Lafayette, Lusardi, and Shakespeare

Lafayette, Lusardi, and Shakespeare: The three were woven inextricably for more than three decades. The passion of the late James P. Lusardi ’55, Francis A. March Professor of English, for Shakespeare was an irresistible force behind the bond.

Lusardi’s teaching, research, and collaboration with June Schlueter, provost and Charles A. Dana Professor of English, as editors of Shakespeare Bulletin speak volumes about his perceptiveness, scholarly knowledge, and commitment in studying and admiring the Bard’s timeless works.

His devotion lives on in a new book of essays in Lusardi’s honor compiled by good friends, colleagues, and fellow Shakespeare devotees. Schlueter and Paul Nelsen ’69, professor of theater and drama at Marlboro College in Vermont, are editors of Acts of Criticism: Performance Matters in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. The memorial volume, or festschrift, assembles a cast of 16 distinguished theater historians and performance critics. Their essays, all appearing in print for the first time, are presented in two sections, one on theater history and practice, in which contributors examine matters related to performance in Shakespeare’s time and our own, and one on performance criticism, in which contributors treat modern productions on stage and screen.

It’s a love letter from contemporaries who haven’t forgotten the passion Lusardi always showed for Shakespeare.

“Paul Nelsen and I both spoke at the memorial service for Jim at the college. It was then that we said, ‘Why don’t we do a festschrift?’ Three years after his death we were finally able to hold the book in our hands,” Schlueter says. “It’s a very nice tribute to Jim. Our affection for him is pretty clear in the introduction. He did touch many generations of Lafayette students.”

“This is a not-so-small, happy gesture, a joyful gesture we’ve made to preserve that memory in print,” adds Nelsen, who served with Lusardi as a consultant on the rebuilding of the Globe Theatre in London. “All associated with Lafayette should take pride in his memory and his contributions toward our understanding of Shakespeare.”

Lusardi and Schlueter co-edited Shakespeare Bulletin, an international journal of performance criticism and scholarship published at Lafayette and read around the world from 1984 until his death in 2002. From 1982-84 they were the journal’s associate editors.

The stories behind the connections among the aficionados are compelling.

In Schlueter’s case, the professional synergy with Lusardi stemmed from a long and rewarding affiliation at Lafayette, which found expression not only on campus but also through frequent interim-session trips to London and Dublin with two dozen or so students to see productions of Shakespeare’s works and other plays, old and new.

Often the Lafayette group would run into Nelsen and a contingent of Marlboro students in his charge, who’d traveled to Britain with a similar agenda. Ultimately, the two groups wound up sharing other expenses.

“The relationship that Paul and Jim had was longstanding,” Schlueter recalls. Indeed it began during the former’s days as a student. Even as an undergraduate, Nelsen is proud to say, he had a strong affinity for Shakespeare.

About 15 years after Nelsen left Lafayette, he and Lusardi chanced to meet on a London street, and the affiliation that had begun at the college blossomed. Nelsen became a regular contributor to ShakespeareBulletin and a frequent companion at the theater. They took in “as many other productions of plays as we possibly could,” Nelsen says.

“It was a special pleasure and honor for me to take a former professor and become a friend, a colleague, a working associate,” Nelsen says. “So even when we weren’t traveling together there would be phone calls about one issue or another related to theater or Shakespeare Bulletin or research issues, with one serving as a sounding board for the other about what kind of tactic we were taking in approaching Shakespeare.”