Latin in London

A few U. S. schools there are which annually impress their friends and bore most of their students by staging a classical drama, usually something translated from Plautus or Aristophanes. It would indeed startle the public if leading newspapers gave these events more than cursory notice. Were a newspaper to publish long passages from such a play, readers would suspect the editor had gone mad. In England the public views the classics differently.

Fortnight ago in London, in accordance with ancient custom, Westminster School (St. Peter's College) boys produced Terence's Phormio (The Parasite). The hoary College Dormitory, designed by famed Sir Christopher Wren, has housed similar productions each year since 1729. Older than the Westminster tradition of struggling for a tossed pancake on Shrove Tuesday is the annual presentation of a Latin play. It is also customary for the year's bright scholars to write a prolog and epilog and last fortnight the London Times bowed to custom by reproducing these learned appendages fully--four fat columns of Latin.

The epilog was a jolly lampoon of contemporary foibles, political, artistic, social. Two constables debated upon the dangerous possibilities of two paintings, one blank, one hung upside down.* Three party leaders, a Roman (Stanley Baldwin), a Druid (David Lloyd George), and a Scotchman (Ramsay MacDonald), "fitted with clockwork and vocal powers," directed electoral addresses at Joan Bull (Britain's "flapper vote"), who had to choose between them.

Said the erudite Times: "The object of the writer has been to make the Latin easily intelligible, and therefore he has avoided elaborate punning, which, though it pleases the groundlings, tends to obscure the meaning. Still there are a few--'Gas main' (Rogas manat), 'Stick-a-lips' (Aste Calypso) are good examples; the rest are puns of a single word like felix and omnibus. In this connection it is interesting to note that the centenary of this mode of public conveyance is marked by the recurrence of the same pun as was employed in 1829."

*In Manhattan, seven weeks ago, a picture (The Fossil Hunters) by Edwin W. Dickinson, exhibited by the National Academy of Design, won a prize although hung on its side (TIMF, Nov. 18).

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