Slyphs of the pen

"THEN one night Laburnam Woods begin to move towards the castle. The Laburnam wood is a army carrying a branch of the laburnam tree, each person carrying one." This wonderful variant on the familiar tale of Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane was quoted by the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan from a university entrance exam he corrected 20 years ago. It suggests that the recent complaint from the Department of Education's inspectors of English about the standards in this year's Leaving Cert answers may be somewhat misplaced.

The inspectors cited an answer on Philadelphia, Here I Come! which described Madge as a "housekipper" and one on Macbeth which claimed that but for the malevolence of Lady Macbeth "Duncan might be alive today". But it is also possible to sense in the vision of Madge as a salty old fish or the sweet scent of Malcolm's yellow headed army a rebellion of the imagination against the boredom of orthodoxy.

Freud claimed that all wit and humour have their origins in the sub conscious, and some of the examples of mistakes that lose marks in exams tend to bear him out. If any of the following examination errors - all genuine - were deliberate they would be hailed as examples of clever wordplay:

. "Caesar is proud and pompeous."

. "Richard II was a weak and irresolute man pandied by his favourites."

. "Lady Macbeth rambling out her horrible memoirs."

. "The third voyage includes Gulliver's visit to the Mormons."

The elision of Caesar and Pompey would do the Joyce of Finnegans Wake proud. Some bold director is bound to take up the idea of having Richard II, who does indeed have a strong masochistic streak, spanked by his male lovers. The recent television adaptation of Gulliver's Travels would have been greatly enhanced by our hero's encounter with a race of short haired young men wearing bad suits. But the great minds who invented these concepts are punished merely because they were unconscious.

Examiners simply fail to appreciate the infinite expansiveness of young minds shaped by the surrealism of advertising, television and rock videos. Teachers in Ireland report that "the Easter Rising began when Big Jim and Jim Larkin walked into the GPO", and that "after their battles the Romans retired to their camp, where they had wine, women and song, not to mention grapes". A semi state body is "when someone dies while they're abroad and the government brings the body home." And plankton is "an orgasm in cold water". The question "What do you call a watering hole in the desert?", supplied with the hint that it is the same name as a pop group, produced the answer "Pulp".

It is hardly surprising that when such supple imaginations are brought to bear on questions about literature and theatre, they should produce answers that, though written off by literal minded examiners, show great critical insight. Why should an attempt to extend the mythic lexicon with a statement like "Pope's machinery includes slyphs, nmyphs, and knombs" be penalised? The student who wrote "Swift is a suturist" was surely telling us something about that embattled writer's ability to stitch up his opponents in his polemics. The statement that "Chaucer never fails to lose our interest" may not be what examiners want to hear, but it probably came from the heart.

The claim that "George Eliot betrays village life very well" would surely win support from supporters of historical realism. That "we feel, though mingled with remorse, a ping of satisfaction at Macbeth's death" is a priceless insight. The students who wrote that "The Wife of Bath was a real woman's man" or that "Darcy asks Elizabeth for his hand which she refuses" were merely reflecting on the cultural construction of gender. And who could deny that "Macbeth has a powerful weakness"?

Why should the system penalise students who, instead of being mere passive recipients of education, are willing to engage creatively with classic texts? Charles Marowitz won critical acclaim in the 1960s for his reconstruction of Shakespeare. Yet as well as the denizens of "Laburnam Woods", Edwin Morgan encountered "Frankienstien and Guilderstern" in Hamlet and "Pluck and Buttons" in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

He found that "Hamlet calls himself a muddy mettled minded rascal and rightly so", "Hamlet's mother remarries her dead hushand's uncle", "Macbeth meets Macduff who was plucked from his mother's woman before her time was up. This finishes Macbeth" and "Lady Macbeth goes mad and one day her body was found floating becide the lillies. Shortely after that Macbeth dies a nartural death. Mostely of wory." The unusual orthography in some of these passages is surely a brave attempt to mimic the idiosyncrasies of Elizabethan English.

There is a historical precedent for such inventiveness. In the 1750s, the Dublin actor Thomas Layfield, playing Iago to Thomas Sheridan's Othello at Smock Alley, launched into the famous speech about jealousy as "a green eyed monster". What came out, though, was "Oh my Lord! beware of jealousy,/It is a green eyed lobster". He spent the few short years remaining to him in an asylum. These days, he might not have felt so bad.