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The reference to Gammer Gurton took me back in a flash to Drama School where under the tuteledge of perhaps the most demanding teacher I ever had, Alois Nagler, I read Gammar Gurton's Needle, an English Medieval or early Renaissance comedy. It was one of hundreds of plays we had to read that year so I have no clear memory of it. All has diappeared from memory except the title. However, seeing a reference to GG's Garland made me curious as to what the connection might be but despite a few minutes poking around with Google I found nothing.

I have a feeling that old Dr. Nagler would be very pleased that so many decades later I had a shred of curiousity left.

I do remember one question from his exams(you had to get at least a "C" in his course or you were flunked out of post graduate drama school no matter how much promise you had as an actor, playwrite, director, etc).

"If you went to see Iphigenia in Tauris on opening night, how much would pay to sit in the front of the first balcony?" He assumed you knew it was by Goethe, of course, and that you were familiar with the theater it debuted in as well as the currency.

Now, in fairness to Dr. Nagler, in the source book (which he had written and edited, he had published a letter from someone who had attended that particular theater and had written home a letter describing the performance, where they sat, and how much they had paid for the ticket. On the other hand, during this same period of time, we were responsible for 30 plays as well as scores of other source documents.

When asked (not by me, I would never have had the nerve) why he asked such tightly focused questions, he is supposd to have answered in his Germanic, Old School, manner, "If you know the tiny things, I can be sure you will know the big things".

I guess it's true though. We had to study the contract for the building of the Globe Theatre. I read it far more carefully than I did the contract for my own house, I think. On the other hand, I sure learned a lot about staging Shakespeare. And any time I meet someone who graduated from the same drama school within fifteen years on either side of me, we get to reminisce over Dr. Nagler's class, kind of like reliving combat experience by veterans of different units.

(All this from "I see the Moon, the Moon sees me and Gammar Gurton's Garland)

We return you now to our regular programming.