Death of the author

SIR – Ian Mcewan, who unsuccessfully advised his son on a school essay about his own novel, Enduring Love (report, May 7), could take solace from Guy Boas’s poem, “Lays of Learning” (1926):

I dreamt last night that Shakespeare’s ghost Sat for a civil service post.

The English paper for that year

Had several questions on “King Lear”,

Which Shakespeare answered very badly

Because he hadn’t read his Bradley.

London W12

Sean Bellew