ABSTRACT
As a professor of sixteenth-century poetry, I am an interloper here. It is true that I have, as it happens, a dead father and plan to be one myself in just about a lifetime, but obviously this kind of mundane personal experience, for the moment incomplete, does not qualify me for an august volume on the Dead Father. I have had to settle, as a teacher of language and literature, for a dead tongue (that’s t-o-n-g-u-e), a dead-father tongue. Not a dead father, then, but only a father-tongue, though a paternal language about as dead as they come. And, as my title advertises, a little pedagogy, then and now; if I were bold enough to borrow from Robert Frost, my title would be “playing for mortal stakes.”
