Mr. Burns, William Shakespeare & The Eternal Conversation

“More days than not, in class we’d just talk about stuff. Mr. Burns would often start the lesson by telling a story about his family. It could be about his wife Ellen, or their children—one of whom lived in the State Hospital up on the hill, institutionalized for most of his adult life with schizophrenia. From there the lessons would dovetail into a conversation about the foundational questions of our world. One day in particular, Mr. Burns asked who amongst us believed in love at first sight. My girlfriend at the time Karla and I looked at one another and our hands shot straight up.”—Michael Tallon

Fairly Unbalanced

By Michael Tallon

ANTIGUA Guatemala—(Hubris)—March 2025—Though I retired from the profession many years ago, on occasion I’m still asked why I became a teacher. The simple answer is that Mr. Burns, my high school Shakespeare teacher, inspired me to follow in his footsteps. The more dramatic answer involves a retelling of the time when King Lear, descending into madness upon the moors of my high school classroom, first cracked my skull open with a particularly deft bit of magical compassion and saw some light shining through.

For teacher-appreciation day—perhaps every day?—I’d like to share that story with you.

My hometown of Binghamton is a small city in Upstate New York, so it’s no surprise that Mr. Burns, aside from being my teacher, was also a family friend. Prior to becoming a teacher, he lived a remarkable, adventurous life. He was a veteran of World War Two, a businessman, the mayor of our town for some time, a friend to Bobby Kennedy, a poet, a painter, and a strident, passionate, lifelong advocate for the mentally ill. He didn’t enter the classroom until his late 50s when, for want of a new adventure, he became an English teacher at Binghamton High School.

Mr. Burns had been on the job for many years by the time I enrolled in his class, yet he still had a fire in the belly for teaching. Years later, when I was an educator at FDR High School in Brooklyn, as I watched young and hopeful newbies flame-out within months, I came to understand how rare such a long-burning passion truly is.

Teaching is a very hard job. It’s rewarding if you’re doing it right, but still it carries lousy pay, crazily early mornings, constant late-night headaches of paperwork and lesson planning, the more-than-occasional sociopathic colleague, and the incessant foolishness of office politics. Then there’s the administration, a hierarchy of superiors, many of whom chose a path to the front office when they discovered that they hated children. God, if it weren’t for the kids, the job would be unbearable. Truly.

There’s no getting around those realities, so if teachers are going to keep their drive, they’ve got to find something else to spin their jets. Mr. Burns had it, and he inspired it in me.

It wasn’t until my senior year that I finally got Mr. Burns as a teacher. He had just taken over the Shakespeare elective from a retiring Mr. Bernstein, and I wanted in. The word in the halls was that Mr. Burns was an easy A, and my transcript could certainly have used the boost. But I wanted to take the class for more than the good grade. I’d been a member of Mr. Bernstein’s Shakespeare Club for a few years, and I loved the camaraderie of the weird, artsy, intellectually adventurous, and chemically altered kids who read the Bard. Oddly, perhaps, reading and acting in local Shakespeare productions was a form of rebellion against the deadening culture of a 1980s teen-scape which gave rise to my national cohort of unnecessarily cynical Gen-Xers.

From the start, Mr. Burns’ class was different than anything I’d known. He was an old man—but he wasn’t. Bill, as I came to know him in the years after graduation, treated his students with civility and decency, love and compassion, though he did possess a wicked “teacher’s glare” if you did anything mean-spirited. His methods worked wonders with me, to the point where I took it upon myself to be his friend and ally in class if things started to get too far out of hand.

Our three big works that semester were “Romeo and Juliet,” “Hamlet,” and “Lear.” Most days in class, we would read aloud for a few minutes and then discuss the passages. On Fridays, we’d do something distantly akin to acting. There was never a sense of great pressure to cram for a test. Rather it was reading and learning as I’d eventually come to understand reading and learning—an activity engaged in for the slow pleasure of a world’s creation.

