The Story of Adam Max Cohen

Imagine that you love the work of Shakespeare—not as most of us do who go to an occasional play and can recite a few lines learned in high school—but enough to make it your life’s work. You follow your passion, working your way through the labyrinthine corridors of academia to become a Shakespearian scholar and professor. Your life centers on reading, discussing, and writing about the Bard. You earn your living by teaching college students to appreciate Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear. Imagine, too, that one day—quite suddenly—everything you worked for and love so deeply is taken away. You have lost your ability to read.

This was the calamity Adam Max Cohen faced. A professor and scholar who had devoted his life to Shakespeare, Cohen was at the peak of his career when he developed a brain tumor that rendered him illiterate. “I felt like King Lear in the wilderness,” he later wrote. “Like Hamlet after his father’s death, Caesar as Brutus plunges in the dagger.” Like many of Shakespeare’s characters, Cohen was dealing with a life that had lost its center. He wondered how he could teach students to read Shakespeare when he could no longer do so himself; how he could continue his scholarship when he couldn’t so much as read a bedtime story to his daughter. He no longer knew who he was.

Facing what he called a “dizzying series of reversals, redefinitions, assaults, and losses,” Cohen could have succumbed to depression and despair. He did not. Instead, he learned to approach his life’s work in a new way. Instead of reading Shakespeare’s plays, he and his students watched them. Rather than approaching the Bard’s work as literature, he learned to see it as performance. A new world opened to him.

Cohen soon realized that, for the first time, he was experiencing Shakespeare’s work as the Bard meant it to be experienced. Not as literature to be read, but as performance to be watched and heard.

He now had something in common with Shakespeare’s original audience. The people who gathered at London’s Globe Theater at the turn of the 17th century were not scholars. Most of them were uneducated and illiterate. They were also dealing with change and uncertainty, “struggling to understand their place in an increasingly confusing . . . world,” just as Cohen was. They did not come to the theater to study, but to see the complexities of life enacted on the stage—and to be entertained. Through his sudden disability, Cohen found new depth and meaning in Shakespeare’s work, and a connection with the people who first saw it performed.

Cohen’s story is about many things. On one level, it’s a simple fable about finding one’s way in the face of adversity—and a reminder of how the Universe can drag us kicking and screaming to surprising places full of astonishing new insights. But it’s also about literature. It’s about the power of the word. About how the best writing can reach out and touch us, can center and support us, four centuries after it was written. And it reminds us that literature is not for an elite class of students and scholars, but for everyone—even those who cannot read it.

Adam Max Cohen regained his ability to read for several months before he succumbed to brain cancer in January 2010. He was thirty-eight. By the time of his death, he had published several books on Shakespeare and the Elizabethan age, and had chronicled his experiences with cancer in an unpublished work, Memoir of a Shakespeare Professor.

You can read more about Adam Max Cohen at www.boston.com.