June Schlueter, Charles A. Dana Professor of English and provost, and James Lusardi '55, Francis A. March Professor Emeritus of English, are sitting in her living room, under a rubbing of Shakespeare's gravestone curse on the cur who dares move his bones. They're recalling 18 years as coeditors of Shakespeare Bulletin, which is marking its 20th anniversary as the Shakespeare journal of performance criticism and scholarship. A question about the 600 or so Shakespearean productions they've seen together has them cueing each other like actors.

June Schlueter (left) and James Lusardi '55 with Heather Braun '95 who assisted with the bulletin and is now a Ph.D. candidate in English at Boston College.

Schlueter: "We've been in theaters that hold 12 people. We've been in lofts. We've been in basements.'' Lusardi: "There was a Romeo and Juliet in a park in Buffalo, where the Prince arrived on horseback.'' Schlueter: "Have we ever seen Shakespeare in a graveyard, or on a highway?'' Lusardi: "The closest thing to a highway was a bilingual production of Romeo and Juliet in Canada. One family was French, one was English. There was an open-ended tent with a road down the middle. The Montagues rode in a pickup truck.''

Each issue of the quarterly includes a section on film and video, photographs, a calendar of events, and announcements. Each winter issue is international. Other issues survey interpretations in New York and North America.

Lusardi and Schlueter have strikingly different personalities. She's a well-stoked fire; he's a percolating volcano. She jokes she knows the first three words of every Shakespeare speech. He can act them from start to stop, from memory.

Yet they share a mission to cover Shakespeare's globe as richly as Shakespeare circled the cosmos. Both insist on perceptive, provocative reviews, with detailed analysis. "We're looking for the interpretation that dramatically changes the reading of a play; we're looking for documents of theater history," says Schlueter.

The editors are teammates inside the theater and out. Schlueter takes notes in shorthand, which she used as a legal secretary. Lusardi takes notes, maps blocking, and sketches set design. Schlueter quips that after the apocalypse Lusardi's drawings "may be the only evidence of what a theater looked like in our day.''

Schlueter handles layout, subscriptions, and printing, which is paid by subscriptions and Lafayette. Lusardi answers correspondence. He assigns reviews of plays and films; she, reviews of books. Lusardi gets the first read of contributions. "Jim is the heavy hand," she says. "He finds errors in dates and scenes. We all know Shakespeare, but nobody knows Shakespeare like Jim knows Shakespeare."

"They are mad for the theater but also are responsible professional scholars and readers," say John Timpane, who edits the commentary page for The Philadelphia Inquirer. "While both are world-beating thinkers, they remain fans of the art."

Under their stewardship, the bulletin has matured from source to resource. They've published stories on film (the Mel Gibson Hamlet), opera, and solo shows. They've surfed the tidal waves of the Shakespeare boom, chronicling the explosion of festivals and the 1998 Academy Awards for Shakespeare in Love.

Along the way they've published a fair number of scoops. Probably the best was a series of features on the excavation and recreation of the Globe, Shakespeare's favorite playhouse. These reports were written by Paul Nelsen '69, professor of theater and drama, Marlboro College, Vermont,who with Lusardi advised the London project.

Thanks to this open-door policy, the bulletin has become an international magnet. Subscribers live in New Zealand, Korea, and other far-flung locales. Contributor AlanDessen, theater historian, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, has published a book based on his yearly "hits, runs, and errors" overviews. Justin Shaltz, computer systems analyst for a Chicago bank, is fulfilling his quest to review all of Shakespeare's 36 plays.

Schlueter and Lusardi have used the bulletin and auxiliary activities (a Lafayette theater course in London, a book on performing King Lear) to narrow the great divide between teachers and producers.

Lusardi and Schlueter consider their journal a time capsule. They plan to preserve it by donating their papers to Skillman Library. Until then, they'll continue gathering memories to perform.

Lusardi: "We've probably seen at least 75 Hamlets together."

Schlueter: "There was the one at NYU that had five Hamlets. That was more like an omelette."

Lusardi: "And a production of Titus Andronicus where the actors wore body suits that made them look nude.''

Schlueter: "We were afraid to put that on the cover, for fear the U.S. Postal Service wouldn't deliver it."