Dot Wordsworth

Jack

issue 02 February 2019

‘Sounds like fun,’ said my husband, wearing a hat with the sign ‘Irony’ in its band. He had read a review of ‘a gritty reworking of Shakespeare’s King Lear, set on the River Humber’. The name of the drama was Jack Lear.

A true drama that gripped the popular tabloids is that of Jack Shepherd, convicted in absentia for the manslaughter of a young woman he took out in a speedboat on the Thames, and now in jail in Georgia (on the Black Sea) facing extradition.

Shepherd’s namesake Jack Sheppard (1702-24) was celebrated as a jailbreaker after his conviction for burglary. His exploits remained famous enough for an unsuccessful film Where’s Jack?, starring Tommy Steele, to be made in 1969.

Jack is a hypocoristic or pet version of John, as Harry is of Henry. You might think it would be a version of James — Jacobus in Latin and Jacques in French.

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