The Malone Society Council is deeply saddened by the recent death of our colleague and friend, Mrs Leah Scragg. In fond memory of Leah, we offer a eulogy by Professor Katharine Craik, delivered at her funeral in a slightly extended form.
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‘What dreams are these, Mileta? And can there be no truth in dreams?’
This is the opening line of Act 4, Scene 3 of Sapho and Phao by the Elizabethan playwright John Lyly, first printed in 1584. Here Sapho and others take it in turns to recount their dreams. It is an extraordinary scene in an extraordinary play. Sapho has been dreaming about a dove who builds a nest in a tall cedar tree. Mileta dreams of a fire staunched with fresh flowers. Canope dreams about clouds which turn to drops of gold, and then to dust. Lamya dreams of two lutes tuned in one key playing enchanting music. It is one of Lyly’s typical interludes: vivid, strange and drenched in myth and classical references. But it is not entirely serious. In what follows, the group offers increasingly elaborate interpretations of each others’ dreams until Eugenua admits that ‘Dreams are but dotings’.
Leah Scragg was the world’s leading authority on the works of John Lyly. She edited his plays and prose, making these newly accessible for generations of students. Her textual scholarship is celebrated for its meticulous standards. She also wrote extensively and brilliantly on the works of Lyly and his contemporaries, including three books on Shakespeare: Discovering Shakespeare’s Meaning, Shakespeare’s Alternative Tales and Shakespeare’s Mouldy Tales. Here, and in a range of important journal articles, Leah’s writing is informative, clear-sighted and notably uncompromising. To read it is to be welcomed into a world of imaginative complexity with a helpful, and helpfully firm, guide alongside.
Leah concentrated her attention however on Lyly, and her scholarship is, and will always be, indispensable to anyone approaching these works. Lyly can seem abstract and difficult. But while his style is highly ornate, it is neither cerebral nor remote. The Bodleian Library’s copy of Leah’s book about Lyly’s creativity, The Metamorphosis of Gallathea, has literally been read to pieces and is now held together with a ribbon. Here Leah sets out how Lyly expresses ambiguity through patterned style, creating what she calls ‘a dazzling demonstration of the inherent instability of both the physical and intellectual worlds’. Leah reveals Lyly’s writing as astonishing, elegant and imaginatively capacious. His works capture ‘constant inconstancy, or change without progression’, often through metaphors of the moon and the sea. They are indeed full of mysterious and wonderful transformations: Endymion is transformed from a youth to an old man, Diana’s foresters become ardent lovers, nymphs are changed into emblems. As Leah writes, ‘Lylian drama is a play of shadows’ where appearances offer a ‘valid, if partial, perspective upon an inherently ambivalent world’.
Leah was a great academic of the old school. She taught at the University of Manchester for many years, and is fondly and gratefully remembered by her students. As Leah’s longstanding colleague Professor Emerita Jacqueline Pearson remembers, ‘Leah excited loyalty. She did not bear fools gladly, but in a way that made you determined not to be a fool if you could possibly help it.’ Jackie recalls Leah’s warmth and collegiality in the staff room at Manchester over many lunchtimes: ‘my chief memory is of laughter; there was always laughter where Leah was. She had a bone dry wit, and was a great storyteller.’ Leah’s early days in the Department in the 60s and 70s could not however have been easy. She was a trailblazer for the role of women in what was a male-dominated, chauvinistic institution. Leah would come to hate the changes in the university, the bureaucratisation, and the lack of support for the old disciplines. But many appreciated her uncompromising scholarship.
Leah’s commitment to scholarly standards, combined with her sense of fun, fitted perfectly with the Malone Society where she served as President. Leah joined the Society in 1977 as Honorary Treasurer, and subsequently held a number of positions on Council. The meetings she chaired in the Fraenkel Room at Corpus Christi College in Oxford were always serious fun for a group of scholars capable of debating for 20 minutes the placement of a comma. Leah always arrived first, usually wearing a pin-striped shirt and a tie, ready to run an international scholarly society on nothing but good cheer and a deeply held love of language. She particularly relished the Society’s annual conferences which always included a staged reading of a neglected play. Last year, the chosen play was John Lyly’s Campaspe, and the conference was dedicated to the Society’s much-loved President.
Leah was a brilliant scholar. She was also generous, funny, clear-minded and utterly herself. She was all of these things when I visited her for the last time earlier this year, at home with her devoted family Tim, Gina and Ben. I reflected then that Leah had always seemed ageless. In retrospect, this impression seems entirely of a piece with Lyly’s expression of wonder, fluidity and transformation. And so we end where we began, with Favilo’s dream in Sapho and Phao:
‘Methought going by the seaside among pebbles, I saw one playing with a round stone, ever throwing it into the water when the sun shone. I asked the name; he said, it was called Abeston – which being once hot, would never be cold. He gave it me, and vanished. I, forgetting myself, delighted with the fair show, would always show it by candlelight, pull it out in the sun, and see how bright it would look in the fire – where, catching heat, nothing could cool it.’