More days than not, in class we’d just talk about stuff. Mr. Burns would often start the lesson by telling a story about his family. It could be about his wife Ellen, or their children—one of whom lived in the State Hospital up on the hill, institutionalized for most of his adult life with schizophrenia. From there the lessons would dovetail into a conversation about the foundational questions of our world. One day in particular, Mr. Burns asked who amongst us believed in love at first sight. My girlfriend at the time Karla and I looked at one another and our hands shot straight up. Bill looked back at us through his dusty glasses which framed the upper boundary of his old-man beard, somewhat yellowed around the whiskers by nicotine and coffee, and he smiled. Bill loved Karla and me, and when he saw us sitting in the back row with our hands reaching for the sky, his eyes lit up and he told us about when he first met sweet Ellen. It was magic.

There were some deeper, maybe darker, classes, too, spent discussing the cruelty of fate or God or chance. It was with Mr. Burns that I was first asked by an adult if I believed that there even was a God. After so many years as an altar boy, I was finally allowed to wonder aloud why God, if He does exist, treats His own creation with such heightened disregard. Why famines? Why madness? Why death?

In one class, we spoke about what children should expect from their parents and what they owe their parents in return. Another day, there was a lesson wherein Mr. Burns spoke of the bonds that can exist between the young and the very old. Personally, I like to think that he slipped that one in there just for Karla and me.

I’d enjoyed these conversations and obviously saw that there was some overlap between our talks and the texts we studied, but up until the day that I walked into class to find Mr. Burns staring out the window overlooking Oak Street, the global lesson he’d been building toward had yet to sink in.

Still, in his class, I was daily afforded the opportunity to speak and to be heard. In that way, Mr. Burns’ class gave me a sense of agency. In return, I listened to him and I fell in love like we were family.

Ask any teacher why they keep coming back day after day, and he will tell you some version of the same truth. What we live for is the moment of crystallization when the lights suddenly go on inside one of our kids. It isn’t the student getting the proper answer to question number three, it’s watching the tumblers click into place on a whole range of interconnected thoughts.

Many years after I sat in Mr. Burns’ class as a 17-year-old boy and was a professional teacher on my own, I came to recognize the signs of a child who is at the cusp of understanding. It’s almost like you can start to hear it in their voices when they ask certain questions that lead on to bigger things. It is a delicate time. As a teacher, you must neither drive nor hinder the final passage to awareness. These moments are sacred. They are awakenings.

With me it happened on a Friday during the spring semester of 1984. The trees were blooming. I remember that well.

I walked into the class a few minutes before the bell. I was wearing my standard-issue uniform of ripped Levis, a dashiki, and wraparound sunglasses. Karla was already in her seat in the back of the room. The other kids were milling about, and Mr. Burns, white-maned and ancient, sat staring intently out the window paying no mind at all to the class. I said hellos to a few friends and sat down next to Karla as the bell rang. The room quieted a bit in expectation of commencement, but Mr. Burns didn’t move. He just kept staring out the window. It was like he was heartbroken or lost in thought.

After a few minutes, the relative silence of a class waiting for the teacher gave way to breaking waves of noise. Students started to talk with one another. Desks were turned to allow for more economical flirting.

Still, Mr. Burns just kept staring out the window as the ambient volume in the room grew.

After five very long minutes, paper airplanes were flying and general mayhem was on the verge of breaking loose.

Karla looked at me and said, “Do you think Mr. Burns is all right?” I told her I’d go check.

I walked over to the window to ask him if he was OK.

Without looking at me, while still staring out the window at a giant oak tree just down the road, he said, “Michael . . . Do you see it?” The tree? What the hell was he talking about?

“The tree? Yes, I see the tree, Mr. Burns.”

“Not just the tree. Do you see it?” he said with urgency. We both sat staring out the window for a moment. I was trying to understand what the hell he was on about. I was worried for him. He didn’t seem himself.

