In the now long gone days of the BBC’s high-browed amd minded Third Programme, it was not just Ted and Sylvia reading their latest, the classics, and reedy experts analysing the beauties of early Ming music, but sometimes lighter fare, as with Henry Reed’s immortal scripts featuring Stephen Shewin, Hilda Tablet and General Gland,.
There was also at least one offering of verse parody, which contained the poet Terence Tiller’s Hamlet, Prince of Wenlock. Efforts to trace this in his collected works or via the BBC having failed, the memory only retains two concluding lines of one of the Tiller pieces on the theme – Ophelia’s in the river/ And Hamlet’s mad again. So, you are asked to plug this gaping hole in the corpus of Housman parody in up to 24 lines by May the 23rd
The issue’s done. You’ve had your fun.
See you again when June’s begun.