Bill Demastes tottered back and forth behind the lecturn in the Nicholson Hall chemistry lab turned English lecture hall.
He checked his watch as students continued in and chatted over the loud squeaks of the wooden desks. 
   He finally leaned over the desk and said, “Good morning, class” instead of his usual opener, “Questions, comments, observations?”
    No one said a word.
   “Anybody have anything they want to say about ‘Hamlet’ before we put it to bed?”
   Silence still filled the large room.
   Taking their cue as if onstage himself, the 49-year-old English professor stood back up and asked his Shakespearean literature class, “What’s odd about Othello?”
   “He’s a brother,” a student on the second row quickly responded.
   “Right! He’s black! He’s African-American,” Demastes said. “Why did Shakespeare make Othello black? Why didn’t he make Hamlet black?”
    “Hamlet already had too many problems,” joked Amy Sandstrum, international studies sophomore sitting in the third row.
    Demastes found her response amusing.
    “He came home that day laughing hysterically,” said Jean Rohloff, his wife. “He loves undergraduates in particular because he loves the freshness they bring to it. He likes the new ideas and the enthusiasm that undergrads have about Shakespeare.”
The communal atmosphere Demastes creates in his Shakespeare class mirrors the course material and his teaching style.
He is like the great magician Prospero in “The Tempest.” His students are like the other characters on the island in that they can be inspired by his desire to learn.
“What kind of character is Iago?” he asked them.
“Manipulative!” “Revengeful!” “Self-centered!” they responded as he wrote every response on the chalkboard.
His questions do not stop.
“Why did Othello promote Cascio?” he asked them. “Is anyone here of a suspicious nature? Go ahead, raise your hands.”
After class, Demastes said his goal is to show students that Shakespeare offers them the same elements they see today in pop culture.
“They’re intimidated by the idea that Shakespeare is some kind of high artist,” he said. “But he was intended to be accessible. And he is if students give him a chance.”
For example, he said, Shakespeare understood how young adults easily forget classwork after thinking they have fallen in love.
“I burn, I pine, I perish,” Lucentio says to Tranio in “The Taming of the Shrew,” completely forgetting his academic intentions in Padua at the first sight of the lovely Bianca.
Demastes also said the pitfalls of youthful ambition in “Macbeth” and the crystallized jealousy of “Othello” hit close to home with college students.
“[Shakespeare] gets straight to the heart of the matter,” Demastes said. “What makes people really jealous?”
Students that enroll in college to learn more than a skill or trade can better understand how the world operates through Shakespeare’s works, he said.
“He gives them the material and asks them to do something with it,” Demastes said.
 
Act I: Literature Over Latrines 
 
emastes grew up in the military town of Columbus, Ga.
    There was not much to do for a small boy. For the adults there were strip bars.
   “In high school we snuck into one,” said Jim Young, 50, of his adventures with Bill.
   In a phone interview from North Carolina, Young said Demastes took advanced placement classes and played sports with him.
   Well-versed and able to adapt to different groups, Young said, Demastes mingled with everyone at the Krystal Burger hangout – where fellow high schoolers waited for someone to streak naked.
   “People would get out there, park and do the ‘Happy Days’ thing,” Demastes said.
Demastes wanted to better understand life after high school and not follow in his father’s military footsteps. And as the Vietnam War was winding down in 1973, he was not forced to enter the draft.   
He sold the love of his life at the time — his metallic blue Chevy Vega with an obnoxiously loud engine — to pay for tuition and other expenses at the “wild and radical” University of California at Berkeley.
   Demastes said he “got closer to the truth” in Victorian literature and post-modern English theory instead of the philosophy classes toward his degree.
So he earned his master’s degree in American literature back home at the University of Georgia, and then traveled to the University of Wisconsin, or “The Berkeley of the Midwest,” for a Ph.D. in Renaissance studies.
           
