Tributes paid to Shakespeare scholar Professor Russ McDonald

Tributes have flooded in for Goldsmiths academic and worldwide Shakespearean authority Professor Russ McDonald after his sudden death following a stroke.

Professor McDonald has been remembered by family, friends and colleagues as a brilliant scholar whose sense of humour was as deep as his knowledge of the Bard.

A celebration of Prof McDonald's life is to be held in the Beveridge Hall at Senate House in central London at 3pm on Saturday 30 July 2016. Those wishing to attend should email Marian Perez-Velazquez in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. 

Warden Patrick Loughrey said: "Russ was a brilliant academic and a brilliant man.

"He brought world-leading scholarship to Goldsmiths which he shared so wonderfully with students and colleagues. Russ was generous with his time, knowledge and humour. He was a star.

"His appetite for life was also astonishing. He swallowed up every morsel of culture which London could offer him – his diary was filled by concerts, recitals and performances most nights of the week.

"Our thoughts go out to Gail, his wife, as well as everyone else in the Goldsmiths community who was lucky enough to have met Russ."

Professor Lucia Boldrini, head of the Department of English and Comparative Literature in which Prof McDonald spent a decade surrounded by friends, has collected memories of the award-winning, opera-loving renaissance man who mixed a mean Martini and was an inspiration to students and colleagues alike. These are shared below. 

If you feel you would like to add to the tributes please post your thoughts at the bottom of this page.

Russ was one of the great Shakespearean scholars. In one of the many highlights of his career, he was elected President of the Shakespeare Association of America in 2010-11.

As his close colleague and friend Dr Charlotte Scott remembers: "When he gave his speech at the opening ceremony, in front of every Shakespeare scholar in the west, he pulled a scrumpled piece of paper out of his jacket and said he found it stuffed into the wall at the Shakespeare Institute, whereupon he read the contents of the paper which were a list of scurrilous insights into the lives and loves of Shakespeareans. For Russ, life and art were always in conversation with each other and he saw the best in both.

Charlotte adds: "He hosted Sir Stanley Wells at Goldsmiths, whom Russ deeply admired. When he introduced Stanley, he said what a great and wonderful scholar he was but really the best thing about him was that he was friends with Judy Dench.... Irreverent and clever, funny and inspirational but always professional."

He could talk about language and style – on which he was an undisputed authority, as his acclaimed Shakespeare’s Late Style and Shakespeare and the Arts of Language testify - with contagious enthusiasm. An Italian colleague who heard of Russ’s passing, Professor Rocco Coronato, contacted the department to say that Shakespeare and the Arts of Language was for him a marvellous marriage of knowledge, clarity and wit, and the most un-rhetorical of books on rhetoric.

His 1865-page-long Bedford Shakespeare – an edition of 25 of Shakespeare’s most taught plays, co-edited with Lena Orlin – is a monument you can hold in your hands: immensely useful, clear, sharp; it has quickly become indispensable for all students and teachers of Shakespeare.

Russ’s scholarship – which was brilliant – was indeed never apart from pedagogy. He had the gift of making Shakespeare and Elizabethan texts both complex and accessible, enjoyable in all their aspects – dramatic, literary, linguistic, visual… showing how they were deeply embedded in their context and yet so contemporary and relevant to us.

And yet, as Charlotte Scott points out: "Russ’s commitment to teaching and to theatre extended way beyond the seminar room. He would love to take students to the theatre, to talk about productions, especially those he loved and hated, and host play readings at his house in central London.

"He understood life through the lens of the director, the commitment of the actor and the intellectual scope of the playwright."

And he was unfailingly ready to find the fun in things. Charlotte remembers, during his inaugural lecture at Goldsmiths: "A personal folder of Word documents flicked up on the screen, in which one eager-eyed audience member spotted a file called Finances and heckled ‘Oh yes let’s open that one’! Russ loved it!"

Unlike his students who heard him weekly or his Shakespearean colleagues who heard him at conferences, several of the staff did not have the pleasure or opportunity to attend many of his lectures, and memories of his lecturing style are for many based mainly on that inaugural lecture, a sparkling analysis of one of Shakespeare's sonnets.

Professor Blake Morrison comments: "Most powerpoint presentations add little to a lecture; Russ’s used colour and highlighting to bring out the subtlety of patterning in the sonnet. It was a bravura performance, deeply scholarly and highly entertaining at the same time. 

