WINIFRED SMITH
1879 - 1967
Miss Winifred Smith, sometime Professor of English and Professor
Emeritus of Drama and Chairman of the Division of Drama, died on
October 28, 1967, in Louisville, Kentucky, at the age of eighty-
eight. She had gone to Louisville some years after her retire-
ment from the college in 1947 to be near her niece, Priscilla
Smith Robertson.
Winifred Smith was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1879, the daughter
of Henry Preserved and Anna Macneale Smith. Her brother was
Preserved Smith, who became a distinguished historian of the Reform-
ation. She was graduated from Vassar in 1904 and came back as a
member of the faculty, when she joined the English Department as
an Instructor in 1911. She was made a Professor of English in
1926 and served briefly as chairman of that department, from
1929-1931. Of her work as a student at the college, she has
written that "Miss Keyes's extraordinary course in Shakespeare
was the beginning of my life long interest in the drama," and
that it was at the encouragement of Miss Wylie that she went on
to graduate work in English and comparative literature at Columbia
University, where she was awarded the doctorate in 1912. In the
years that she was working on her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees, she
taught at Mt. Holyoke and at the Knox School in Lockwood, New
Jersey, and studied for a year at the Sorbonne. During her
tenure at the college she spent two sabbatical years in Rome,
and taught as a Visiting Professor of English in summer sessions
at Stanford and at the University of California. Among her major
extra-curricular activities were her interest in the founding of
Sarah Lawrence College and her membership on its board of trustees
from 1932-1945 and her work for ten years on the board of the
Poughkeepsie Community Theatre
Miss Smith took a leading part in the founding of the Division
of Drama in 1936 with its attendant Experimental Theatre. She
has described their evolution from Miss Buck's course in play-
writing, in which students did some "walking through scenes,"
without costumes or scenery; then came the founding of two courses
in dramatic production by the English Department, which Hallie
Flannagan taught; then the establishment of the "now famous"
Theatre in Avery in 1930, and finally the organization of the
independent Division of Drama, headed by Miss Smith, with Hallie
Flannagan as Professor of Drama and Director of the Theatre. It
was during this period in the thirties that Hallie Flannagan
experimented with the living newspaper as a dramatic form and
gave the premier of T. S. Eliot“s Sweeney Agonistes. Miss Smith
WINIFRED SMITH — continued.
served as Chairman of the Division during the tenure of
Mrs. Flannagan and with Mary Virginia Heinlein, who succeeded
her in 1942 as Professor of Drama and Director.
Miss Smith has been recognized as one of Vassar's great teachers;
she was also one of its great rebels; and for her, taking a stand
began early and as a family tradition. Her father, Henry Preserved
Smith, Biblical scholar, Presbyterian minister, Professor of Theol-
ogy, a defender of the higher criticism, was tried for heresy by
the Presbytery of Cincinnati, Ohio, and suspended from the minis-
try by the General Assembly in 1894 because he denied the verbal
inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible. Her devotion to her
father and admiration for him are remembered by her colleagues
as one of the salient facts of her life. She has recorded, in
an unpublished memoir, how, in her teens, she sat with her mother
and her brother, Preserved, in the gallery, tingling with pride
at her father's intrepid stand at his trial; and how as "the
daughter of a heretic" she inspired a certain distrust.in President
Taylor, "a genial but conservative man" who advised her at the time
of her appointment to Vassar that it is a "teacher's responsibil-
ity not to disturb the faith of the young." She adds that it was
almost as disturbing a fact that she was "an ardent worker for
woman's suffrage."
Miss Smith's advocacy of the suffrage movement (she was speaking
all over the country for it in her first years at the college),
her interest in the Poughkeepsie community (she taught courses
for working women), her knowledge of contemporary politics and
her sympathy with the revolutionary side, her concern for social
justice, her constant efforts to keep her students alert to the
connections between drama and the world were during her career
active and interlocking attitudes. While such attitudes were not
unusual among her contemporaries on the faculty, she lived them
with a particular energy, became known, she writes, as a "radical"
by some of the trustees and parents. They may have found their
opinion substantiated if they saw an article written by Vice-
President Coolidge in a national magazine on red tendencies in
America's colleges when he quoted as an example, the Vassar
Miscellany News as saying, "Miss Smith was quite favorably impressed
by the Soviet Ambassador and struck by his moderation and intel-
ligence as compared to the narrowness of some of the Senate com-
mittee." That was in 1921.
But Winifred Smith’s concern with the contemporary world was never
detached from the great tradition of the theater itself, from
the Greek, European, English and American drama. She was a very
WINIFRED SMITH - continued.
learned woman. She was the author of two books, The Comedia del
Arte and Italian Actors in the Renaissance; she wrote articles
and reviews on innumerable subjects connected with the drama;
she translated for production plays by French and Italian writers,
and she travelled widely in Europe studying the theater. She
spoke French, German and Italian and read Spanish. She planned
and taught with Professors Grace Macurdy and Philip Davis of the
Classics Department a course called "Tragedy; Greek, Renaissance
and Modern." This course became Drama 220, a course in compara-
tive drama, one of the most demanding and distinguished courses
in the college. It was conducted by Miss Smith in collaboration
with members of the English, Classics and Modern Language Depart-
ments. It is remembered that Miss Smith had "a swift acting
genius for correlation"; and her card file of the synopses of
plays that she had read was the wonder of her department; it
seems that it contained enough plays to stagger a computer.
Of the many reviews she wrote for the outside world, it is said
that "she dashed them off at a high speed but always getting to
the core of the matter." Her reviews of current productions on
the Vassar campus (she herself was not a director) also got to
the core of the matter. They were careful to educate the college
community in the tradition of the drama and in the study of drama
at Vassar. For example, in the year of her retirement Miss Smith
wrote of one production that it was "studied in a fundamental
way." "Our theater," she continued, "is one of the few on uni-
versity campuses that takes its function seriously. For years
it has presented significant plays that show its audiences what
the stage at its best can do to illuminate tradition, interpret
yesterday's and today’s philosophies, and through picture and
the spoken word, hold the mirror up to nature."
Professor Emeritus Helen Sandison, a long time friend and col-
league of Miss Smith's in the English Department (and in its
relations with the Division of Drama) wrote among other things,
when I asked for reminiscenses of their teaching here: "Like
her father, Winifred was a swift and brilliant thinker. She
always, it seemed to me, thought through her feelings. This
led, sometimes, to misjudgment or inaccuracy, but also to her
compelling influence on her students." One of these (a con-
firmed Tory, her favorite Shakespeare play was Coriolanus), whom
she "awoke," temporarily at least, to George Bernard Shaw, gave
money to the college library in honor of "that brilliant but mis-
guided woman." And when Miss Smith died, she wrote, "My years
at Vassar are still real and living and splendid thanks to Miss
Smith." One other anecdote rounds out the picture of Miss Smith's
influence in the college and in the world: “a young scholar who