Then Mr. Burns stood up from the windowsill and squeezed my arm in a way particular to uncles and their brothers’ children—in a way that denotes so much love and also a trust in the mettle of the child. Then he sprang about like a lion tamer towards the class, cracked the whip of his voice and, in a flash, he’d transformed Room 417-A of Binghamton High School into the maelstrom of the English Moors.

Lear: Act III, Scene ii. “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Raaaaage! Blow!” he bellowed, and I swear to Christ that he spun every atom to attention within the sound of his voice. “You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!”

Startled, I turned, to him. But I could still see the oak tree, persistence of vision, standing in inverted colors, all around him.

“You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving THUNDER-BOLTS, Singe! My! White! Head! He mock-tore at his clothing. The tree exploded. “And thou, all-shaking thunder, strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world! Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once that make ingrateful man! Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! Spout, rain! Nor rain, wind, thunder . . . FIRE ARE MY DAUGHTERS!”

The class was stunned, silent. He turned towards me and his eyes were burning into mine. He paused . . . Then said much more softly: “I tax not you, you elements with unkindness; I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children, you owe me no subscription.”

He had quieted to near muteness, and the red oval around the sclera made it look like his own eyes were causing him a deadly pain. He said slowly, sadly, heartbrokenly: “ . . . then . . . let fall your horrible pleasure; here I stand . . . your slave . . . a poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man.”

He had fallen to his knees. He was shattered. I wanted to reach out and catch him in my arms. My jaw was hanging slack; I didn’t know fully where I was. Something had happened. In an instant, I knew what he meant. He knew I knew.

Leaving the mad king on the moors, Mr. Burns nodded his head towards the window and the tree beyond, and I felt as though I’d just been offered a gold-inlayed invitation to the conversation that predated even the author of those perfect words.

Let Olivier sail, I had met my Lear. And he loved me as much as he always loved Cordelia—as much as he still loved Regan and Goneril, their spite be damned. And all those conversations about children and parents, about love, about family, about madness made sense in the larger context of our shared humanity.

Words are what is real, even if they are only the wind.

He was Lear. He was my good ‘nuncle. He was Mr. Burns. I was his favorite boy. All those early conversations about family, love, and hope had been the natural kindling to the fire that was lit that day. In one moment, so much clicked into place.

What I understood then about the tree sounds rather New-Agey, I suppose, but I’ll stand by it: Mr. Burns saw the whole of the tree. He saw its branches and its roots. He saw the air that touched the leaves and the soil that encased the smallest networking filaments that wedded earth to life. And in an act of radical, violent compassion that softened immediately to love, he taught me to see it, as well.

That tree was all trees, and it was as tied to the world as we are to one another. The tree is the home it makes for the birds, the acorns it drops for the squirrels to eat, the shade it gives on the blazing days of summer, the wood it might provide when all has turned to ice. He saw in it the Platonic perfection of a tree, the tree that exists in our minds, the mind that reaches out to find other connections between crazed old men on the moors, the fools that travel with them, the children whom God or fate or chance has cursed to true insanity, the love of family, the need for faith in human kindness, the bonds that can exist between the young and the very old. The ultimate sap and the firmest glue of our existence: compassion, empathy.

That day, that semester, he’d planted the seed of understanding that teachers should not try to crack open the thick skulls of teenagers to pound facts and figures in, but rather more importantly, to let the light pour out.

About five years after that day, once I’d graduated from university, I was back in Binghamton looking for a job and vaguely planning to go to law school. My father, a state legislator, had a fundraiser for his latest campaign, and as business kept him in Albany for the weekend, it fell to me to greet the guests and thank them for their support. I’d been doing this stuff for years, and really rather enjoyed it. But there was one guy that I always made sure to spend most of my time with, and that was Mr. Burns. I hadn’t seen him much since graduating, and when I found him seated up near the band, he again avuncularly grabbed my arm with strength and trust, and sat me down at his right hand.

We chatted about politics, local and national. We chatted about Shakespeare, the theater, and he asked me how Karla was doing. I told him she was well, but that we weren’t dating anymore. Bill gave me a smile that told me he was sorry, but that the world would keep turning.

