The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Schumacher

Author:Julie Schumacher
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2018-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

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Letters to the editor—on the topic of Shakespeare—began to appear with regularity in the Campus Scribe. Some offered support of Professor Cassovan, who was a “good professor even if his classes were pretty hard”; a few suggested that Fitger be severely castigated and, preferably, fired. One letter made an unusual claim about censorship, enjoining other members of the Payne campus to “stick up for Shakespeare and other blacklisted writers.”

Fitger skimmed the latest group of letters and shoved the Scribe in the trash. Noting the layer of ice covering the interior of his office window, he tested the radiator with the palm of his hand. Nothing. In some portions of campus, steam heat churned through the buildings; on the first floor of Willard, the metal accordion-like structures mainly served as abstract art, remaining cool to the touch while occasionally emitting a few clanking sounds.

It was December, the season of personal crises and exhaustion, and there were only two weeks left until the end of the term. Some sort of virus was on the loose, turning classrooms into sick wards. During his Literature of Apocalypse class, irriguous coughs erupting from every corner, Fitger had snapped in response to a student’s question: Why would any writer bother to make stuff up? Because, Fitger answered, reality was bleak and often unbearable, their puny lives a meaningless trudge toward the blank vault of death. One of the students named Sam—Fitger had trouble, still, distinguishing one from the others—gathered his books and his coat and walked out of the room.

In the wake of his ineffectual conversation with Cassovan, Fitger found it difficult to motivate himself for additional tête-à-têtes with the faculty; but remembering with a certain wistfulness Janet’s suggestion that he journey door-to-door through the building, charming his colleagues, he knocked at the office of Helena Stang.

Stang was obviously surprised to see him: he didn’t remember ever having entered her office, which—with its stark metal-topped desk and barbed-wire artwork on the wall, brought to mind a modernist abattoir.

She listened calmly while he referred to the department’s “unfortunate curricular challenge” regarding the requirement—or lack of requirement—of the work of Shakespeare. Compromise would be difficult, he said, and he understood that faculty had principles from which he would never attempt to dissuade them; but he hoped, eventually, to find common ground. Might Helena Stang be flexible regarding some of the Statement of Vision’s finer points? How might he persuade her to be so, if she was not?

While he talked, Stang toyed with her necklace, a heavy, industrial design composed of ball bearings and roofing nails, and stared at him flatly, fixedly, without blinking, across the desk. Fitger had seen her employ this technique on students: after four or five minutes even the most cynical were apt to succumb to her mesmeric gaze, confessing to plagiarism, unexcused absences, sexual errors and misjudgments, and childhood cruelty to siblings and pets. Stang lifted the necklace—he guessed that it must have weighed fifteen pounds—and let it fall with a clank against her chest.

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