Kevin McDermott

We know that both Hamlet and The Taming of the Shrew were performed during that voyage.

Handbills advertising the plays survive to this day.

The fate of the Franklin ships was a mystery for decades.

John Ray, an employee of the Hudson Bay Trading Company, spent years searching in the far north.

He learned from the Inuit that the two ships, the Terror and Erebus, had been abandoned.

White men had been seen dragging their rowing boats over the ice on sleds.

Inuit coastal communities reported finding the bodies of sailors, bodies which bore evidence of cannibalism.

Ray's report, based on Inuit accounts, was published in London in October 1854 to public outrage.

Charles Dickens denounced it as slander.

Against the testimony of savages, as he labelled the Inuit, Dickens upheld the honour and moral superiority of the Englishman.

With Wilkie Collins he wrote a play, The Frozen Deep, that extolled the heroism and selflessness of the British Navy.

The discovery of the ships of the Franklin expedition by the Canadian Coast Guard in the last decade seemed to confirm the accounts of the Inuit.

My brother loved his time in the far north and he loved Shakespeare and shared his enthusiasm for the playwright.

He gifted me a Minster classic edition of The Tragedy of Macbeth when I was 12, the first Shakespeare I ever owned.

The inscription came from Hamlet.

Polonius, the king's advisor and father to Ophelia, greets the young prince.

What do you read, my lord?

And the smart Alec Hamlet replies, Words, words, words.

Later, when I began to read Shakespeare in earnest, Polonius was one of the first fathers I encountered, the first in a litany of terrible parents, Shylock, Capulet, Lear, Aegeus, Leontes.

Where do these angry or controlling fathers come from?