Sir,

Stella Halkyard (PNR 227) is, I think, slightly misinformed about Ben Jonson’s thumb. Jonson was indeed arraigned and indicted at the Old Bailey in 1598 for the manslaughter of Gabriel Spencer in a duel; he was able to claim ‘benefit of clergy’ by reading in Latin the so-called ‘neck verse’, Psalm 51 – although this, as his recent biographer Ian Donaldson points out, is ‘a passage that might easily be committed to memory even by the illiterate’. Donaldson continues:


His ability to read had saved him from an almost certain death. His goods however were confiscated, and, like all such offenders, he was branded with a hot iron in the fleshy part of the thumb of the right hand probably with the letter M (for manslayer) (T, for thief, mentioned in the court record, looks like a clerical error). Such a brand, immediately visible when the right hand was lifted up again in a courtroom, ensured that the benefit could be claimed only once. (Ian Donaldson, Ben Jonson: A Life (2011), p. 136)


So the letter must have been ‘M’, not ‘T’. Thom Gunn seems to have deduced this in ‘A Mirror for Poets’, which was written while he was a Cambridge undergraduate and first published in February 1952: ‘Shakespeare must keep the peace, and Jonson’s thumb / Be branded (for manslaughter) . . . ’

Neil Powell
Orford



Sir,

I read with interest the recently discovered poem by Dylan Thomas appearing in the latest issue.

There is surely a spelling mistake in the second stanza, the last word of which should be beAches, not beEches? As written it makes no sense – why would there be sand grains skating from beech trees?

Mike Jones
by email



Sir,

Mike Jones is understandably sceptical of ‘beeches’ (though that is the way it’s spelt in the original), but he’s not quite getting the image, I think. That would seem to me to be of a drowned valley, now frozen over in winter, with the drowned trees just under the surface of the ice.

The pun on beech / beach (of the lake) is therefore intentional, not a misprint, and characteristic of Thomas, who uses the drowned village, town, kingdom topos elsewhere. He’s Welsh enough to resent the English flooding mid-Wales valleys for water, and fond of the legend of Seithenyn, the Welsh king who drunkenly allowed the waters of Cardigan Bay to drown his kingdom. But in any case the beaches / beeches confusion fits the dream logic of the poem: it’s ‘A dream of winter’, not a naturalistic description of any actual landscape.

John Goodby
by email