Spectator competition winners: the Shakespeare anniversary: To fête? How much to fête? — that is the question…

The latest competition sees us leap unashamedly aboard the bandwagon du jour with an invitation to imagine what characters from Shakespeare’s plays would have made of this year’s fulsome celebrations of the 400th anniversary of his death. How would the Bard himself have reacted to all the fuss, I wonder. In the expert opinion of Professor Gordon McMullan, director of the London Shakespeare Centre at King’s College London, he would have welcomed the publicity but been ‘baffled by the celebration of him as a person because at that time they didn’t have our obsession with biography or the idea that plays are a reflection of the life of a writer’. But do Hamlet and co. feel the same? First word goes to Caesar by way of Alan Millard, who gets to stuff first prize of £30 in his codpiece. The rest are rewarded with £25 each. Carolyn Thomas-Coxhead, Brian Murdoch, Josh Ekroy and W.J.