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William Shakespeare Experience

About me

Location	Kingston, New York
Introduction	I majored in English at Yale, which gave me a broad historical sense of the humanistic arts. After Yale, I learned a lot about film and further deepened my sense of the connections between art and literature. However, teaching always seduced me, and I took another six years to finish my dissertation--on malcontent figures in Renaissance drama (Don John, Jacques, Hamlet, and the like). At California State University, Chico, I taught and/or created every sort of course I could imagine, and have, by this time, probably taught some forty different courses. I have written many handbooks for the latter, innumerable plays and musicals for young people (“We went to see Hamlet, Dr. Schoen-René, but it wasn’t as good as the one we put on -- no songs.”) I have been increasingly involved in drama, writing music for a college production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle two years ago, and translating the Middle-English Everyman. As a teacher, I am known for innumerable tossed-off puns, intensity, a physicality that will have me loping around the room or jumping up on a table, and having a hard time not weeping when I read aloud Wordsworth’s “Intimations” or James Agee’s “Knoxville, 1913.”

Location

Kingston, New York

Introduction

I majored in English at Yale, which gave me a broad historical sense of the humanistic arts. After Yale, I learned a lot about film and further deepened my sense of the connections between art and literature. However, teaching always seduced me, and I took another six years to finish my dissertation--on malcontent figures in Renaissance drama (Don John, Jacques, Hamlet, and the like). At California State University, Chico, I taught and/or created every sort of course I could imagine, and have, by this time, probably taught some forty different courses. I have written many handbooks for the latter, innumerable plays and musicals for young people (“We went to see Hamlet, Dr. Schoen-René, but it wasn’t as good as the one we put on -- no songs.”) I have been increasingly involved in drama, writing music for a college production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle two years ago, and translating the Middle-English Everyman. As a teacher, I am known for innumerable tossed-off puns, intensity, a physicality that will have me loping around the room or jumping up on a table, and having a hard time not weeping when I read aloud Wordsworth’s “Intimations” or James Agee’s “Knoxville, 1913.”