1. Recognise this? What is the link to A Minor Role?
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts…
Jaques, As You Like It
Recognise this? What is the link to A Minor Role?

2. How does Fanthorpe link theatricality to serious illness?

3. What different ‘roles’ do you ‘play’ in life and how do you adapt your persona to do so?

4. Unpick stanza 1

6. Ursula Fanthorpe • Attended St Anne’s College Oxford,
Head of English at Cheltenham Ladies’ College.
• Only began writing when she turned her back on her teaching career to become a receptionist at a psychiatric hospital
Observation of the patients provided the inspiration for her first book, Side Effects (Peterloo Poets, 1978).
Talking of her war-time childhood, Fanthorpe said, ‘I think it's important not to run away’,
• Poetry seems to encapsulate those traditional, stoic English values we associate with the period.
• England and Englishness are central themes in her work, but such a reading misses the wit and sly debunking of national myth which mark Fanthorpe's sensibility.