My Mum Wrote Shakespeare

by willwain Comment Closed
The strange idea that Shakespeare was written by someone else, a notion which only seriously began in Victorian times (and an aptly-named Mr Looney played a pivotal role in some of that early speculation) has not only not faded, it has been given a big boost by an entertaining film, Anonymous, which plugs the theory that the Earl of Oxford was the real author. All the renewed debate has reminded me that one person who actually added anything to Shakespeare’s own lines, though in a very modest way, was  my own mother. Eirian James, who became Eirian Wain later, was working in the 1950s for the  Arts section of the British Council in London. In collaboration with George Rylands of King’s College Cambridge and the Marlowe Society, the Council, and Mum, helped to produce LP records of the entirety of Shakespeare’s plays, and the Sonnets too. While working as the organiser and administrator of this labour of love, she got to...
Read More

Hitler’s Cheerleaders

by willwain Comment Closed
Philip Larkin once wrote, about his childhood home, that ‘nothing, like something, happens everywhere’. Why is it so fascinating, then, to find places where you might think nothing happened, but where (in fact) a whole collection of somethings did? You have to get off that well-beaten track, to look for the odd corners of England – let’s just stick to England, for the moment, if nobody minds – and I’ve found that you can’t look for those places, you can only find them; stumbling around, but with your eyes open. (As the screenwriter and author Ben Hecht put it, writing about himself : I was... ' just walking down the road when [I] bumped into history.') My favourite of these rare discoveries is a village called Swinbrook, in the countryside where the Cotswold hills begin to rise, about fifteen or twenty miles to the west of Oxford, and a more likely place to find nothing happening it would be hard to...
Read More