My Mum Wrote Shakespeare
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...