Her exams were notoriously difficult, requiring you to identify, contextualize, and discuss spot passages from any one or two of the many Shakespeare plays we took up. But we learned to read Shakespearean texts so closely that we could almost sniff the perfumed sails of Cleopatra’s barge—and to read and to think first before mouthing an opinion. For all her seriousness, Sylvia was not beyond smiling—and her smile of approbation was reward enough. Many years later, I would meet her in the corridor; I was older and balding by then, and she herself was a little slower of walk, but I swear—and I don’t know if I’m just imagining this now—but she paused to buss me on the cheek to thank me for some nice things I’d said about her in a column. And if you think I’m saying these things again to finagle another kiss from the lady, you wouldn’t be too far off the mark. She was matched in fervor by another legendary “terror” of the English department, Dr. Wilhelmina Ramas—she of the page- boy silver hair that some wags unkindly called a helmet, so stern was her demeanor, so scathing her rebuke of the ignorant and unprepared. Ramas pushed and pressed us for the best possible answer. The Greek gods didn’t just “get angry,” Ramas said—they became “enraged” or “consumed in wrath.” When it was time for our class in “The Idea of Tragedy” to take its final exam, it took me three bluebooks and five hours to give the professor what I thought she wanted—and even then, the best I could manage was a 1.5. Dr. Ramas was the toughest professor I ever had, bar none, counting even all my professors in graduate school in the United States. And it was a good thing I’d been through the wringer with Ventura and Ramas when I went to Michigan for my MFA. A glutton for punishment, I enrolled once again in a Shakespeare
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