“The wheel is come full circle; I am here.”
—King Lear
By Michael LoMonico, ‘68
Senior Consultant on National Education, Folger Shakespeare Library
Fifty years ago, I sat in my Campion dorm room contemplating the future. The war in Vietnam was escalating and the draft was looming and inevitable. Heated discussions with fellow Stags had convinced me that the war was wrong. The final blow came when I heard that Joe Zale was killed in Khe Sanh. Joe’s room was next to mine freshman year in Loyola Hall, and he was drafted soon after failing out that year. With graduation only a year away, the future seemed bleak. The sick joke on campus was that at graduation we’d be handed our diplomas and immediately loaded onto a US Army truck. Draft deferments for graduate school were gone, so I changed my mind about applying to the UCLA Film School. But when I read that public school teachers were being given draft deferments, I quickly headed to my advisor’s office to add an Education minor to my English degree. Over the summer, I took some additional English courses, and in my final semester, I student taught at Milford High School.
My plan worked. I graduated with a BA in English and a Connecticut teaching certification. I began teaching English at a suburban Long Island high school and received a deferment. I continued to teach there for the next 33 years, and upon retirement, I began teaching at Stony Brook University. Then the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC hired me as the Senior Consultant on National Education. During my work with the Folger, I have worked in 39 states teaching teachers how to teach Shakespeare. That work also inspired me to write That Shakespeare Kid, a novel about a young boy who can only speak lines from Shakespeare, and how he helped change his English teacher’s approach to Shakespeare.
But my love of Shakespeare began in John Bonn’s
Shakespeare class at Fairfield. Father Bonn made us analyze the plays in some
unusual ways, using complicated charts and what we now call graphic organizers.
I vividly recall spending an entire semester scrutinizing and dissecting my
appointed play, Love’s Labor’s Lost. I
traced all the images, all the props and imbedded stage directions, and each
character’s entrances and exits. I believe
that his methodology led to writing my first book, The Shakespeare Book of Lists in 2000. I also remember Father Bonn standing in front of the class, speaking
those beautiful words as my classmates and I sat in awe. What a presence; what
a voice!
But my favorite memory was a discussion he led in my senior year at our house at Lantern Point. One afternoon he showed up with his worn black briefcase and began a discussion on Hamlet. He took off his Roman collar and showed us his human side. It was wonderful.
And now, nearly 50 years later, I return to Fairfield where my love of Shakespeare began. I want to thank professors Shannon Kelly, Bryan Crandall, and Betsy Bowen for inviting me to talk to their students about my Shakespeare teaching experience and my work at the Folger Library. I look forward to meeting those students—some of whom might be sitting in their dorm rooms at night as I had done, wondering what lies in their future. Perhaps one of them might be the next great Shakespeare professor and inspire students just as John Bonn did for me.
