There is a beat, and then a storm of outrage breaks. About half of the students are engaged in heated debate, but the other half are sitting quietly, and two or three actually look distressed. They are freshmen, after all.
“All right, break it up, people! Break it up, come on!”
Some appear to be relieved that I am taking control again; others are reluctant.
“You see how charged with controversy our topic is, and it is brilliant that we have discovered it all by ourselves, without any help from theorists or critics.”
They have settled down again and are listening, and hardly any face shows the glassy lethargy that usually envelops a class two-thirds through.
“Okay.” The muscles in my stomach relax. Easy, now. “So, this semester we are going to look at comic versions of this tale of sacrifice and survival. The plays we will read together accentuate the aspect of revival, but I think we understand now that even the brightest, fluffiest comedy suppresses its tragic twin, a tale of loss and sacrifice. Over every comedy looms the danger that the sunlight will not break through the clouds, or that the rain might not come. Can you think of dangers to the survival of a community that have nothing to do with murder or other forms of violence?” This stumps them. “How do tribes and peoples die out?”
“Not enough babies.” This comes from Logan again, who is clearly hoping to throw me.
“And to produce babies, men and women have to have sex. That—and the ways in which these—um—negotiations can go wrong—is what early modern comedy is mainly about. Let’s have a look, if you will—” I get up from the desk on which I had been sitting to distribute the first batch of hand-outs “—at how Shakespeare addresses this issue in his first sonnet.”
“I don’t think it’s appropriate to discuss this sort of thing in class.” A girl in a yellow silk blouse is holding the sheet of paper in her hand as if it were a soiled diaper. “In fact, I think it’s very inappropriate.”
“What sort of thing?”
“Sex and all that.”
“We’re not discussing sex,” I say calmly. “But thank you for raising that issue—Marleen, right? I’d like to make this unmistakably clear: we’re discussing a Shakespearean sonnet that happens to be about procreation. Okay, about sex. Our subject is the literary representation of the world, not the world itself. If you want that, stick to Political Science or Biology.”
“I’d like to,” she murmurs. “And my name is Madeline.”
I smile at her, and I think she knows perfectly well what I mean but am not saying: you have three weeks to drop out, baby, and welcome to!
We read the sonnet quatrain by quatrain, but the language is too involved for them to catch its drift right away. Slowly I take them through the nature metaphors.
“You promised us sex!” Logan, for one, is unable to distinguish the tale from the teller or, in this case, the topic from the teacher. My impulse is to step on him, but I am supposed to be gentle with them, so I ignore him and the guffaws he provokes.
“This is a lookist poem,” Jocelyn mutters. “Gorgeous people should have children so their gorgeousness lives on.”
“Aren’t the first sonnets addressed to a young man?” the shy boy, Lucas, cautiously offers. “And isn’t the young man gay?”
Madeline flings herself against the back of her chair in an outbreak of exasperation; there are some audible groans in the room, and not of the good variety.
“No, no, hang on—it’s not as bad as all that!” A sarcastic undertone creeps into my attempts to keep them calm. “You are right—Shakespeare played around with the traditional sonnet by replacing the poet-lover’s unattainable lady with an unattainable boy. But this boy, the implied reader of the poem, isn’t gay; that’s not the point. What is the point?”
“He’s a hoarder. He hoards food, the harvest produce, and other people starve.” This comes from one of Logan’s neighbors, a guy with shoulders like an action hero, who is evidently better at poetry than he looks.
“Excellent, now apply this metaphor to human beings.”
“He’s hoarding…no.” He blushes and shakes his head.
“Yes.” I grin at him. “Well, I’ve been suggesting to you that all this boy-meets-girl stuff in literature is, in essence, an enactment of ancient fertility rites. Renaissance England, being an agricultural society, was still closer to these realities than we are today, so we must expect Renaissance literature to be quite outspoken.