Public signs of an uncontrollable youthful passion disrupt rehearsals for the play at Castrevenford School, where the Headmaster struggles manfully to keep the Platonic halves apart, but it is an uprising of an entirely different sort that will soon occupy his attention. For the night before Speech Day brings the discovery of two wretched murders in the school grounds. With scandal only temporarily averted, it is left to the visiting Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, to investigate happenings more convoluted than any genuine Shakespearean tragedy.