, 1876, he spent the first twenty-two years of his life in Maine, graduating from Bowdoin in 1898. When he left college, he was uncertain whether his future career would lie in the direction of painting or scholarship. He seemed to have a flair for both; he was gifted, too, in music. But he decided on the study and teaching of language and literature and spent a year in Germany—then thought to be the ideal center of learning for Anglo-Saxon youth. For three years he taught German at Harvard and, in 1903, accepted a professorship in English at the University of Kansas. He then went to Columbia and stayed there for thirty years until, in 1936, he retired.

His writings in this period included The Haunted Mare in Beowulf, Medieval Story, Beowulf and the Epic Tradition, Chaucer and Canterbury Tales, and shortly before his retirement, Shakespeare’s Problem Plays.

After his retirement, he was an active trustee of Bowdoin College. He was long a trustee of the American Scandinavian Foundation and was awarded the Swedish Royal Order of Vasa, First Class. He was a charter member of the Medieval Academy of America.

For many years, he was one of a group organized by Professor William T. Brewster which sat for Tuesday lunch in the southwest corner of the Century’s dining room. In the group were Roberts Walker, Gerard Fountain, Charles Hazen, and others; it was often enlivened by the explosive erudition of Leonard Bacon.

It is sad to have these scholars of the old school go. Too few of them are left in a world which so needs their serenity and sense of order.

Roger Burlingame
1959 Century Association Yearbook