It began innocently enough, a fun evening with my new Belgian colleagues at the local Irish pub for drinks and trivia. It ended with me standing bare-assed in front of them, exposed as the literary historian who didn’t know his Bard. “O, I have lost my reputation!” I lamented quietly in the grey night, like some Flemish Cassio.
A Canadian by birth, I had started a few months earlier at Ghent University, having spent the prior fifteen years bouncing around: first teaching English in Prague, then doing my PhD in California, before taking up post-docs in Montreal and Vancouver. While I was at UBC, my friend Martin sent me the job posting. He lived in London, a quick train ride from Belgium (at least in those halcyon days before Brexit), meaning we would be able to see each other more often, something that had happened rarely since we had lived together as students in Toronto.
At the pub that night, we separated into teams for the quiz, which puttered along...
Andrew Benjamin Bricker teaches literary studies at Ghent University. He wrote Libel and Lampoon: Satire in the Courts, 1670–1792.
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