Lynne Johnson is a volunteer teacher at Howard County’s newest 50+ Center. Johnson, who has decades of teaching experience and a love of literature, teaches a free Shakespeare class. Photo by Edward Warner

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It’s that time of year again, when one’s memories turn to school days — and perhaps to that singular teacher or professor who seemed to live and breathe their subject, passing on their enthusiasm to students.

Howard County resident Lynne Johnson is such a teacher. Johnson leads a Shakespeare reading group at the East Columbia 50+ Center, one of several free classes and clubs offered this fall at the county’s 50+ centers.

At the same center, older adults can take baduanjin classes, which explore the ancient Chinese qigong exercise. Or they can head over to the North Laurel 50+ Center, which offers a weekly drop-in jam session for musicians.

But Johnson, 75, holds the distinction of offering the only class where attendees encounter each of Shakespeare’s plays, reading the lines in round-robin fashion. In her class, no one has just one role: One student may by happenstance get only a “hark” during her turn, while another may end up reading all of Marc Anthony’s soliloquy over the slain body of Julius Caesar.

Johnson’s teaching method has a way of engaging her students and showing them how relevant these plays can be in their modern lives.

“I am an ambassador to Shakespeare,” she said, noting that she aims to make students aware of how relatable he is today. “It’s not some old-fashioned form of literature.”

A hefty gift

Not surprisingly, Johnson’s love of the Bard began in England, where Johnson arrived in the 1970s as a young woman. Her husband, Johnny, who was stationed there as an Air Force officer, bought her a three-inch-thick copy of The Riverside Shakespeare, which contains every play and sonnet. Johnson was off and running.

She began watching performances of the plays on the BBC, which had just promised to broadcast all of the Bard’s works over a six-year period.

Later, she saw plays at the theater in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon. All the while, she filled up her Riverside with marginal notes in red or black that now seem to outnumber the lines on each page.

Since her English sojourn, Johnson has seen every single one of Shakespeare’s plays performed, some several times.

But her greatest joy has been teaching Shakespeare, which she began doing at a senior center in Georgia in 1999.

“The minute I started, they’d have to drag me away,” she recalled.

Johnson does what she loves for the joy of it. She’s one of several volunteers who teach classes at the East Columbia 50+ Center, which in March celebrated the one-year anniversary of the opening of its new building, increasing the center’s space tenfold, to 29,000 square feet.

Volunteer teacher for 26 years

During her 17-year stint living in the Atlanta area, Johnson taught a weekly Shakespeare class and belonged to two Shakespeare reading groups, where attendees read plays aloud.

Now, having relocated to Maryland with her husband after his retirement, Johnson conducts a Shakespeare reading group that has the scholarly richness of a college-level class.

As the group of a dozen or more students begins a new play, Johnson provides copies of the extensive notes she wrote about the play while teaching it in Georgia.

Then, as the class reads each new act in the play, she sets the stage by describing what’s to come, clarifying the plot so readers know the context of their lines.

Recently, she ended a class with a video of some of her favorite Shakespearean actors doing famous soliloquies.

Free classes at 50+ centers

Johnson’s class is free because, as in Georgia, she works as a volunteer.

Volunteers are especially important to the East Columbia center because when it reopened just over a year ago, it had a huge new space to fill. So, the center issued a call for volunteers to lead activities and services.

As many as 60 people stepped up, according to the center’s director, Meridy McCague. The volunteers started a book club, chess group, a men’s discussion group and a grief-recovery group, among other offerings.

“The volunteer effort here has been exhilarating,” McCague said. “We’re dazzled by the new things we’d be able to offer” at the center, which gets 3,000 to 4,000 visits per month.

McCague admitted that she was unsure Johnson’s proposed Shakespeare class would succeed, but since its launch, “it has gone to great heights,” she said.

Favorite play and sonnet

So how does Johnson get her students engaged? Her recipe for doing so is simple.

First, she suggests, watch a performance or a video of the play you’re planning to read, so you can know in advance what the story is about, given how Elizabethan language can confuse modern ears.

Next, learn about Shakespeare’s poetic techniques, such as alliteration and iambic pentameter, so you’ll “really see the poetry,” she said. Then read the play alone or with classmates.

Her favorite play, of course, is Shakespeare’s longest and perhaps most meaningful: Hamlet, a work she calls “unique in all literature.” She’s seen Hamlet performed 10 times on stage — and 15 times as a film.

Surprisingly, her favorite Shakespearean performance wasn’t someone in the role of Hamlet, but rather Ian McKellen as lead in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Macbeth. Yet she also admits a fondness for Denzel Washington in his recent turn on Broadway as Othello and Ralph Fiennes as Macbeth in a Shakespeare Theater Company performance in Washington, D.C.

As for Johnson’s favorite sonnet by Shakespeare, hers is number 29.

“For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings/That then I scorn to change my state with kings,” the sonnet reads. In other words, true wealth lies in our friendships.

She says it reminds us that, when others are happy but you’re not, the recollection of deep friendships can take away the sting. As Johnson tells her students, Shakespeare’s words have as much power now as they did 400 years ago.

For a list of classes at 50+ Centers, some of which charge fees, go to howardcountymd.gov/recreation-parks/programs#programs-by-age and click on Active Adult Programs.