Education: Goodbye, Messrs. Chips
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The University of Illinois' stiff-collar-and-high-shoe-wearing Thomas Whitfield Baldwin, 68, one of the world's leading authorities on Shakespeare. Coatless, but sheltered by a black hat and fortified by a furled umbrella, he has stalked about the Illinois campus on long, ruminative walks since 1925, disdains to use an elevator to reach his fourth-floor office. A marathon motorist, he wrote many of his Shakespearean studies during cross-country trips in a house-trailer. Among his noted works: a volume on the playwright's education (William Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke), and another, published in 1957, proving that Shakespeare wrote a play, probably now surviving under another title, called Love's Labor's Won.
Harvard's intense, slightly built Harry Austryn Wolfson, 70, probably the world's foremost historian of religious philosophy. He went to Harvard as a freshman in 1908, has spent almost the entire time since in his book-sandbagged study at the Widener Library and his tome-cluttered flat near bywhere, a friend relates, the scholar once searched unsuccessfully for a book in the refrigerator, thought a moment, triumphantly fished it out of the unlit oven. Ranging widely and deeply, he began with medieval Jewish philosophy, went on to trace with minute thoroughness the works of such men as Spinoza and Crescas back to the ancient Hebrew, Christian, Moslem and Greek philosophers, took time out only to catch every film shown at Harvard Square's second-run theater. Says Scholar Wolfson: "It is wonderful to start with an original text, an unstudied text, and to realize that there is nothing between you and this text. You try to find out everything that is implied in every term, every phrase, to get behind the words into the man's mind."
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