Dr. Lell was my Shakespeare professor at Concordia, and he was one of the best teachers I've ever had -- and I've loved a lot of teachers. I still remember how excited I was to sign up for his Shakespeare class my sophomore year. My advisor tried unsuccessfully to convince me to take her Ibsen class instead, which was offered at the same time and would have fulfilled the same requirement. No disrespect to her or to Ibsen -- I loved her too, and I like Ibsen -- but I had to have that Shakespeare class. I'd been salivating over that Shakespeare class practically from the moment I got my acceptance letter to Concordia. I remember finding one of my friends after registering for spring semester, and we actually jumped up and down with glee over the fact that we were going to get to take that Shakespeare class together. We just kept saying, "I'm so excited!" over and over again. English majors can be a special kind of nerdy.
The class didn't disappoint. Dr. Lell was possibly the most energetic professor I ever had. His passion for Shakespeare, for literature, made him one of my most inspiring role models. The Fargo Forum ran a nice piece on him at the beginning of March, part of which I'll include here:
Lell has long been prominent at Concordia, where he filled lecture halls with his class on Shakespeare and made countless trips with students to watch productions of Shakespeare’s plays, including study sojourns to the bard’s England. “I’ve always been able to hit it off with the undergraduate students,” Lell said. He was an academic rebel of sorts, shunning the “publish or perish” pressures to conduct obscure scholarly research to focus instead on the classroom. When he began his teaching career at Concordia in 1970, after seven years at the University of Nebraska, Lell was a pioneer in the study of Shakespeare in the American academy. His hallmark was a stubborn devotion to the performance – “The play’s the thing!” – instead of the text, long given primacy in academic studies of Shakespeare. For Lell, who has an undergraduate degree in piano performance, studying the text of the play was the path to enjoying the staged version, popular entertainment of Elizabethan England, when the Globe Theatre was the Hollywood of its day. “It’s almost like a foreign language when you read Shakespeare,” Danielson said. “He made it approachable.” So approachable that 4,600 students took his Shakespeare class, 6,000 accompanied him to productions at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg, and more than 400 joined him on seminar trips to Great Britain. Some came back for more as students at his courses through F/M Communiversity, and others joined Lell on study trips to Italy and Scandinavia, among other destinations in his global classroom. Cathy McMullen, a member of Concordia’s English faculty, accompanied Lell on two study trips to Great Britain. As preparation for one of the trips, she sat in on his Shakespeare class, where Lell’s enthusiasm for his subject was infectious. That enthusiasm took physical form on a study trip, where his ritual for combating jet lag was to immediately set off on a walking tour of London, with students five decades younger struggling to keep up. “You can’t help but catch his enthusiasm,” McMullen said. Lell made sure to take time when students came to him with questions, never giving the impression a question was unwelcome. “He just had all the time in the world for them and never made them feel small for asking,” she said.
I have so many specific memories of that class -- where I sat, who took it with me, where I was when I read each of the plays (I read Richard III sequestered in the basement of Fjelstad Hall, Othello in Barnes and Noble in Fargo, Hamlet on a bus during band tour, etc). One day Kristin Rudrud, best known for her role in Fargo, came to class and acted a scene from Richard III. I was struck both by how multifaceted an actress she is -- she played the bereaved queen as convincingly as she played a very, very Midwestern mom -- and by how much love and admiration she had for my teacher. (We had the same teacher! Wow.) I was fortunate enough to attend three Shakespeare productions at the Guthrie during my time at Concordia: Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet. I used to take my friend Dana to his weekly Shakespeare movie night; she enjoyed it as well, even though she wasn't an English major. I remember talking with him during the spring semester of my senior year, worried about teaching Julius Caesar to a bunch of high school sophomores.
"I'll never understand why they always try to do that one with sophomores," he said, wincing a little. "There are so many great comedies!" But he gave me some good suggestions, and if anyone could make Julius Caesar an enjoyable experience, it was Dr. Lell. While teaching Othello the next year to high school students in Washington, I found myself recalling my old teacher's words about how the Laurence Fishburne version of the movie had the best Desdemona, and like my old teacher, I showed clips from a couple of different versions for comparison. (That was back in the day when my school district didn't ban everything.) I wonder how many times I subconsciously echo him in my teaching; I hope it's often, because he embodied everything a teacher of literature should strive to be.
In the fall of 2006, when I was still on maternity leave with Suzannah, my mom and I drove from Seattle to Moorhead for Concordia's homecoming. I'd only been back once in the five years since I'd graduated, a quick trip to campus a few summers earlier after my brother's graduation from UND, but the campus was pretty empty. One of my favorite parts of the weekend was the open house in the English department. I've kept in touch with some of my professors over the years, so I loved seeing them again and catching up in person. I hadn't spoken with Dr. Lell since 2001, though. I wanted to tell him just how much I appreciated his classes, how much he inspired me both as a teacher and a reader, but I didn't actually expect him to remember me personally. To my surprise, as soon as he saw me, his face broke into a grin, he called me by name, and grabbed me in a warm bear hug. I wasn't as close to him as some of my fellow English majors were, and I don't claim to have had a particularly special relationship with him; I was simply a girl who loved Shakespeare and loved his class. It's true, though, that he had this gift of making us all feel special to him.
Someone on Facebook commented yesterday that when he wasn't smiling, he was twinkling. I think that's a pretty apt description.
It seems only fitting to end with Sonnet 30, one that Dr. Lell recited for his fellow faculty members at a recent appreciation dinner, and one that is making the rounds in various online tributes. Conclusions have always been one of my weaknesses anyway; I can only say that I miss him, that my heart hurts for his loss, and that I feel so blessed that I could be one of the thousands of lives he touched.
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.
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