In 1922, a year that saw the publication of landmark works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the sixth-form student Samuel Beckett read plays by William Shakespeare. His copies of editions of Shakespeare’s plays like the one of Macbeth1 contain many underlined or marked passages, but the reading trace very often found in their margins is: ‘Learn by heart’.2