Retired Iowa Professor Makes Shakespeare Accessible for All Ages

PHOTO Courtesy Blaine Greteman UI English department chair Blaine Greteman (right) and his students studying abroad in London this past summer visited Shakespeare professor emerita Miriam Gilbert (center) at her second home in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Miriam Gilbert may have retired from the University of Iowa’s Department of English a decade ago, but she’s far from finished with teaching. Described by colleagues and mentees as “a force of nature” and “brilliant and generous,” the professor emerita and expert in all things Shakespeare continues to turn audiences of all ages on to the possibilities of theater.

Following more than four decades in the formal classroom, Gilbert now teaches from different stages. She leads frequent talkbacks at Riverside Theatre, the Iowa City company she’s been intimately involved with since its inception in the early 1980s. She also teaches an annual class for UI Senior College, which since moving online attracts 150 people from all over the country.

Among the students she taught at Iowa from 1969–2013, Gilbert is best remembered for the acting groups that were central to her Shakespeare classes. Having students move from the page to the stage came naturally to Gilbert, who spent the lion’s share of her own undergraduate days at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and the University of Manchester in England working on theatrical productions. “I did sound, stage management, producing—you name it,” she says (including a performance of a Harold Pinter play that the playwright attended and “loathed”). By senior year, she figured she needed to get serious about her actual major in English.

With a lifelong love of teaching, Gilbert was attracted to join the UI faculty because of its unique team-taught program, The English Semester. Students met daily and read deeply. Small groups were assigned to perform scenes from the plays on the syllabus. Gilbert immediately understood the value in this embodied practice and adapted it to her future classes. “When you rehearse, you really understand how a play works,” she says.

PHOTO: DAVID GREEDY Riverside Theatre's Adam Knight with Miriam Gilbert at the annual Riverside Gala

Gilbert gives people permission to find immediacy in words composed more than four centuries ago. “Miriam understands that theater is a living, breathing thing,” says Adam Knight, Riverside Theatre’s producing artistic director. Whether it’s turning a scene from Coriolanus into an Iowa caucus with the characters beating each other with seed corn caps, or donning punk garb for Hamlet, her point is that these plays are as germane to the current moment as to Elizabethan times.

April Lidinsky (88BA), who took several classes from Gilbert and is currently professor of women’s and gender studies at Indiana University South Bend, says, “I remember Miriam’s immense delight in every weird staging we conjured. She roared with laughter at our comic turns and took seriously our interpretations of challenging scenes.”

Part of Gilbert’s pleasure in shifting her teaching focus to the older students of Senior College, a program run by retired UI faculty and staff, is the depth of experience they bring to the plays. “When I teach King Lear to undergrads and ask what’s happening in the opening scene, they always say he’s crazy or senile,” says Gilbert. “But in Senior College, a woman said she thought he was facing empty nest syndrome. It was the reaction of a person who has a lived understanding of what it’s like to have their children move away.”

It’s Gilbert’s curiosity that makes her such an irresistible champion of Shakespeare. “She seems to be constantly learning new things about plays she’s been teaching for decades,” says Knight, “which speaks to the brilliance of Shakespeare but also of Miriam.”

Recently, she surprised herself when her teaching of Henry V coincided with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As is her practice, she spent hours reviewing and selecting clips of productions of a play that she’d long taught as “a success story.” This time, however, she read the play differently and was overcome by war’s ruinous effects. “I was unprepared for how emotionally devastated I was by it,” she says.

Gilbert’s capacity to help people not only decipher Shakespeare but relish in his plays is very much alive. This past summer, a group of UI undergraduates taking a travel-abroad class, Shakespeare’s England, attended a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company and then went to Gilbert’s second home in Stratford-upon- Avon, the birthplace of Shakespeare. UI professor Blaine Greteman, who taught the class and accompanied the group, said they were mystified by the avant-garde production. But not for long.

“Miriam cooked us an incredible meal and conducted a master class in her garden,” says Greteman. “They were hooked. Walking back to the train station, one of them said, ‘Well, now I think that’s the best play I’ve ever seen!’”

Jennifer New (84BA) played Goneril in a 1982 class production of King Lear. Thanks to Miriam Gilbert, she still knows her lines by heart: “Pluck out his eyes!” Jennifer lives in Iowa City where she runs her own business focused on facilitation and storytelling.

Stories From Gilbert's Classroom

“Miriam lit up my life. I took her Shakespeare course as a wide-eyed first-year grad student in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her approach to Shakespeare—as a dramatist, whose plays were meant to be performed, not ossified in a textbook—was revolutionary. The highlight? I got to play Puck in a classroom performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream.”
—T.C. Boyle (74MFA, 77PhD), novelist

“As a science major [at the UI in the 1980s] who loved literature, I really wanted to take one of [Gilbert’s] Shakespeare classes back then, but never managed to do so. This was one of my biggest regrets from my undergraduate years. I was thrilled to see [she] would be teaching via video this spring through Senior College. I am living and working in California these days, and it is an amazing experience to be able to realize one of my undergraduate ambitions from 2,000 miles away!”
—Mary Malik (89BA)

“She has every right to be intimidating, but Miriam may be the most positive, affirming teachers I’ve ever had. When I did The Tempest, the two of us went through the play word for word. She helped expand my understanding of what was possible. Miriam made me a bolder actor.”
—Jody Hovland (81MFA), Riverside Theatre co-founder

“Dr. Gilbert does not suffer fools, which may intimidate some, but she is also an eminently kind human being and a stimulating teacher. I have never met anyone more passionate about the performance of Shakespeare's plays, and it is difficult not to be swept up in that passion when you are studying Shakespeare with her; it is a great privilege to explore a subject with a professor who truly loves it. Miriam attended my wedding party, she covered my classes when I had to have an emergency appendectomy, and she was the first to celebrate with me when I passed my dissertation defense.”
—Judith Coleman (08MA, 13PhD), associate English professor, Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi

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