8. 9 June 1995 (Various)

Dear John,

   Thanks for yours. Of course I agree with you about the later years too. There's quite  a good piece on Blackfriars etc, I seem to recall, in Shakespeare Survey I; but I've got stuck in 1596, thinking about the enclosed well-known sketc, which seems to me to depict an early Shakespeare play, with the author-actor himself on stag. But I'm brooding further on the topic, and drafting an article. Meanwhile you might like to exercise your detective talentson this topic.

   I like the reason for which the second line of PP IX was omitted. I wonder what its rhyming word was. Mild? Child? Undefiled? I agree too tat XV demands some personal explanation.

   I think PP was published no doubt without permission but in all good faith about the authorship: perhaps the copy was an MS collection, containing the work of others written out for reference: hence the Marlowe poem (if indeed it was his). We have the same trouble wih Schubert MSS, which quite often include his own copyings from the works of others, often very inferior to his own; he wasn't a proud chap, and reckoned he could always learn something.

   As to your question, yes, I've heard Bryn T[erfel]'s Schubert at Cardiff on TV and was quite impressed. I'm happy to say he was trained at the Guildhall where I'm just off o take a Lieder-class at the moment. He was a Rudolph Piernay pupil, though: never one of mine (alas). But I did also hear his fine Figaro, which he sang in our son Jeremy's translation; and I did the Schubert translations for Bryn's video-recital in Austria (have you seen that?).

   My academic referee for Yale have pronounced cautiously but positively on my Shakespeare Edward III edition, so I may soon have to revert to that. And London Unversity have kindly invited me to give a symposium in October. There are certain signs of ice-break. Will it last, I wonder?

   Yours as ever, Eric