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Teaching infects the rest of my life…and then the rest of my life infects my teaching,” says award-winning UPEI English professor Shannon Murray. “It’s hard—whether you’re in the classroom or at home—not to have what you’re passionate about spill out.” Shakespearean theatre is the most serious infection that is cross-afflicting her teaching and her life, and local productions of the Bard’s plays are spilling out.
This spring, she is helping with a UPEI Theatre Society production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. “Officially,” Shannon says, “I’m the publicity director. My unofficial role is to drum up a sense of event, or occasion, in the classroom.” This task is made easy by her love of the play—her daughter is named for a character in it. (And though “Celia” is excitedly anticipating seeing “herself” on stage, Shannon confesses her children “are showing early signs of exasperation with their mother’s Bardolatry.”)
This summer, Shannon will be helping impresario Laurie Murphy to plan and promote an outdoor production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. As a lead-up, she and Murphy are organizing “a month of twelfth nights” in April: open-admission, casual gatherings to discuss the play. “We’re not expecting everyone who comes to have read the play…but we hope people will know about the play by the end of the month…In the process, we’ll steal lots of good ideas for the performance.”
Despite her love of theatre, Shannon describes her acting experience as “limited and embarrassing.” In an ACT production of Pickwick she played “Joe, the Narcoleptic Fat Boy,” but it wasn’t a stretch since she was seven months pregnant “and neither the sleepiness nor the fatness was any challenge.”
Her only other experience on stage came during a workshop at the Globe Theatre, with the Original Shakespeare Company. Her instructions: “You go on with your lord, you go off with your lord, and you listen.” After “going on with her lord,” she began thinking, “So that’s what it’s like from this side,” and, rapt with thoughts of famous actors of the Globe’s past, she forgot to listen and hence forgot to “go off with her lord,” who finally had to “grab himself by the scruff of his own neck and pull himself off stage.”
Shannon has found her theatrical role off stage: “The thing I can do is start conversations,” she says. “And I do love to talk about plays.” Love of conversation about plays was Shannon’s impetus to begin the PEI Shakespeare Society several years ago and has inspired her since to organize panel discussions around several non-Shakespearean theatre productions in Charlottetown. “The classroom is not a substitute for performance,” she says, “But it can give something else—the intellectual pleasure of talking something through.”
That being said, most of her moments of “revelation and epiphany” have come about during performances. When she was sixteen, her life was forever changed by seeing Derek Jacobi play Hamlet. “Seeing that play and that actor, something moved and excited me. I got it.”
On those nights when attending performances isn’t possible, she advocates reading plays, alone or with others. “Reading plays came slowly to me, so I’m not surprised when it’s a ‘hard sell,’” Shannon admits. “But when I read a play, I see all possibilities. I can be an actor, the director, or anything I choose. As wonderful as performance is, when you perform a lot of those decisions have been made for you.”
Shannon takes seriously her job of helping students learn a love of literature and carry it with them into their communities, careers, families, and lives. Before I leave, she shows off a tilting pile of portfolios from UPEI students who have been taking a “capstone course” looking into careers in which an English degree can make a difference. “The course is designed to encourage students to think of ways they can make literature matter in the world,” she says. Making literature matter is a task she herself has taken on with passion and enthusiasm.