A Tribute to Christopher Innes

Both Christopher Innes and I landed at York University in 1969, he in English and me in the newly created Department of Theatre. After his arrival at York, Christopher received quick recognition, not only for his teaching but also for his immense scholarship on European dramatic literature (much of it published by Cambridge University Press).We didn't actually meet until two or three years later when he phoned me to talk about his interest in theater and drama and his desire to do a course for us. We arranged a lunch, and it did not take very long for me to realize that he was not only a real theater scholar but also probably the most competitive academic I had ever met. At that early point in his career, he wanted to do everything and run everything. Not only was he going to prove that he was one of the best in the field of drama studies, but he was also going to prove to the world that he was one of the best PERIOD. In everything. Christopher did have an ego—and so did I, so we competed a lot. Even in silly areas. When he found out I got to York the same year he did, he started telling people he had gotten there in '68, a year earlier. Somehow, he was going to beat me even at that. And he never stopped competing. I am convinced that Christopher went after several of the honorifics and awards he received during his long and distinguished career just for the competition of it. I remember asking him once if he had ever received a certain prize that I was thinking of applying for. His answer was not the usual modest “yes” or “no.” His answer was “of course.”In recent years we good-naturedly sparred over the question of who really wrote the plays of Shakespeare. I felt I had good solid evidence on my side to say that it was the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford writing under a pseudonym. Christopher would laugh his booming laugh at that point—his very booming laugh—and would tell me not only that I was wrong but that my position was “career suicide” and I shouldn't mention it to anyone. So I invited him to make his position known at an international Oxfordian conference I organized at York in 2013, and to his everlasting credit he actually showed up to make his points, the only member of the York or the U of T English Department to attend. And he was—in his intellectual opposition—a hit there, a palpable hit.As academics and friends for almost five decades, Christopher and I loved to talk theater. Any kind of theater. Virtually all of his sixteen major academic books were, in fact, on theater, books he wrote for such riffraff publishers as Cambridge and Yale University Press. Early on in his career, he taught European dramatic literature and literary theory—heavily German and English—but over the years, he grew his way into other theater areas such as directing and aesthetics, the nature of the avant-garde, and even design. He was, after all, as many of you know, an expert carpenter and painter. He also loved making wide intellectual connections, and he loved bringing new areas of research into being. He worked closely with me to establish York's MA and PhD programs in Theatre Studies. He loved it when top graduate students (like Annabel Rutherford) crossed over and worked in multidisciplinary ways in literature, dance, and theater. He helped create other joint programs like Communications and Culture, which brought not just departments but whole universities together. He has also held visiting professorships or fellowships at Corpus Christi and St. John's Colleges, Cambridge; at Newcastle University, Australia; as well as at Ohtani University, Japan, and the Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Germany.His time as a Canada Research Chair in Theatre at York gave him still more opportunities to explore even more widely—things like the theatrical roots of the Caribbean Carnival, research he developed with his beloved musician wife Brigitte Bogar. And most recently, he and Brigitte were working on a major study of the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, a study that I hope Brigitte will finish on her own. Personally, about two or three years ago, as much as I loved teaching, I knew that I was wearing out. I was thinking about stopping. When I told Christopher that I was going to retire, he disapproved and told me that he would never retire. “They'll have to carry me out,” he told me in 2016. “I will teach 'til I die,” he said. “It keeps me alive.” And Christopher did keep teaching. He was still officially teaching when he learned that he had ALS, just months before he died.Christopher was one of York's stars. He was large in every way, from his height to his booming laugh. He seemed to be everywhere at York and was into everything. He was the longest-serving active member in the Department of English. He made a profound and lasting difference during his time at the university. A world-renowned scholar and an enthusiastic and recognized Shavian, he remained energetically active and engaged in cutting-edge research until the very end of his life.Christopher died due to complications from ALS on 19 June 2017.

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