Philip J. Finkelpearl ’46

One of his students called Phil Finkelpearl’s Shakespeare class “truly theater in itself.” A longtime college professor, Phil specialized in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, publishing two books — John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in His Social Setting and Court and Country: Politics in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher — as well as numerous articles on the historical and social context of the theater.

After graduating from Princeton, where he established a lifelong friendship with his roommate, Robert Venturi, Phil taught at Brandeis University, Vassar College, and the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He most recently taught at Wellesley College, where in 1985 he earned the Pinanski Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971 and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1987.

Phil’s death Nov. 30, 2014, left Kitty, his wife of 66 years; daughter Ellen ’75; son Tom ’79; and three grandchildren. The class is grateful for this life, described by those who knew Phil best as “original, irreverent, creative, playful and warm, and intensely social as well as reclusive.”