“You will never age for me, nor fade, nor die.” This sentence from the movie Shakespeare in Love, the 1999 Academy Award winner for Best Picture, was spoken as the film’s two lovers, William Shakespeare and Lady Viola, said their final farewell as the fictional story of the events that inspired Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet ended.
The sentence’s meaning, however, can be further applied. The concepts of infinity and timeless classicism can be aptly applied to the works of William Shakespeare. And, according to Thomas Moisan, Shakespeare’s plays will continue to thrive and influence readers of all backgrounds into the next millennium.
Moisan, a professor in the English department for the past 10 years, discussed how he approaches teaching Shakespearean plays to both undergraduate and graduate classes at Saint Louis University. He also shared his view on why the Bard continues to be a major literary figure.
This semester, Moisan is teaching an upper-level course on Shakespeare’s early plays. The class will read a total of six plays, including Richard III, The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing. Shakespeare’s later plays are the subject of the two upper-level classes Moisan will teach in the spring semester.
One technique Moisan has used frequently in his classes during the past eight or nine years is to have groups of students perform segments from Shakespeare plays. In order to combine the concepts of writing, reading and performance, his students are currently working on preparing scenes from Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing.
“Each group has a substantial scene to do that they’ve been rehearsing and will eventually perform,” Moisan said. “I have to remind myself that these texts were meant to be performed. Students actually have to get inside a character and make choices. It’s not just a matter of reading lines but actually reading lines with a sense of what they mean, which means active interpretations and decisions. I think performances force that moment of crisis more effectively.”
Looking back on his experiences on teaching a variety of English and Shakespeare classes, Moisan said that having to choose a favorite subject is difficult. “I really have enjoyed teaching all my classes. Quite sincerely, each class has had different kinds of thrills.”
Hailing from New York City, Moisan attended Holy Cross, a Jesuit school in Worchester, Mass., and earned his master’s and doctoral degree from Harvard University. Moisan and his wife, a mathematics teacher, both held their first teaching positions in New England for four years before accepting positions at Arkansas State University. In 1989, after Moisan spent two years teaching in Fredericksburg, Va., the couple moved to St. Louis and assumed positions in their present departments.
Moisan first joined the SLU faculty not only as a professor, but as English department chair, a situation that he said provided him with a unique perspective. “I really had to appreciate a full mix-the act of leading a department and trying to figure out ways of serving its students better and building the department, along with doing work as a teacher and researcher. That total culmination has been thrilling and has been a defining moment in my professional life.”
Moisan said that teaching undergraduate classes does differ from teaching graduate courses. Teaching undergraduate students, Moisan said, is like introducing them “to the empowerment of interpreting text and writing about it” whereas the prospect of “seeing [graduates] turn into professionals in understanding the material and going on to teach it” is a thrill, too.
As for his own personal interest in Shakespeare, Moisan is a member of the International Shakespeare Association, a global organization that meets every five years. A member since 1986, Moisan traveled to Berlin in 1986 and Tokyo in 1991, giving him the opportunity to interact with foreign Shakespearean influences.
“In Tokyo, the tradition of Shakespeare merged with Japanese traditions of performance art-for example, with the Kabuki style,” Moisan said. “It was quite fascinating for those of us less familiar with that tradition to see. It was a measure of the way in which Shakespeare’s plays can extend and be adapted by not only customs of different times but customs of different traditions.”
Moisan also talked about Shakespeare in the entertainment industry and the surge of box-office hits based on his plays. “The plays are infinitely adaptable. I don’t know whether that’s a peculiar gift of Shakespeare or pure luck, but Shakespeare managed to appeal to successive generations of scholars and critics and, more importantly, directors and actors who kept the plays onstage and tinkered with them, adapted them, but always found that there was something worth adapting there.”
Moisan also offered his opinion on the latest movie with a Shakesperean theme-Shakespeare in Love. “It was witty,” Moisan said. “It was a very clever script and got the audience into the fun of the atmosphere of Shakespeare’s theatre in ways in which I’ve never seen that done before by other films about the Elizabethan period. Shakespeare in Love was much more playful with itself and therefore allowed people to enjoy it on their own terms.”
As for why Shakespeare’s plays have enjoyed more than 400 years of popularity, Moisan said that someone once compared Shakespeare to a virus. “It can mutate and change and adapt to the times, and so have Shakespeare’s works. He’s continued to make his plays accessible for centuries. So it’s nice because you can get students to understand plays on Shakespeare’s 16th century terms, but you can also get them to appreciate the ways in which Shakespeare speaks to 20th century, and now 21st century, concerns.”
