* In his biography of Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter overplays Tolkien’s dislike of Shakespeare on the evidence of a bombastic piece of school debate polemic. Tolkien disliked reading Shakespeare but could enjoy watching Hamlet and, as Tom Shippey has argued, his own work was influenced by Macbeth. He came to blame Shakespeare for bastardizing the ‘fairy’ tradition with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but ‘Goblin Feet’ shows that, in 1915, Tolkien had not yet rebelled fully against the Shakespearean approach.