“Just about a hundred years ago an editor of Shakespeare’s work … made the following assertion: ‘Shakespeare should not be put in the hands of the young without the warning that the foolish things in his plays were written to please the foolish, the filthy for the filthy, and the brutal for the brutal.'” Thus begins the syllabus for Professor Scott Maisano’s course, which invites students into the century-long argument over the issue of “foolish,” “filthy,” and “brutal” incidents in Shakespeare’s plays. Is such material just incidental or is it somehow essential to-and characteristic of-Shakespeare’s genius? In other words are the filthy or brutal parts of Shakespeare’s plays simply evidence that he had to compete with the brothels and blood sports on offer in London’s theatre district or is all the explicit violence and implicit sexuality part of Shakespeare’s own artistic sensibility?

ENGL 382: Early Shakespeare, “unofficially” subtitled as Shakespeare: SVL (Sex, Violence, and Laughter), is just one of the classes Prof. Maisano is teaching this semester. One of the required texts for this class is Stanley Wells’ Looking for Sex in Shakespeare, a book published in 2004 by Cambridge University Press. Many people, when they see the words “sex” and “violence,” don’t immediately associate them with Shakespeare. Isn’t Shakespeare “the greatest poet and dramatist of the world”? Although Maisano definitely agrees that Shakespeare is a great poet and dramatist, he also believes strongly that some of that greatness is owing to the fact that Shakespeare could be erotic, filthy, and brutal too.

Maisano’s focus on the issues of sex and violence in Shakespeare’s early work is not simply an attempt to “whet the audiences’ appetite” for more Renaissance drama, but also a way of encouraging students to see Shakespeare’s works differently and thus critically. In his class, students are reminded that thinking critically is impossible without also thinking creatively. Because this is a new approach to Shakespeare’s work for almost every student, they need to pay very careful attention to each word in the play.

Maisano also urges students to connect Shakespeare’s work to contemporary issues just as Shakespeare himself connected ancient Roman and Greek literature, as well as the Bible, to contemporary issues in Elizabethan England. Maisano says, “If we cease to look for new ideas in Shakespeare, then his work becomes, like Latin, a dead language. Shakespeare, for his part, helped preserve a number of Latin authors, like Ovid, from premature anonymity by making them contemporary, relevant, and, well, ‘sexy’ to Elizabethan and Jacobean authors some 1600 years later. He didn’t tell his audiences, in a didactic and condescending manner, ‘you need to read this stuff.’ Instead, he just presented the material in a way that made audiences WANT to read more.” Thus Maisano hopes students revive Shakespeare in today’s world.

For the next semester, he will be teaching Five British Writers and Late Shakespeare in which he plans to focus on a future history of Shakespeare. According to his course description, not only did Shakespeare wonder and worry about how he would be remembered after he died but he even “engineered his own ‘comebacks’ or returns from the grave,” just like the dead father in his tragedy Hamlet.

Prof. Maisano is currently working on a book about Shakespeare’s very last plays as “science fictions” which look ahead to a future history, a world which “will have been” as a result of the new science being produced by Bacon, Galileo and Descartes. During this summer vacation, he obviously plans to work on his book, but has also been invited to present a paper at the British Shakespeare Association. As for his spare time: “Well, I’ll be watching Lifetime ‘television for women,'” quoth he, “and trying out to be the next American Idol.” So, book up his class for the coming semester before he becomes too “idol” to teach at UMass Boston.