Bad television has been blamed for much wretched behavior and many social ills in modern times, so it may come as a surprise that a “really terrible” TV series is what set Menlo Park writer Michael P. Jensen on the happy path of his life’s pursuit.
It was 1978, and the BBC’s production of William Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” was decidedly not as the young Mr. Jensen liked it. “It was terrible, I knew … but I also knew there was something going on with that language that was worth knowing more about,” Mr. Jensen, now 53, recalls.
Deciding to dig in for the duration of the series, he began to read each Shakespeare play before its broadcast “so that I would understand the story and could listen to the language,” he says. “And it worked for me.
“And so this really bad series on television … became kind of a magical experience for me.”
The magic didn’t go away after the series disappeared, however. Nor did his hunger to learn more about the Bard and his nearly 400-year-old work. Three decades later, Mr. Jensen is an independent Shakespeare scholar whose reputation in the world of fellow scholars has led to invitations to conferences as a presenter, contributions to scholarly publications, and what has to be one of the largest, most unusual collections of “Shakespeariana” imaginable.
A grand collection
Last year, he gathered a large portion of this collection — books, movies, comics, gadgets, trinkets and toys with some connection to the Bard — and hauled it up to Southern Oregon University’s Hannon Library in Ashland, Oregon, where it now exists under a grand title: The Michael P. Jensen Collection of Shakespeare in Mass Media and Popular Culture.
He chose the university library to house the collection because its hometown, Ashland, is also home to the celebrated Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It’s also a second home for Mr. Jensen and his wife, Cydne.
The new collection was launched last October, and at that time Mr. Jensen delivered a “Shakespeare in the Library” series talk at the Hannon on the history of radio broadcasts of the festival’s performances.
Mr. Jensen, a freelance writer who has lived in Menlo Park for about 17 years, delivered about 200 items to launch the collection and has many more he hopes to donate soon. On the list of future donations are comic books, stickers, bookmarks, mints in a tin, and a rubber ducky-style bathtub toy. There are early to mid-20th century books and periodicals, and a 21st century computer software program for classroom instruction on Macbeth.
Some of the more unusual items already in the collection: a party-favor noisemaker bearing Shakespeare’s image, a Shakespeare action figure, and a bobble-head Bard.
He’s a magnet for such items, he concedes. “Friends and family know that I’m on the lookout for this stuff.”
They not only send objects his way, they also alert him to possible Shakespearean allusions in movies, television shows and publications. Those alerts often launch him into his own investigations, furthering his expertise in a growing field of Shakespeare studies: the influence of the Western world’s most famous playwright on popular culture.
On that topic, he can elaborate till dawn. Among his many published articles are expositions on the evolution of modern speakers’ use of the name Romeo; uses of Shakespeare in the comic strips Dick Tracy, Alley Oop and Krazy Kat; and actor Mel Gibson’s views on Hamlet.
He also was one of only 13 contributors to a massive, two-volume reference book published last month, “Shakespeares After Shakespeare,” focusing on the Bard in the mass media and popular culture. Mr. Jensen wrote more than 700 entries in the radio and the comics sections.
Dramatic debut
It was the article he wrote on Mel Gibson, who starred in the 1990 film “Hamlet,” directed by Franco Zeffirelli, that boosted his visibility in the world of Shakespeareans and opened doors to him.Mr. Jensen had attended a Hamlet conference in Berkeley around the time the film was being issued, and Mr. Gibson showed up unexpectedly. The actor then spoke at the event, and afterward, Mr. Jensen managed to snag a few minutes with him.
“I was really impressed with his professionalism, and began to see Hamlet through an actor’s eyes,” he says.
Only afterward did he decide to write the article. “I was sort of going through a crisis in my writing life,” he recalls. “I’d been writing for a long time, but (had started) asking myself, what do I really want to write about? Then this opportunity just fell into my lap.”
Although he initially saw the article as “a one-time thing” in the area of Shakespearean topics, he says, he found himself enjoying the community of fellow Shakespeare lovers he found himself in more and more, and started coming up with good ideas for more articles.
He followed through with those ideas, slowly establishing a support system of scholars and editors, including editor and scholar Bernice Kliman, who he says became “a sort of mentor.”
“And the world opened wider and wider — the door opened wider and wider,” he says.
Independent scholar
When Mr. Jensen began serious research as an independent Shakespeare scholar, he did so “with great intimidation,” he admits.Not only does he not have a doctorate in Shakespearean studies, he did miserably in a class on the Bard he took as an undergrad.
“There were all these people with Ph.D.s, and (I imagined they were saying), how dare I try to swim in their swimming pool,” he recalls.
“I kind of expected to be swatted away, and I wasn’t,” he adds, crediting what he found to be an immense generosity within the Shakespearean community.
Today, he is a contributing editor of the Shakespeare Newsletter, and his work is cited in a range of Shakespearean publications. For the newsletter, he created and writes the “Talking Books” column — interviews with Shakespeare scholars.
He has also co-taught two courses in the Stanford Continuing Studies program.
Through the holiday season he was hard at work at the Stanford library and other research outlets preparing for lectures this month and in March.
Lifelong study
Before getting hooked on the Bard, Mr. Jensen says, he had taken up other interests with passion and steady focus. For example, his fascination with the actor and film director Orson Wells kept him occupied for about two years, he notes.“But with most things, you get to a point where you know it, then move on,” he says.
Then came those poorly executed BBC television productions of Shakespeare plays that caught his imagination.
“Shakespeare is sufficiently inexhaustible that, after all this time, there’s far more that I want to know than I ever shall,” he says. What hooked him, he explains, is the “breadth and depth” of the man and his work.
“There are so many ways of discovering and experiencing Shakespeare,” he says.
“You can (know him) through his times, through the other plays that were written at that time and his place in that mosaic, through his language, through his performance history, through modern performance, through studying the ways Shakespeare has been studied over the centuries, through his characters — I could add three times as many to that list and pretty much all of them fascinate me.”
Donating to the collection
Have any Shakespeariana lying around the house or boxed up in your closet? Mike Jensen would love to have it so that he can catalogue it and add it to the Michael P. Jensen Collection of Shakespeare in Mass Media and Popular Culture in Ashland, Oregon. He can be contacted by e-mail at mikejensen16@hotmail.com. “We’re not looking for cash, but a few new Shakespeare trinkets would be great,” he says.
