Another Cymbeline Sir: Jonathan Keates (Books in general, 24 August)
and other readers may be interest- ed to know that the copy of Cymbeline buried with Tennyson was not actually the one he was holding on his deathbed. That was volume 9 of the 1785 Shakespeare (edited by Johnson and Stevens) and it can still be seen on the shelves of the Tennyson Research Centre in Lincoln. It had come to Tennyson from his brother Charles and carries the bookplate of their Turner great- grandfather. In its place Hallam Tennyson put in the coffin a 'little green' Cymbeline from a set belonging to his wife. On the flyleaf he wrote that Tennyson had last opened it at the words Jonathan Keates quotes: 'Hang there like fruit, my soul, till the tree
Audrey Tennyson recorded this in a diary which is also at Lincoln.
Ann Thwaite
The Mill House, Low Tharston, Norwich
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