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YOU never can tell what the future holds. When I embarked on a twosemester seminar in Shakespeare thirty-five years ago, I expected a major extension of my graduate study but not an encounter with a legendary figure. In 1968, though J. Leeds Barroll III had already established credentials sufficient to secure him an endowed professorship at Vanderbilt, he had barely begun the remarkable achievements that now make him so distinguished. Many others whose lives and careers he has touched or transformed might have written this essay in his honor, but no one else, I suspect, has known him in as many different capacities. Teacher, scholar, visionary, administrator, editor, colleague, mentor, friend. It has been my privilege to observe Leeds at first hand in all these capacities.
He might well have made his mark solely as an extraordinary teacher. In that long-ago seminar at Vanderbilt, he set up procedures that demonstrated not only his own enormous grasp of Shakespearean scholarship but also his high standards for professional competence. Each week we heard a brilliant, meticulously crafted lecture on some aspect of the field-biography, theater history, textual studies, bibliography, critical approaches, and other methodological matters in the first semester, with a sweep through the canon in the second semester. I still consult my notes sometimes, humbled yet profoundly grateful for the foundation Leeds Barroll provided us. One unique feature, which I subsequently incorporated into my own teaching, involved weekly assignments at random to two or three students who had to prepare a critical review of some essential work in Shakespearean scholarship related to the topic for the next session. Regardless of any other commitments for any other courses, we had to assess the work in an ungraded but formally written threeminute presentation (accompanied by a handout identifying three significant reviews of the book), delivered as if it were a paper at a professional meeting. Nowadays, when graduate students routinely show up at such meetings and submit papers for pre-PhD publication, this practice may seem commonplace. At the time, however, it provided a rare, realistic foretaste of the pressure to produce which haunts anyone with serious aspirations. After each presentation, the weekly victims received critiques of their performances by fellow students and by Leeds. We learned more than...