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The Whizz Kid Quiz

If someone asked you whether this question was taken from a) a camping manual, b) Schanell's Essential Speller, c) the Communist manifesto; or d) a Medieval English text book would you automatically answer: "Of course not, it's obviously from a Stage II terms lest in Shakespearian drama"?....You'd be right.

These ten phrases plucked from 'Hamlet' and 'King Lear', completely out of context and with absolutely no relevance to anything in themselves, represented the grand quiz session after a month's intensive study in English 213. The student's happy task was to explain the big words. To be fair, it was not the only question in the text. Four slightly longer quotations also had to be popped oh-so skilfully into the appropriate place, the right guys in the plays matched with the right words, and any part of the contents "relevant to the larger concerns of the plays" commented on. With ten minutes allocated to each question, glib superficiality was inevitable, even if some depth of thought had been the aim of the test or possible in such competitive circumstances.

No one who has been to Don McKenzie's lectures will deny that he is an effective and thought-provoking lecturer, nor that his love to Shakespeare is genuine and' his knowledge extensive. 'Hamlet' he sees ultimately as a definition of humanity, and 'King Lear' as the fullest explanation of the harshness of perversion of life. Thus he constantly relates the motivations, the dilemmas, the relationships of Shakespeare's heros to the modern situation, and drama through his eyes is able to create some awareness of the universal human search for identity and meaningful social interaction.

The terms lest was the complete antithesis of this creation. It reduced drama once again to its traditional role as a purely academic study of art form, whose main cause, purpose and consequence seems merely to perpetuate its own existence. It could do no more than check up on who had read the plays (or was sitting beside someone who had)—in itself, a somewhat negative comment on the level of interest expected from students at this university.

Involvement in courses leading to and stimulated by social involvement can only be drained away by such demands of veto learning which are opposed to the genuine sharing and widening of experience. Instead, such; senseless tests of 'knowledge' churn out an intellectual elite who concentrate on the medium to the exclusion of the message. No wonder we have critics like the one who considered Patrick White's book. 'The Rye of the Storm', a masterpiece in every respect except for two words on page 338.

—Pip Desmond