Shakespeare's Improbable Journey to Inner Mongolia

Abstract

DURING the last week of December 2006 the Inner Mongolia Normal University presented its first-ever production of a Shakespeare play. With just eight weeks of preparation, Romeo and Juliet nonetheless proved to be a gratifying success for the school's English department, the talented cast of ethnic Han and Mongolian English majors, and the two young directors, Shang Xiuling and Wang Xinxin. However, in an improbably indirect way, the triumph really belonged to a long-deceased teacher. In the 1960s William Teunis was the most revered--and feared--English teacher at Kennedy High School in Montgomery County, Maryland. He was the first man I had ever met with a full beard, and he had honed to razor sharpness intellectual and verbal repertoire at Harvard and Iowa State. While he was not physically imposing, he had a presence that commanded instant respect. Though he rarely raised voice, diction was so clear and precise that it could easily be heard across a noisy auditorium, especially when he admonished someone with the threat of serving his head up on a platter. His methods were a strange brew of traditional and innovative practices. We were always seated in a boy/girl checkerboard pattern and lectured regularly on avoiding carefully prepared list of odious We were all eager to please him, but terrified when we were actually assigned to one of classes. But most of all Mr. Teunis was a Shakespearean. Each year, he took a group of gangly suburban adolescents and turned them into passionate, brooding, swashbuckling characters. King Lear, Hamlet, Richard III--somehow he was able to draw great characters out of a bunch of ordinary high school kids. It was quite remarkable, and he was very much a local legend for it. His career and life were cut short by a tragic accident in the spring of 1970, the year of my graduation. I was never part of the group of bohemian intellectuals who gravitated toward Mr. Teunis and populated the English office. Quite the contrary, I was a quiet jock and spent most of my time avoiding English in any form. Because I grew up dyslexic in the days before special education, I had learned well how to avoid exposure--and how to live down embarrassment. The kind of intellectual rigor represented by Mr. Teunis was what I spent most of my time trying to dodge. However, I was not entirely successful, and consequently he was able to slip me two gifts of immeasurable value. The first was in eighth grade, when he required students to read outside books. I was essentially a nonreader who struggled even with the required texts. Whether or not he recognized it as such, Mr. Teunis' gift was to allow me to read something I was interested in, regardless of its literary status. For me, that turned out to be the fantasy paperbacks with garish covers that were becoming popular at that time. I started with the short stories of Robert E. Howard (creator of the Conan character) and worked my way up to Tolkien. These were the first books that I had ever been encouraged to read that could sustain my interest long enough for me to undertake the laborious effort of reading them. Mr. Teunis somehow knew that, for students like me, reading anything was better than reading nothing. His second gift to me didn't come until my senior year. Students like me spent most of our time learning to write as little as possible, thus minimizing our mistakes. Somehow Mr. Teunis was able to discern the faintest whisper of a voice between the spelling errors in my writing. He was the first teacher in my school career who valued what students had to say, rather than simply the mechanics of saying it. He encouraged us to think first and clean up the errors later. His focus on meaning made the dozens of subsequent trips to the dictionary worthwhile. So my school experience was saved pretty much at the last minute, in large part because of a little bit of attention and encouragement that came my way from Mr. …