The class of 39

Your schooldays are inevitably a powerfully determinant of your character, leaving many traces - some would say scars - in the psyche.  I can certainly attest to one such formative experience, which has marked me in a variety of subtle and sometimes quite strange ways.

For example, it has left me ambitious, but strangely hesitant to seize opportunities, and unable to say the right thing at the right time.  As a result of this I am frequently overcome by an overpowering sense of the tediousness of an endeavour - sometimes to the extent of wondering if there is any real point to anything. More oddly, this schoolboy encounter has left me obsessed with the weather - is it going to be nice?  Do I need my umbrella? - preoccupied with the treatment of old people in our society especially women and, most oddly of all, nervous in the presence of shrubbery that can be moved around in tubs.

I exaggerate, of course, but studying Shakespeare's Macbeth intensively for a year has certainly changed the way I see the world.  In particular, I find that without warning apt quotations from the play will well up within me, nudging me to think them, and so alter the way I view things. For, appropriating Macbeth's thoughts, I find that I begin to take on some of his character - hence my occasional sense that life is 'a tale told by an idiot', and the rest.

Nor am I alone in this experience. From time to time I come across other Macbethians, people apt to cry 'out damn spot' at unexpected moments, or to call me a 'cream-faced loon'. They too seem to have been changed by that childhood encounter, viewing the world as a series of opportunities to use some of those quotations and interpretations which were drummed into them so long ago. 

This leads me to posit a world - in Britain, at least - divided up into distinct groups according to the Shakespeare play you studied.  Every member in each of those groups - all 39 of them - shares common characteristics springing from the view of the world they received by literary osmosis in studying the respective play.

For example, Learians have a grand if tragic view of the world.  They know that we must all suffer, but that we may be redeemed by that suffering. They tend to be wise if a little lofty in their pronouncements.  Romeans and Julietians, of course, are apt to be rather poetical and sentimental in their viewpoints, while Coriolanians and Julians flourish in political debates.  Hamletians are easily recognised by their complete inability to stop quoting from the play whatever the context.

As for the other members of the tribe the various Comedians, Historians and lesser Tragedians - they tend to use their store of quotations more rarely. Or rather the rest of us simply fail to recognise when they do, since extracts from Henry VIII or The Two Gentlemen of Verona have not quite the public currency of those from Othello. And as for the Troilians and Timonians...well, at least there are worst things to be than a Macbethian.

(23.2.92)

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