Act II: ‘Over Stringbeans’
   
econds passed. Jean Rohloff could not answer why she fell in love with Demastes.
She sat speechless in her office wearing a long black dress, pink sweater and colorful scarf. Behind the glasses on her slim face, she thought about their first meeting “over stringbeans” at a 1981 dinner party in graduate school.
   Finally, she pointed to the mailroom behind her office.
   “When he walks down that hallway, I still feel like I’m in school,” she said as her face reddened and her eyes began to water.
Embarrassed, she grabbed a stack of e-mails and covered her tears. “I think: That’s my husband. It’s the guy from school.”
Demastes was not the love-struck Lucentio falling for Bianca when he first met wife Jean, also an LSU English professor.
   But it did not take a love potion from Puck for them to start dating.
   “Our relationship was an evolution,” Rohloff said. “We were blessed in that we found more that we liked about each other.”
 
Act III: Transition to Sophomores 
 
s associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 2001 to 2003, Demastes had no teaching responsibilities. But he volunteered to teach one Shakespeare course per year. Complete removal from the classroom was not an option.
Teaching Shakespeare to undergraduates is what he has done since 1999.
   By the end of his 2148 class, notes on the blackboard look like a football play from hell.
   After the Othello discussion, the word “BLACK” with two arrows pointing to the words “OUTSIDER” and “NAIVE” became a giant hodgepodge of words, circles and arrows by the end of the hour.
   Of course, students such as Sandstrum – the sophomore that amused Demastes with her joke about Hamlet – claim there is no need to take notes anyway.
   “He puts it in terms you can understand. I don’t need an endless notebook of notes,” she said.
   Sandstrum said Demastes does not belittle students in a class of 300 when they raise their hands.
“Most professors will try to make your question seem stupid,” she said. “But he tries to understand and makes you feel smart for being bold enough to raise your hand.”
English senior Felipe Martinez said Demastes’ humor grabbed his attention since day one.
“He said, ‘You can call me ‘Bill,’ you can call me ‘Dr. Demastes,’ you can call me ‘Bill, you ignorant slut.’ That told me he would be upfront with us,” Martinez said. “He was trying to bring Shakespeare to our level, and I admired that about him.”
Demastes succeeded in getting Martinez to think in different perspectives by engaging in the material. He said Demastes’ discussion of duty versus inclination in each character made him ponder his post-graduation plans.
“Do I want a job that makes a lot of money or do I want a job helping others?” Demastes said.
 
Act IV: Tough Times 
 
emastes knew as associate dean he needed to work with University officials in 2003 to prepare a proposal that would release English instructors for more professors in accordance with the Flagship Agenda – the seven-year plan to increase research and scholarly productivity at the University.
   This led to larger lecture classes such as Demastes’ 300-student Shakespeare course.
   In 2003 there were about 45 professors and 60 instructors in the department. But the reversed ratio of professors to instructors is currently about two to one.
   Demastes presented the proposal to the entire faculty in an Allen Hall classroom with a small Powerpoint presentation.
   It was tough.
   “I sat up there and got bombarded. People weren’t happy,” he said. “They looked to the left, and then to the right, and knew one of them was getting fired by the end of the year.”
   Anna Nardo, chair of the English department, said Demastes was helpful that day in giving everyone a timetable of what would happen during the three-year transition.
   “Everyone’s emotions were high,” Nardo said. “[The faculty] needed clarity to know what was happening and when it was going to happen. He provided what clarity he had.”
 
Act V: Still Researching
 
emastes continues to learn through research.
    The majority of his authored books, articles and reviews focus on live theater and its culture.
His research, for example, on chaos theory argues that the rising and falling action of nature can be seen in theater. Theater, he says, can shadow what math and science say about the world.
   His research reminds him of philosophy lessons learned at Berkeley.
   “I like thinking about how to understand the world,” he said. “Theater in my mind is the place to experiment. Life says more than books. No other art form is as close to life, so it’s the next best thing to studying life.”
   Demastes watches the Atlanta Braves, drinks Budweiser, laughs out loud at “The Three Stooges” and named his boat “My Royalties” after financing it from published research.
    But the same man, according to those who know him, is also a literature scholar and teacher extraordinare.
And he has no plans of slowing down. Acquiring knowledge is pointless for Demastes if he cannot impart it.
Macbeth, Othello and Hamlet are forced to choose between their duty and their inclination to act.
For Demastes, engaging the imagination through Shakespeare is neither duty nor inclination. It is both.    
   “There’s an adrenaline high in the classroom that’s a lot of fun,” he said. “That’s what I live for.”