Peter Davison first bustled into my life in 1964 through a chance encounter when I was a new undergraduate. In his bibliography and palaeography course, he taught us to read Elizabethan “secretary hand”, described the workings of a 17th-century printing house and explained how it was possible to distinguish the hand of each compositor in a printed Elizabethan text, a task which, in an age before personal computers, involved the enthusiasm, hard slog and attention to detail that characterised so much of what he did. These were evident in his edition of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I in the New Penguin Shakespeare series (1968), which combined scrupulous examination of the early texts with perceptive literary criticism.
Though always serious about his work (he turned down an offer to appear on a popular TV programme because he did not want to be regarded as frivolous by his academic colleagues) he did not take himself too seriously. He recalled with glee how his students cheered him on when he went to Lampeter and had to sit an examination in the Welsh language.
