School’s over now, so my kids are decompressing by starting to have friends over just to hang out, not to study. Today my daughter’s friend arrived and headed straight for me.
“I had to tell you,” she began excitedly, “For my Latin final, I wrote about the Shakespeare question. And my teacher said it was the best answer he’d ever seen!”
“Great!” I replied, thrown by the leap from Latin to Shakespeare. She’s also probably talking about an AP (Advanced Placement) course so I think that maybe this was one of those situations where they gave the kids multiple prompts and they had to pick one, and one was about Shakespeare. “Exactly which Shakespeare question are we talking about?” I finally asked.
“About authorship, how people think he didn’t write the plays.”
“Oh,” I said, rolling my eyes, “that question. I hope you are on the side of the man from Stratford?”
“Of course,” she replied, “I’m definitely a Stratfordian.”
“Good girl,” I told her. “I don’t think I would have let you into the house otherwise.”
So did you find out what the authorship question had to do with her Latin final? Has someone suggested the plays were written by Ovid?
I did ask, and I guess there was a heavy theatre component in the class, tracing the evolution of theatre from the classics through Shakespeare all the way up to modern musicals. I think she took it on her own to tackle the authorship question, which probably got her the extra attention – from experience with my own kids I’ve seen that every teacher, when introducing Shakespeare, will go through the basic biographical stuff, and pretty much every kid will have never heard any of it. So those kids that are already versed in Shakespeare when they get there are a very pleasant surprise!