Three Queens
Three Queens is a men's college at Shiz University, a repository of ancient manuscripts and a site of both scholarly labor and illicit research into the origins of Animals. Its library, overseen by a titanic Rhinoceros librarian, holds documents that become crucial to the underground investigation into the biological and mythological foundations of Animal consciousness, a project that draws students from across the university into a secret network of resistance against the Wizard's oppressive Banns on Animal Mobility.
Architecture and Atmosphere
The college is one of the institutions whose boys are invited to Madame Morrible's poetry soiree at Crage Hall, indicating its place within the social and academic life of Shiz. Its library is a place of musty stacks, mahogany drawers lined with vellum manuscripts, and lozenge-paned windows between bluestone mullions and transoms that mist over with steady rain. The building's atmosphere is one of aged, cloistered learning, a space where the past is physically present in the form of decaying documents and the watchful presence of its Animal librarian.
The Library and Its Keeper
The library is presided over by a Rhinoceros, a figure of immense authority who, during the summer, pays scant attention to the student workers until he suddenly cottons on to how little work has been achieved, becoming all rheumatic buffs and watchful eyes. This oversight makes the library a place of both drudgery and clandestine opportunity. Boq, Crope, and Tibbett work there during the summer, cleaning old manuscripts that are clearly not looked at more than once a century. The Rhino's eventual vigilance forces the boys to work with little chatter, brushing and cleaning vellum, rubbing finfoot oil on leather bindings, and polishing brass clasps.
A Site of Forbidden Research
Three Queens becomes a critical node in the secret research project for Doctor Dillamond. Boq, who has access to the stacks, offers to help Elphaba and the Doctor by sleuthing in the library's collections. He and his friends, Crope and Tibbett, search for Lurlinist and early unionist disquisitions on how Animals and animals were created and differentiated. The library holds stacks of documents from the monks' observations of animal and vegetable life, resources that are off-limits to Elphaba because she is a girl and to Doctor Dillamond because he is an Animal. It is in this library that Boq discovers a crucial piece of evidence: a four- or five-hundred-year-old codex containing a painting of a figure he identifies as a Kumbric Witch. The image depicts the Witch standing on an isthmus, cradling a drowned beast and offering it her breast, her feet turned out at ninety-degree angles and clad in brilliant silver shoes. Boq smuggles this scroll out of the library to show Elphaba and Doctor Dillamond, recognizing its potential value to their research into the origins of Animal consciousness.
Narrative Significance
Three Queens functions as a space where the official, sanctioned knowledge of the university is stored, but also where the suppressed history of Oz—particularly the origins of the Animals and the role of the Kumbric Witch—can be unearthed. It is a place of both tedious labor and thrilling discovery, where the boundaries between sanctioned scholarship and political resistance blur. The library's physical layout, with its restricted stacks and watchful librarian, mirrors the broader political restrictions of the Wizard's regime, making the act of research itself a form of defiance.
