Page 8 Scribulus Winter Issue SCHOLARS KNOW MORE By Helen Hinckley The wraith stopped before the class schedule posted in the hall of the Administration building. His sharp eye raked the departments in which courses were offered. Some of the words he could decipher by-referring to mythology. "Psychology" for instance. Physche being the Goddess of the Soul, this must be a new name for religion. Many of the names were totally new. Strange, he thought, that the young people who tittered so foolishly, and seemed so stupid, should have in their heads much information about subjects of which he had never even heard. Although he stood there for some time, stroking his carefully turned mustache and his delicate silken beard; although his cloak, the tall hat which he held under his arm, the velvet doublet and breeches, and his wide satin collar would arouse interest in any display of historic costumes; he was entirely unnoticed by the group that milled around him. For a time he wondered why, and then he bethought himself that he must be invisible. For a moment he was angered. Satan had not informed him that invisibility was one of the conditions of his vacation up to earth. He wondered if his body would be unable to cope with physical things. To test the matter he shifted his hat to his left arm. So far, so good. Now with his right thumb dampened with immaterial saliva he reached up and touched the corner of the class schedule. With a turn of his wrist he flipped over the page. On the new page a very familiar name caught his glance. Amid such unknowns as Shelley and Schiller his own stood out blackly and importantly. SHAKESPEARE. And beside it he read this description: "Four of SHAKESPEARE'S tragedies, four comedies, and two histories will be studied intensively in this course. Particular attention will be paid to his purpose and method. M. T. TH. F. Four credit hours." The apparition smiled now as he placed his hat on his head and adjusted it at a becoming angle. He decided to find the class and spend a pleasant hour. He wondered what tragedies and comedies would be selected. He hoped that those which he had run off over night on contract would not be considered, and for a moment he felt ashamed of the passages that he had allowed the stage boy to write for him while he devoted himself to sonnets. By now the characters that he had lifted from other plays, and the plots that he had "borrowed" would all be discovered. He knew that. He had already spent some half hours with Satan over these same moral lapses. They must not think too evil of him for there was his name! He turned the schedule over, looking for the names of his contemporaries. He saw none of them, but in an inconspicuous place he read: "Lesser Dramatists of the Elizabethan Period. This course will consider the contemporaries of SHAKESPEARE with the view of determining his influence upon the group." The self-satisfied smile broadened. He asked several people to direct him to the building in which Shakespeare classes were held, but none of them answered him. The realization that he could not be heard any more than he could be seen was another keen disappointment. He had looked forward to talking about himself to interested listeners. Down where he had been living the old residents had heard all of his stories so many times that they refused to listen longer. Besides, many of them recognized themselves to be the originals of many of his most perfidious characters, and they found the frequent recital of their sins and weaknesses rather distasteful. The newcomers would not listen at all. They had been conditioned against him by their many-degreed English teachers and the melodramatic stock actors. Being unable to ask his way about, he listened to the talk about him until he found two girls who were on their way to the class, and he trailed them to the lecture room. "I wonder if he'll ask us to know lines?" In unison they repeated disjointed fragments from some of the plays. At first the words sounded like gibberish to the author until his ear became accustomed to the enunciation of the two. When they reached the classroom the professor was already on the platform. His high-shouldered spareness, his sober face Winter Issue Scribulus Page 9 dominated by a high-bridged thin nose, would have, Shakespeare thought, fitted him to be the "lean and hungry" Cassius. "You will remember," said the professor in a voice as meager as his body, "that we decided yesterday that today we would devote ourselves to a little oral discussion of the points to be considered in examination. As we are to discuss both method and purpose, suppose that we start with Hamlet. The crucial question of the entire play seems to be: Why did Hamlet delay his revenge?" A business-like young man offered to answer. He kept one eye upon his reading notes and lifted the other as frequently as possible to the professor's face. "Hamlet," he said and read, "by temperament was inclined to nervous instability, to rapid and perhaps extreme changes of mind, and was disposed to be for the time, absorbed in the feeling or mood that possessed him, whether it was joyous or depressed. This temperament was" Shakesepare's mind wandered from the dull answer. He wondered why the professor did not recognize that the young man did not know his lines and call him on it, not knowing that a professor's standing is determined by the number of under-graduates he can pull through his courses and so has trained himself to see as little as possible. He was recalled to the discussion by the syrupy voice of the round-eyed girl at the right. "Some one," she was saying, "has likened Hamlet to a beautiful vase intended for flowers, but in which an acorn is planted. When the plant expands the vase is necessarily broken." The professor seemed pleased, but Hamlet's creator was disgusted. He had never wanted anything, not even time for writing sonnets, as badly as he wanted to set these young people right. Into his mind came a half-remembered fact. The most recent permanent citizen of his locality was there because he had put murder into the mind of a man. Mental telepathy he had called it. The wraith picked an inoffensive girl near the front and thought with all concentration. To his delight her mouth fell open with a click, and out come his thought. "Hamlet delayed his act of revenge because if he'd done it in the first act, what could he have done in the other four?" The professor's appreciation for the correct answer seemed doubtful. He endeavored to cover the class titter with, "Let us turn from Hamlet. Why did Othello kill Desdemona?" She of the syrupy voice tried again. "To save her from the 'great sin'. In this action Othello was his greatest, most noble self." Shakespeare's answer came out of the suddenly opened mouth of the fresh-faced boy who had led the first laugh. "Neither the author nor Othello knew what else to do with her after they had got her into such a mess." This was fun. Shakespeare was used to putting his best ideas into the mouths of other people, and here was his chance to give these young people something that was really authentic. "May I ask a question?" This group turned to face a girl on the back row. "Professor, how do you account for Hamlet's lack of absorption in Ophelia when he said, 'I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love, make up the sum.'?" Before the professor had time to answer another mouth fell open. "That speech certainly won the women. Not a dry eye in the pit or the gallery! Why bother with her through the play when you can ring in a fine death and funeral without all of that trouble?" The professor's face was beginning to register surprise, but who wouldn't be surprised to find a college class that knew all of the answers? Shakespeare mentally applauded the man for seeing the difference between the answers the students got from their notes and the ones that he put into their mouths. As if to cover his perplexity at his students' brilliance and to make the most of the happy period, the professor shot the questions more rapidly. "Why did Shakespeare make Iago the strongest character in Othello?" The answer was ready. "The director promised a lead to a scrub that just didn't look like a hero. The only thing to do was to make Iago the best part and then the fellow wouldn't take it until the line, 'honest Iago,' was inserted in several places." "Why did Edmund postpone his information concerning Lear and Cordelia until it was too late to rescue them?" Again the answer was ready. "If they'd rescued them at that time it would have taken another act to kill them off. If they didn't die a noble death the author would have been paid comedy rates, which scarcely keeps an average man in cakes and ale." Continued on page 21