Obituary: Professor L. C. Knights

• Published in: Independent (London, England : 1986)
• Main Author: Boris Ford, Professor Henry Gifford
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: London (UK) Independent Digital News & Media 15.03.1997
• ISSN: 0951-9467

I first met Lionel Knights when I was a sixth-former at Gresham's School in Norfolk. He was visiting his close friend, and co-editor of Scrutiny, Denys Thompson, who taught me English literature. Thompson invited me to join them for a walk over the sands at Wells, and I remember little of their conversation except that Knights managed to cap every one of our remarks with an appropriate quotation from Shakespeare, whose plays he apparently knew by heart. I found him a rather perplexing mixture of the severe and merry; but felt pleased with myself for choosing his recent pamphlet How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? (1933) as my school prize for literature. Knights followed up How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? with his celebrated book, which earned him his PhD, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (1937). His Cambridge colleague the distinguished Elizabethan scholar Leo Salingar has described this as one of the first studies to relate the themes and quality of an author's style to the nature and traditions of his society. After the Jonson book came a stream of essays and books on 17th- century literature, including three volumes of what he typically called "explorations" (Explorations, 1946, Further Explorations, 1965, and Explorations 3, 1976) - in his later writings he often seems to be exploring what lies beneath a writer's skin. But it is revealing that his earliest as well as many of his later essays in Scrutiny were on educational themes, notably his "scrutinies" of modern universities, of training colleges and of examinations. Ironically most of his teaching was carried out at the universities of Manchester, Sheffield and Bristol (in the latter two as Professor), and not at Cambridge where he had originally studied. When he first went as an undergraduate to Cambridge from his home in Grantham, he was apparently entranced by the cultural charm of life in the city. But his eight years at Cambridge as King Edward VII Professor of English Literature from 1965 to 1973 were to prove the least happy of all his teaching career. In a lecture, "Cambridge Criticism: what is it?", he said that the approach of the School of English "was concerned for the quality of life of individuals and therefore for the quality of the civilisation that shaped them and for which they were responsible". But it is doubtful if the faculty as he found it was fully articulating those ideas.