I remember thinking ‘Lucky students, to have a teacher of this stature in the department’.

Yes, they were truly lucky. Since the news of his passing has spread, the Department of English and Comparative Literature has received many messages and testimonials of how appreciated and loved Russ was as a teacher.

It’s nearly impossible to single out just one, but there would be no space to include all of them.

Siena Castillo, second-year BA English student, writes: "I started the year hating Renaissance literature, avoiding all seminars and the wrath of Russ. And then, we had a meeting about my first essay. He gave me the most productive and encouraging feedback. Six months later, I had attended every lecture, every seminar, I was engaging and was actually looking forward to the Renaissance exam. It turned out to be the subject I did the best in, with the highest grade I have achieved since starting University. I also applied to do Renaissance Drama in third year, in the hope of having him as a tutor. He was inspiring, passionate and you could see that he enjoyed passing that onto others."

Russ was enormously generous to his colleagues too, and more junior staff in particular. Dr Michael Simpson recalls how, when he had taught on the Shakespeare course for the first time, in 2006-07 (Russ had joined us that year) Russ "made a point of beckoning me into his office, sitting me down, and telling me how positive the student evaluations were". 

Michael continues: "There was nothing even remotely patronising here, and I was not just encouraged but also impressed by Russ’s generosity as a professional. I don’t think he believed for a moment that there’s a finite amount of good, or fun, in the world, just plenty to have, and plenty to make.  Among Russ’s attributes was certainly the ability to encourage younger colleagues."

Dr Catherine Humble similarly recalls: "Russ was my teaching mentor several years ago – he was so encouraging, an amazing teacher, and incredibly nice man."

Prior to joining Goldsmiths in 2006, Russ taught at five US institutions, including the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, during which time he won the prize of North Carolina Professor of the Year (2003) – not his only award for distinguished teaching.

He loved opera and it could be heard playing in the background (sometimes blaring in the background) as Russ sat in his office; one of his recent public talks was at the London Philharmonic Orchestra, before the Shakespeare400: Otello concert, on the inspiration that composers have found in Shakespeare. Yet again, passion, scholarship and inspiration went hand in hand.

Thousands of students and scholars have benefitted from and enjoyed Russ’s teaching and writing. Those lucky to know him have enjoyed his wit, his delightful sense of dress (occasionally commented on by students in module evaluation), his conviviality. Dr Carole Sweeney – Russ’s next-door neighbour in Warmington Tower and friend – expresses what all who knew Russ feel: "I will miss his mischievous wit and unfailing sartorial elegance, the colour and life he lent to the dullest of drear November mornings in the Tower. I’ll miss hearing the opera music, the whistling, the doodling, his staple lunch of Diet Coke and Pret or Paul sandwiches, the nattiest of suits and the coolest of Ray-Ban sunnies. 

"I’ll miss hearing about his seemingly inexhaustible love of London theatre and what he had seen that weekend. We talked literature a lot too. He got me into audible books as a way of carrying on ‘reading’ novels on the move. He listened to Wharton and James and Hawthorne and Austen as he strode from the Barbican over London Bridge."

Over the years so many students praised his consummately witty lectures and seminars and even the exacting demands he made on their writing. Even when he was teaching in what he called the "crack house" (!) he inspired them with his profound knowledge of Shakespeare. The number of his undergraduates who came to hear Stanley Wells speak in the Hoggart Lecture back in January testified to his immense appeal and influence on students.

But my overriding memory of Russ is of lots and lots of shared laughter, and of very happy times with him and Gail over wonderful food and drinks. He mixed me my first ever Martini and he made a mean pannacotta.

The last time we saw him was having drinks in the sunny garden of the NX House with colleagues after that long dept. meeting. He was, naturally, in his Ray-Bans, on terrific form and looking forward to Washington and then to research leave with his beloved wife and our colleague Gail. 

It was not meant to be. Russ had a stroke in the early hours of Wednesday 29 June – his birthday. He and Gail had hosted friends for a dinner party just a few hours before the stroke – another event full of light and laughter.

He never regained consciousness, and died on Friday 1 July 2016, aged 67.

The family donated his organs. His son Jack and siblings Mark and Molly were able to see him before he passed.

We have lost a dear and admired colleague, and we will miss him terribly, but we hope to carry his legacy on. Our thoughts are with his family and especially with our colleague Gail.

– Professor Lucia Boldrini, head of department, Department of English and Comparative Literature