MAD ABOUT SHAKESPEARE ( CONTINUED )
IT WAS TYPICALLY BOLD OF OUR TEACHERS to choose the story of the middle-aged Antony and Cleopatra as opposed to the teenage Juliet and her Romeo for our A-Level tragedy of love . It is a much longer , more demanding and ultimately more grown-up play . But they were an inspiring team and they brought it alive for us .
Classes alternated between Alan Hurd , a Cambridge man who had become a county cricketer , and John Adams , who could have been an Oxford don but was committed to schoolteaching . Hurdy and JA , we called them . Hurdy coached the cricket team , which included two future England players ; he took special delight in hearing a master from Tonbridge complaining on the boundary that it was ‘ A fine state of affairs when we can ’ t beat the grammar school down the road ’. Hurdy was a great admirer of E . M . Forster , who had been miserable as a pupil at Tonbridge . His own tone of teaching was Forsterian , probing but never coercive . ‘ School ,’ says the headmaster in The Longest Journey , a novel based on Forster ’ s experience at Tonbridge and then Cambridge , ‘ School is the world in miniature .’ Then he paused , as a man well may who has made such a remark . Hurdy loved the quiet subversion of the public-school ethos in that .
JA , meanwhile , was master of the bon mot , as in the one about John Donne making Tom Stoppard seem like tennis for rabbits . And such pronouncements as ‘ To say that Fielding ’ s character of Tom Jones is an insufficiently deep psychological entity is like saying that Mozart makes inadequate use of the electric guitar .’ He had the whole of Western culture at his fingertips . He launched us into the first ten lines of Antony and Cleopatra , spoken by a Roman soldier who doesn ’ t contribute anything else to the play :
134 ALUMNI REVIEW