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What is your earliest memory?
Sprinkling water from the bathroom window, in the hope that when my mother came out of the back door below she would think it was raining. (She did.) -
Who was or still is your mentor?
A Mr EJC Large, who taught English at Kingston High School, Hull, where I was a pupil from 1941 to 1948. I was the eldest of four children and the only one to have cultural interests or academic aspirations, so I was a bit of an intellectual loner. Mr Large encouraged me to go to the theatre, to listen to music and eventually to apply to read English at University College London, which I did. -
How fit are you?
I consider myself lucky, at the age of 93, to be able to totter along with the aid of a walking cane. But, like Hamlet’s father, it is “my custom” to “sleep always of the afternoon”. -
Tell me about an animal you have loved.
There was a border terrier called Beano. He was stubbornly independent. Rather than get into the car to go up the driveway to our house, he would trundle along in front of it. He attended the village school regularly. He visited a nearby house so often that the owners provided him with his own living quarters. When he died, the local farmers, whom he frequently visited, gave him a dignified funeral. -
Risk or caution, which has defined your life more?
I’m not physically adventurous, but intellectually I’ve not been afraid to take calculated risks. As general editor of the Oxford edition of Shakespeare, I made some unorthodox decisions and encouraged reasoned originality in my co-editors. And I’ve accepted challenges such as fighting back against people who argue that the works attributed to Shakespeare were actually written by someone else. -
What trait do you find most irritating in others?
Obsessive tidiness. -
What trait do you find most irritating in yourself?
Slovenliness. My children used to call me Mr Messy. -
What drives you on?
Desire to please the people I care for. Desire to impress even people I don’t care for. And the wish to be able to afford things I enjoy. -
Do you believe in an afterlife?
No. Except in the sense that what one does in life will go on having an impact, for a while at least. In Julius Caesar, Mark Antony expresses this, in a rather negative way, when he says “the evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.” Some of the good may live on, too. -
Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent absence?
“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together,” says a character in All’s Well That Ends Well. All we can do is to rejoice in the good and do our best to survive the bad. -
Name your favourite river.
Presumably, the Grand Canal in Venice doesn’t count. In which case it has to be the Avon. I like to wander by its tree-lined shores, to watch the rowers and punters, the swans and ducks, and the comings and goings of the chain ferry. -
What would you have done differently?
I couldn’t have done anything differently, because that would have involved no longer being myself.
‘What Was Shakespeare Really Like?’, by Stanley Wells, is published by Cambridge University Press
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