Double, Double Toil, and Trouble

As we had planned, I thought I was on schedule to graduate from the university in three and a half years. However, I found I was three credit hours short for an English major. I had enough for the journalism certificate but I needed the English for not only a double major but the 125 hours total to graduate.

Consequently my advisor recommended I take a course in comparative English literature. It seemed like a good idea until I went to class and found it was composed of senior English majors with loads of prerequisite courses that I had not taken. We were required to compare Chaucer with modern-day authors, for instance.

Needless to say I was lost and after I got a flat zero on the first paper, the instructor suggested I drop the course. I had also embarrassed myself in class one day when the professor asked me to cite a poem having to do with some religious belief. My answer was Invictus, one of the most sacrilegious poems I could have picked. One of its lines denies the existence of God. “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” That pretty well settled my fate in this class.

What to do? I dropped the course but it was too late to pick up another. My advisor suggested I take a correspondence course. So I did. A full time student was I, sending in weekly lessons on my correspondence course in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

The weekly routine became boring and I got further and further behind in my course work. As a result, the last couple weeks of the semester found me in the library pounding out answers to questions on the three witches and other fine points of Macbeth. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

I was not all that great in my knowledge of Shakespeare but my journalistic training stood me in good stead. There is probably more written about what others thought Shakespeare meant than any other author so material was easily found in the library. I simply paraphrased what several other experts wrote to answer my questions on the various hidden meanings in the text. Because of the intensity of the study, I did quite well on the answers and got one of my better grades in that course.