Martha Craig, retired professor, Shakespearean scholar; at 75

Martha Alden Craig was widely known in the academic world as a Shakespeare scholar and an authority on the works of Edmund Spenser and of 20th-century American poets. What perhaps was not so widely known was Dr. Craig's appreciation for the drama and the poetry that played out each summer on another stage - Fenway Park.

A retired Wellesley College professor, a reader, and a writer, Dr. Craig was not the kind to show up at the games, but loved to watch on television. On Aug. 26, while watching her beloved Red Sox trounce the White Sox, 11 to 1, Dr. Craig suffered a stroke at her Cambridge home and died, her family said. She was 75.

Dr. Craig began teaching at Wellesley in 1957 and was granted tenure a decade later. Colleagues said she challenged her students to learn and, in many cases, to love Shakespeare, her colleagues said. She retired from the school in 1997.

"We were friends . . . through many years of conversations, and I greatly valued and admired her for the sometimes intimidatingly high standards she maintained and exemplified in her life," David Ferry, a professor emeritus of English at Wellesley, said in an e-mail.

Another Wellesley colleague, English professor Timothy W. Peltason, said that although Shakespeare was the great passion of Dr. Craig's life, she also was a great admirer and a regular teacher of modern poetry.

"She taught courses on W.B. Yeats and Robert Frost, on Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, on confessional poetry, and on 20th-century love poetry," Peltason said. "In all her course descriptions, she stressed the importance of student participation and student discussion and described her ambition to make the students cocreators of the course materials," Peltason said.

Dr. Craig was a teacher students remembered long after college. One of them, Lucretia Slaughter of Cambridge, took her freshman English in the late 1950s.

"She was wonderful," Slaughter said. "She had such clarity of mind. She was one of the people who introduced me to critical thinking."

Lorraine Fine of Brighton, personal assistant to Dr. Craig for 11 years, said writing always remained a large part of her life, whether it be about Shakespeare, Spenser, or other topics.

At the time of her death, she was working on several projects, including modern poetry criticism.

Dr. Craig's essay titled "The Secret Wit of Spenser's Language" was published in "Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism," Oxford University Press, in 1967.

"It was her personal satisfaction," Fine said. " Martha did her writing sitting in an easy chair in longhand on a yellow legal pad in very spidery handwriting."

Dr. Craig grew up in Oberlin, Ohio, where her father, Dr. Clarence Tucker Craig, a noted theologian, was on the faculty of Oberlin College. Her mother, Rena Catharine Stebbins, later became dean of women at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

Martha completed high school in New Haven, when her father had accepted a teaching position at Yale Divinity School. She then returned to Ohio, earning her bachelor's degree in English from Oberlin in 1953, her family said.

She also studied on a Fulbright scholarship at Cambridge University in England before returning to Yale to earn a doctorate in English literature in 1959. Fine said she wrote her dissertation on "Language and Concept in 'The Faerie Queene,' " Spenser's epic poem.

But Dr. Craig was most interested in the psychological aspects of Shakespeare, and was particularly intrigued by "Hamlet," colleagues said.

In the 1990s, Marvin Krims, a Newton psychiatrist, sponsored a symposium about Shakespeare that Dr. Craig attended.

"We talked about the eternal question of Hamlet; people wanted to know what motivated him," Krims said. "Martha just said, 'Hamlet is our source.' "

Dr. Craig leaves two brothers, John Tucker Craig and Dr. Peter S. Craig, both of Washington, D.C., and many nieces and nephews who knew her as "Aunt Toots," derived from a childhood nickname.

Burial is private.

At the service, Ferry will recite the poem "The House was Quiet and the World was Calm" by Wallace Stevens. The poem, Ferry said, "celebrates Martha Craig's persistent scholarly love of poetry."