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Frank Laurence Lucas (28 December 1894 – 1 June 1967) was an English classical scholar, literary critic, poet, novelist, playwright, political polemicist, Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and intelligence officer at Bletchley Park during World War II. He is now best remembered for his scathing 1923 review of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and for his book Style (1955; revised 1962), an acclaimed guide to recognising and writing good prose. His Tragedy in Relation to Aristotle's 'Poetics' (1927, substantially revised 1957) was for over fifty years a standard introduction. His most important contribution to scholarship was his four-volume old-spelling Complete Works of John Webster (1927), the first collected edition of the Jacobean dramatist since that of Hazlitt the Younger (1857), itself an inferior copy of Dyce (1830). Eliot called Lucas "the perfect annotator", and subsequent Webster scholars have been indebted to him, notably the editors of the new Cambridge Webster (1995–2007). Lucas is also remembered for his anti-fascist campaign in the 1930s, and for his wartime work at Bletchley Park, for which he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). Life Early life and the War F. L. ("Peter") Lucas grew up in Blackheath and was educated at Colfe's (1902–1909), where his father F. W. Lucas (1860–1931) was headmaster, and from 1910 at Rugby, where he was tutored by the Sophocles scholar Robert Whitelaw (1843–1917) in his last year before retirement. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1913 to read for the Classical Tripos, adding the Pitt Scholarship and Porson Prize in 1914. In January 1914 he was elected Apostle – the last Apostle elected before the War – coming under the influence of G. E. Moore. Believing Cambridge threatened with the fate of Louvain, he volunteered, aged 19, in October 1914 and was commissioned in November, serving from 1915 as second lieutenant in the 7th Battalion The Royal West Kent Regiment in France. From August 1915 he was in the Somme trenches opposite Fricourt and Mametz; he was wounded by shrapnel in May 1916. "One simply gapes at the gigantic capriciousness of things," he wrote to John Maynard Keynes in October of that year, "waiting our own turn to disappear in the Cyclops' maw." He returned to the front as lieutenant in January 1917, went into battle near Grandcourt on 17 February in the Ancre Offensive, was mentioned in despatches on 22 February, and was gassed on 4 March. In all he spent seventeen months in war-hospitals. By September 1917 he felt that the cause of honour and justice had been lost in the lust of Victory ("We were too ready to go on fighting without offering terms"). Passed fit for garrison duty at Chatham (3rd Battalion Royal West Kent HQ), he sought the help of fellow-Apostle Keynes to return to France, and from August 1918 to the Armistice he was Staff lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps (Third Army HQ), examining German prisoners near Bapaume and Le Quesnoy. His life hung in the balance in November 1918 shortly after the Armistice, when his lung wounds reopened in the influenza pandemic. He returned to Cambridge in January 1919. Fell-walking in the Lake District "on Easter morning [1919] on Kidsty Pike, between Hawes Water and Hayes Water, a blinding spring sun on snowy ridge beyond ridge, from Fairfield to Blucathra, brought a moment of such ecstatic intoxication that, were I a mystic, I should have called it a mystical experience." Career Resuming his undergraduate studies, Lucas won a Chancellor's Medal for Classics and the Browne Medal (1920), and revived meetings of the Apostles, suspended since 1914, becoming Society Secretary and contributing nineteen papers. He was elected to a Fellowship at King's College in 1920 before he had completed his degree, Keynes paying for him to holiday in Greece with Sebastian Sprott on the eve of his Tripos. He took a starred first and began his career as a Classics lecturer in October 1920. In the spring of 1921 he spent three months in Greece as a student of the British School at Athens, locating the site of the Battle of Pharsalus in Thessaly (see Pharsalus below). Back in Cambridge he switched that year to teaching for the English Tripos (instituted in 1919). He was a member of the Cambridge University English Faculty from 1921 to 1939 and from 1945 to 1962, and a university Reader in English from 1947 to 1962. At the invitation of Desmond MacCarthy, literary editor of the New Statesman, Lucas reviewed poetry and criticism for that journal from 1922 to 1926, having begun his career as reviewer with the Athenaeum in 1920–21, its last year. Early reviews and essays were collected in his Authors Dead and Living (1926). Among them was a review of Housman's Last Poems (1922) that, unusually, met with the approval of the poet himself. His move from Classics to English and his edition of Webster (1927) were inspired in large part by J. T. Sheppard's March 1920 Marlowe Society production of The White Devil, which made a powerful impression on him: "What could make the Cambridge production of The White Devil in 1920 seem, to at least two who saw it then without preconceptions, the most staggering performance they had ever known?" he asked in the New Statesman. (The production had been swift-moving, in the Elizabethan manner, with minimal scenery and with emphasis on "beautiful poetry beautifully spoken".) "[Lucas] has been lucky in finding a writer [Webster] who takes his standpoint," T. E. Lawrence remarked, "and sums up life rather in his fashion." Lucas' preference, however, lay with Comparative Literature, and after Webster he turned to his Studies French and English (1934; revised 1950) (he was Membre Correspondant Honoraire de L'Institut Littéraire et Artistique de France ), and later to studies of Scandinavian literature. He served as committee member for the Cambridge Greek Play (1921–33) and continued to write on Greek and Latin literature. As part-time Librarian at King's (1922–36) he accessioned the donated papers of Rupert Brooke. His students at King's included George Rylands, John Hayward, F. E. Halliday, H. C. A. "Tom" Gaunt, Alan Clutton-Brock, Julian Bell, Winton Dean and Desmond Flower. By Cambridge English students in general he was known as "F. L.". Following the publication of his Webster, scholars turned to him for editorial advice: he helped in the preparation of Hayward's Nonesuch Donne (1929), Housman's More Poems (1936), Theodore Redpath's Songs and Sonets of John Donne (1956), and Ingram and Redpath's Shakespeare's Sonnets (1964). He also performed an editorial and advisory role for Christopher Sandford at the Golden Cockerel Press, where he introduced Victor Scholderer's New Hellenic typeface (1937). Four of his verse translations from Greek and Latin, with engravings by John Buckland Wright, were published in collectors' editions by the Golden Cockerel Press and Folio Society. In the middle ye.... Discover the Homer F L Light Translator popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Homer F L Light Translator books.