The front man for the band that night was a singer named Vic Lacatena, Democratic Committee Chair and County Legislator, and he did old standards from the Rat Pack. When Vic cut loose with “Fly Me To the Moon,” Bill said with a smile—and in the very same voice he’d used years before about the tree—“Do you hear it?”

It was like coming home.

“I hear it, Bill. I hear it.”

We listened to the music together, his hand on my leg. After half an hour or so, I got up to finish my rounds of the guests. He took my hand, and I felt his bones like they were already coming apart. I didn’t know it at the time, maybe he didn’t either, but he was dying of cancer. I suggested that he and Ellen and Karla and I should have a picnic when the weather turned. I was committed to it, but life got in the way and we never made a date.

That was the last time I ever saw him.

Bill’s throat cancer progressed pretty swiftly that year, and as life does occasionally mimic narrative form, Karla was volunteering on his ward at Lourdes Hospital when he died. In fact, she was the last person to see Bill alive. He came out of his room to go outside and have a smoke. They saw one another and she gave him a hug. He went and had his last cigarette, then returned to his room and died of a heart attack a few minutes later.

It was Karla who called me with the news.

A few days later, Ellen, Bill’s widow, contacted me to ask that I speak at his memorial dinner representing all of the students’ whose lives he had touched over the years. I was honored, and while preparing my remarks, I decided to forego the idea of law school altogether. Rather, I’d apply to get my Master’s in teaching. It’s a thought common amongst educators. The one that says: “If I could do for one student what Mr. Burns did for me, then there might be some balance in the world.”

The bulk of the speech that I gave at his memorial was what I’ve just related above about the tree, and Lear, and the picnic that never was.

I thought that was it. I thought the final lesson I’d learn from Bill was that we’ve only got a brief candle of time to strut and fret upon the stage, a small window of existence before we’re heard no more—and that we’d better seize those moments before they’re gone forever. And that’s a damn good lesson. But I discovered years later that there was still something more.

It happened during a class on Ancient Mesopotamia. One of my kids, David, looked up as I was finishing a dramatic recitation of the first book ever written, the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s the oldest extant narrative text, the most ancient tale which—beautifully, symmetrically—was originally titled “Sha Naqba Īmuru” or “He who Saw the Deep.”

Earlier in the semester, David didn’t seem to be a particularly attentive student, but the ghosts were rising in him and I’d taken note. We’d spent the previous weeks “talking about stuff” like humility, love, and the infinite, and yet somehow bearable, weight of grief. I was, consciously, working in the spirit of my master, setting the kindling, hoping for the spark.

And five thousand years after Gilgamesh first walked east through the Great Cedar Forest of Babylon on his way home to Uruk, crushed by the death of his spiritual brother, Enkidu, wracked by the disappointments of having failed the tests of Utnapishtim, broken by the theft of his final gift at the mouth of Ningizita ,the Eternal Snake of the Waters, David got it.

Or to use the particular argot of this tale, he saw it.

David saw not just the story of an ancient king committed, finally, to justice and love, but of all human stories. He saw that words bind us to one another across classrooms and across time.

As I finished the story and Gilgamesh passed through the gates of his kingdom, I could see it in his eyes. Both of us were nearly in tears.

I don’t give a damn if you believe me, but this is the truth: Hamlet saw ghosts; Gilgamesh and Enkidu had their monsters to slay; Ophelia danced with flowers in her hair; and as I climbed down from the makeshift stage we’d built with two rows of desks in Room 423 of FDR High School in Brooklyn, as David took my hand to steady me, I saw light pouring out from his now opened eyes.

In that very moment, Mr. Burns bestowed upon me his last lesson: an understanding that nothing ever ends.

The conversation continues. The story moves onward and outward, searching each new generation for its players, pulling them from the audience and onto the stage from the dark, storm-tossed moors of Binghamton classrooms and the Great Cedar Forests of Brooklyn, New York.