Sir – In his very good feature (May 21) on Ruth Padel, Reg Little’s description of the poet’s father as ‘a classics teacher’ is a little meagre. Dr John Padel (1913-1999) was indeed a classical scholar, and for part of his professional life a teacher of classics, but in 1949 he switched to medicine and went on to become one of the most remarkable British psychotherapists of the second half of the 20th century, both as practitioner and as an inspired and inspiring teacher.

In 1981, John Padel published a fascinating study of Shakespeare’s sonnets, entitled New Poems by Shakespeare, in which the sonnets were reordered and set against detailed historicial evidence to demonstrate they were written in response to the death of Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, who died in April 1596, aged 11, a victim of the bubonic plague. John Padel’s illuminating thesis is that Shakespeare’s Sonnets centre on a parental imperative that the son should marry and produce children, a persuasive reading of the poems which deserves reconsideration, perhaps in a lecture by an Oxford professor of poetry.

Bruce Ross-Smith, Headington