WWFS? (What Would Freud Say?)

Class went by quickly on Friday, with little incident, save a major Freudian slip in my Renaissance Drama class. This is a class I took not only because the subject matter is intersting to me, but also because it's only offered once every five years and my favorite professor was teaching it. Said professor also tends to give me As, and it never hurts to improve my GPA. This professor is Dr. Stephen Whitworth, Stephen to those who like him. Stephen is quite gay, very intelligent, and I would sleep with him only because in some twisted sense I think that the process would bestow some of his intelligence on me. Anyway. We had started on a play by Thomas Kid entitled The Spanish Tragedy about a woman named Bel-Imperia, the daughter of a Spanish Duke, who seeks revenge for her murdered lover.

The play opens with her lover's ghost describing his death and how he was unable to cross the River Styx to pass into the afterlife until his friend performed his funeral rites three days after his death, and the judges of the Underworld sent him back with a mysterious presence referred to simply as "Revenge" to watch the events of the play unfold. Stephen asked me to read the ghost's opening monologue, as "he so enjoys hearing me read." This was based on probably one or both of two things: in Approaches to Literary Study, a class I took with him last semester, he asked me to read a passage of The Turn of the Screw "with hysteria," which he enjoyed. He could also have said this because of my initiation to Sigma Tau Delta, the National Honors Fraternity for English, which he is an advisor for. All the new initiates were asked to read a piece of poetry or prose; most people read horrible pretentious intellectual material that they probably just had from the class they were currently taking--Emmerson, Frost, and *shudder* Ayn Rand. Instead, I read a short story written by contemporary a humorist named David Sedaris (I highly recommend him) entitled "The Learning Curve," which is about his experiences teaching a college writing workshop that he was in now way qualified to teach. This class was filled with both students who very transparently put no effort into their work and students who cosntantly complained that they weren't learning. I had to stop every 30 seconds or so to allow laughing. After the initiation, Stephen said "Good reading, Joe. Very funny, and very accurate."

Anyway, I began to read the ghost's monologue. This being a play from the English Renaissance, the language was of course overly flowery with lots of metaphors garnishing it. The gist of what he's trying to say is "I was fucking this high-class chick in secret, but then I was killed in battle, and I went to hell, then came back here." The monologue is over two pages long. One such metaphor goes something like "But in the harvest of my summer joys / Death's winter nipped the blossoms of my bliss / Forcing divorce betwixt my love and me." I read the line (or at least I thought I did), but then noticed Stephen laughung, and the rest of the class following suit. Apparently, I had said "Death's winter nippled the blossoms of my bliss." Oy. I can just tell he's going to ask me to read again more than once over the course of the semester.