If We Were Villains: A Novel

After an hour of interrogating Meredith about her insecurities (of which there were more than I ever would have guessed), Gwendolyn dismissed us, with the promise that everyone else would be subjected to the same rigorous questioning over the next two weeks.

On our way up the stairs to the third floor, second-year art students bustling around us on their way down to the conservatory, James fell in step beside me.

“That was ruthless,” I said, sotto voce. Meredith walked a few steps ahead of us, Richard’s arm around her shoulders, though she didn’t seem to have noticed it. She moved determinedly forward, avoiding direct eye contact with anyone.

“Again,” James whispered, “that’s Gwendolyn.”

“I never thought I’d say this, but I’m looking forward to being shut in the gallery for two hours straight.”

While Gwendolyn taught the more visceral elements of acting—voice and body, heart over head—Frederick taught the intimate particulars of Shakespeare’s text, everything from meter to early modern history. Bookish and diffident as I was, I much preferred Frederick’s classes to Gwendolyn’s, but I was allergic to the chalk he used on his blackboard and spent most of my time in the gallery sneezing.

“Let’s go,” James said, quietly, “before Meredick steals our table.” (Filippa had coined that particular term at the end of our second year, when the two of them were newly in love and at their most obnoxious.) Meredith’s expression was still distracted as we edged past them on the stairs. Whatever Richard had said to soothe her, it wasn’t working.

Frederick preferred to conduct fourth-year classes in the gallery, rather than the classroom he was forced to use for the more numerous second- and third-years. It was a narrow, high-ceilinged room that had once stretched the entire length of the third floor but was unceremoniously divided into smaller rooms and studios when the school opened. The Long Gallery became the Short Gallery, barely twenty feet from end to end, walled on two sides with bookshelves and dotted with portraits of long-dead Dellecher cousins and offspring. A love seat and a low-slung sofa faced each other under the elaborate plasterwork ceiling, while a small round table and two chairs basked in the light of the diamond-paned window on the south side of the room. Whenever we had tea with Frederick (which we did twice a month as third-years and daily during class as fourth-years), James and I made a beeline for the table. It was farthest from the nefarious chalk dust and offered a sparkling view of the lake and surrounding woods, the conical Tower roof perched on top of the trees like a black party hat.

Frederick was already there when we arrived, wheeling the chalkboard out from an odd little spear closet wedged between a bookshelf and the noseless bust of Homer at the end of the room. I sneezed as James said, “Good morning, Frederick.”

He looked up from the blackboard. “James,” he said. “Oliver. Lovely to have you both back. Pleased with casting?”

“Absolutely,” James said, but there was a note of wistfulness in his voice that puzzled me. Who would be disappointed to be playing Brutus? Then I remembered his remark from two nights previous, about wanting a little more variety on his résumé.

“When’s our first rehearsal?” he asked.

“Sunday.” Frederick winked. “We thought we’d give you a week to settle back in.”

Because of their unsupervised residence in the Castle and their infamous penchant for overindulgence, the fourth-year theatre students were generally expected to throw some kind of kickoff party at the beginning of the year. We had planned it for Friday. Frederick and Gwendolyn and probably even Dean Holinshed knew about it but gamely pretended not to.

Richard and Meredith finally came in from the hall, and James and I hurried to dump our things on the table. I sneezed again, wiped my nose on a tea napkin, and peered out the window. The grounds were soaked in sunlight, the lake rippling gently at the touch of a breeze. Richard and Meredith sat on the smaller sofa, leaving the other for Alexander and Filippa to share. They no longer bothered to leave room for Wren, who (endearingly, like a child excited for story time) preferred to sit on the floor.

Frederick poured tea at the sideboard, so the room smelled, as it always did, of chalk and lemon and Ceylon. When he had filled eight cups—tea drinking in Frederick’s class was mandatory; honey was encouraged, but milk and sugar were contraband—he turned around and said, “Welcome back.” He twinkled down at us like a bookish little Santa Claus. “I enjoyed your auditions yesterday, and I am eager to work with you again this semester.” He passed the first teacup to Meredith, who passed it to Richard, who passed it to James, and so on until it ended up in Wren’s hands.

“Fourth year. The year of the tragedy,” Frederick said, grandly, when the tea tray was empty and everyone had a cup and saucer. (Drinking tea from mugs, we were often reminded, was like drinking fine wine from a Solo cup.) “I will refrain from telling you to take the tragedies any more seriously than the comedies. In fact, one might argue that comedy must be deadly serious to the characters, or it is not funny for the audience. But that is a conversation for another time.” He took his own teacup off the tray, sipped delicately, and set it down again. Frederick had never had a desk or lectern, and instead paced slowly back and forth in front of the blackboard as he taught. “This year, we will devote our attention to Shakespeare’s tragic plays. What might that course of study encompass, do you think?”

I sneezed as if in response to his question, and there was a brief pause before we began suggesting topics.

Alexander: “Source material.”

Filippa: “Structure.”

Wren: “Imagery.”

Meredith: “Conflict, internal and external.”

Me: “Fate versus agency.”

James: “The tragic hero.”

Richard: “The tragic villain.”

Frederick held up a hand to stop us. “Good. Yes,” he said. “All of those things. We will, of course, touch on each of these plays—Troilus and Cressida and other problem plays included—but naturally we will begin with Julius Caesar. A question: Why is Caesar not a history play?”

James was first to answer, with characteristic academic eagerness. “The history plays are confined to English history.”

“Indeed,” Frederick said, and resumed his pacing. I sniffed, stirred my tea, and sat back in my chair to listen. “Most of the tragedies include some element of history, but what we choose to call ‘history’ plays, as James has said, are truly English history plays and are all named after English monarchs. Why else? What makes Caesar first and foremost a tragedy?”

My classmates exchanged curious glances, unwilling to offer the first hypothesis and risk being wrong.

“Well,” I ventured, when nobody else spoke, my voice thick with congestion, “by the end of the play most of the major characters are dead, but Rome is still standing.” I stopped, struggling to articulate the idea. “I think it’s more about the people and less about the politics. It’s definitely political but if you look at it next to, I don’t know, the Henry VI cycle, where everybody’s just fighting over the throne, Caesar’s more personal. It’s about the characters and who they are, not just who’s in power.” I shrugged, unsure whether I’d managed to make any part of my point.

“Yes, I think Oliver is onto something,” Frederick said. “Permit me to pose another question: What is more important, that Caesar is assassinated or that he is assassinated by his intimate friends?”

It wasn’t the sort of question that needed an answer, so no one replied. Frederick was watching me, I realized, with the proud, fatherly affection he usually reserved for James—who gave me a faint but encouraging smile when I glanced across the table.

“That,” Frederick said, “is where the tragedy is.” He looked around at all of us, hands folded behind his back, the midday sunlight glinting on his glasses. “So. Shall we begin?” He turned to the blackboard, took a piece of chalk from the tray, and began to write. “Act I, Scene 1. A street. We open with the tribunes and the commoners. What do you suppose is significant about that? The cobbler has a battle of wits with Flavius and Murellus, and upon further questioning introduces our eponymous hero-tyrant…”

We rummaged around in our bags to find notebooks and pens, and as Frederick carried on, we scribbled down almost his every word. The sun warmed my back and the bittersweet scent of black tea drifted up into my face. I stole furtive glances at my classmates as they wrote and listened and occasionally posed questions, struck by how lucky I was to be among them.