Adam Cohen, Shakespeare scholar whose illness cast bard in new light

"The Shakespeare scholar who had sat comfortably at his computer, ably directing it to do as he wished, was now at a machine's mercy," he wrote. "Before I had controlled my world. Now my world controlled me."

Illness brought insight, though, and regret gave way to a reappraisal of the subject that was the focus of his academic career.

"I began to think about how many of the audience members for Shakespeare's plays were in fact illiterates, groundlings, similarly struggling to understand their place in an increasingly confusingly technological, mechanical, textual world," he wrote. "From the ashes of my studies emerged flesh and blood people on stage in Shakespeare's time with whom my disability allowed me to connect. My experience with illiteracy gave me unique insights into how the technology of the printing press changed Shakespeare's plays."

Someday, Dr. Cohen's daughters -- Hailey is 5, Lauren is 3 1/2 -- will be old enough to open his memoir and read about his sense of the "terrible loss if I could not see them grow up, go to school, fall in love, and experience other forms of joy."

"It's really very powerful," his wife, Debbie, said of the memoir. "When I read it, and I have such a close connection, I still can't believe it. It's very moving."

Adam Max Cohen was born in Boston and was a young child when his family moved to Potomac, Md., where he grew up with his two younger sisters.

Because his father, Dr. Max Cohen, was a cancer surgeon, he initially aspired to a career in medicine. But he was always interested in literature and changed his major to English at Stanford University, where he received a bachelor's degree with distinction in 1993.

While spending a year traveling the world, he was in Africa when a teacher he met asked him to help some students learn English.

"Adam went and taught a class and he was hooked," his wife said.

Returning to the United States, he taught English as a second language for three years, then went to the University of Virginia, intending to pursue graduate degrees that focused on writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

"He took a Shakespeare class and once again, he was hooked," his wife said. "That's when he decided to pursue a career in Renaissance literature."

Dr. Cohen received a master's from the university in 1999 and a doctorate in 2001, both in English literature.

He and Debbie Bauer met 15 years ago when their families were both vacationing in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

"He and I knew right away that we were meant to be together," she said, and they were surprised they hadn't met earlier because they had mutual friends.

Along with UMass Dartmouth, where he joined the faculty in 2005, Dr. Cohen taught at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville and the University of South Alabama in Mobile.

"Adam was an incredible person," his wife said. "He had such an ease about him, you just immediately felt drawn to him. There was something about his eyes, his smile, and his personality that was so warm and welcoming. He was so gentle and loving, and as a father, he was patient and could always get our kids to fall asleep when I couldn't. He had this nice calm manner."

Dr. Cohen published two books that examined the relationship between Renaissance literature and the technological developments of the day -- "Shakespeare and Technology: Dramatizing Early Modern Technological Revolutions," in 2006, and "Technology and the Early Modern Self," which came out last year.

But he was just as ease outside classrooms and research libraries, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa and excelling at every sport he tried, particularly golf.

"Like so many of Shakespeare's characters I had been yanked out of a life in which my place was certain and thrown into a maelstrom, an Arden Wood of the mind and spirit, a Prospero's island where I had no idea who I was or where I belonged," he wrote in his memoir, invoking places from the plays "As You Like It" and "The Tempest."

Nevertheless, Dr. Cohen allowed the illness to teach him lessons, recognizing that "only when stripped of the ability to read does one learn the tremendous importance of experiencing a Shakespeare play in performance."

Last year, he wrote most of his memoir during three months when his symptoms eased and he was able to renew his close acquaintance with language.

"There aren't any words to describe the loss and the sadness and the sort of irony of the disease that happened to this man who just loved to learn and read and teach," his wife said. "Because he was a writer and because he was a teacher, maybe this memoir will bring about awareness. Who knows whose lives will be touched by this?"

In addition to his wife, two daughters, and father, Dr. Cohen leaves his mother, Leslie (Krupsaw) of Potomac, Md.; two sisters, Heather Henri of Cupertino, Calif., and Robyn of Los Angeles; and his maternal grandmother, Mildred Krupsaw of Washington, D.C.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Wednesday at Chapman, Cole & Gleason Funeral Home in Mashpee. Burial will be in Falmouth Jewish Cemetery in Falmouth.