The Headmaster's Dilemma Read Online Free PDF Page B

off to girls and girls making up to boys requires a practiced hand."
    "Oh, I can handle boys."
    "The girls may be even harder. The impudent ones—and you can always count on at least one of them to be that—can be very subtle."
    "Not subtler than I!"
    "Well, let me think it over."
    That he did so and took considerable pains about it, she learned later. A plain, severe, and highly competent single lady of fifty, Miss Thompson, headed the English department. She finally—and reluctantly—agreed to let Ione teach one of her classes on Friday mornings, and Ione, much excited, brushed up on the four great tragedies of Shakespeare and the two novels of Henry James that she was assigned to teach. Her students would be sixth-formers, mostly aged seventeen, and presumably mature.
    At her first session, the class, of some thirty boys and girls, was silent and attentive—they were taking her measure. A headmaster's wife in the classroom was certainly a novelty. The girls were probably admiring the smart suit that she had worn for the occasion; the boys may have been sniffing out the lawyer behind her very feminine façade. In that initial hour, Ione found herself delivering a monologue on Hamlet's real or feigned madness. But she thought she had been accepted.
    The following Friday, with
Othello
as the assigned reading, the class was more responsive. A serious bespectacled lad wanted to discuss just how black Othello was and whether Shakespeare could be accused of racism in depicting him as an unreasonably jealous and insanely violent man. A black girl then retorted angrily that, on the contrary, Othello was seen as a great and noble hero and that Iago was the racist, clearly disapproved of by the playwright. Ione began to fear, as the discussion was noisily joined by others, that any literary criticism was being lost over an issue that had hardly been one in Shakespeare's day. She raised her voice over the clamor.
    "We know from Shylock and Marlowe's
Jew of Malta
that anti-Semitism flourished among the Elizabethans, but the number of blacks in England at that time was much too small to have caused any feeling about them one way or the other. The only character who shows any real shock over a white woman's marriage to a black man is Desdemona's father, and the Venetian senate is clearly against him. Iago is not a racist; he simply uses every bit of mud he can get his hands on to sling at Othello. Let us now discuss the question of whether or not Othello is naive in being so easily misled."
    A stout, round-faced girl raised her hand. She was Sally Evans, whom Ione knew to be the daughter of a famous backer of Broadway drama. "You're a lawyer, Mrs. Sayre, are you not? Can you tell us why, even if Othello truly believed his wife to be adulterous, he had to strangle her? Couldn't he just have divorced her? Surely adultery was grounds for that in Venice—or even in Cyprus. Wouldn't that have been better than smothering the poor woman with a pillow? And doing it so clumsily that she survived just long enough to try to exculpate him?"
    "I may be a lawyer, Sally, but I don't presume to know the Venetian code on domestic relations. But anyway Othello gives us his excuse for such drastic action. He is afraid, if Desdemona lives, that she will betray more men."
    "And why is that any business of his?"
    "Evidently he felt a moral obligation to protect his own sex. You must remember, Sally, that in Shakespeare's day people were more inclined to impose their morals on others by force than we are. Look at the religious wars of that era."
    "But divorce was known to be available! Look at the stink Henry VIII made over Catherine of Aragon."
    "But after that he learned a quicker way!" a boy in the back row almost shouted. "He cut off the heads of two wives for adultery! Othello was a piker compared to him!" Ione felt that the class was getting out of control, and she was relieved when the bell tolled the end of the hour and the