A photograph from 1941 shows a hall in use as a feeding centre for destitute families. In the background, the Old Vic theatre company sets up for a performance. Part of a Ministry of Information series documenting the Old Vic’s tour of the South Wales coalfields (1941), it serves as a reminder of economic failure in early twentieth-century Britain. The Old Vic, a home for Shakespeare, opera, and ballet since before the start of the First World War, was one of a number of pre-war and wartime organizations bringing art and education to the people. It was their approach to art for all which largely inspired the establishment of the government Committee (later Council) for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), the forerunner of the Arts Council. A Ministry of Information film (1942) by Dylan Thomas, Alan Osbiston, and others that documents CEMA’s work shows the arts as an essential and productive part of the war effort, while also making the Keynesian economic case for arts funding. Modest financial support for the arts creates employment (including manual jobs) and life-enhancing consumption (theatre-, gallery-, and concert-going). Since no physical goods are involved, money circulates in the economy without inflation.

Historically, the idea of Britain is closely tied to Wales and the Welsh people, who saw themselves as the sovereign rulers of the island nation of Britain, cruelly dispossessed by the Saxons. This chapter traces the historical processes by which the kingdom of England first asserted and then legally established its right to include Wales within the nation of England, appropriating Britishness as a proxy for Englishness. This ideological strategy, first normalised by the Tudors and resisted through Welsh literary production, continues to the present day. In the twentieth century, the rise of Anglophone writing in Wales challenged the link between the Welsh language and Welsh nationhood, but increasing immigration and the achievement of devolution in 1999 encouraged a more inclusive and multilingual national identity. Though political devolution has enabled Wales to define itself as a substate nation within a federated state, the ideological impetus to claim Britishness for itself continues across the border in England.

Andrew Walker writes from the premise that one of Plath’s most notable characteristics is her sense of the dramatic, her experimentation with multiple voices and personas. Walker establishes Plath’s long-held interest in radio drama growing up in America, and the impact of contemporary radio dramas and BBC’s the Third Programme on her work. Plath’s radio play, Three Women, is influenced by Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood as well as Ted Hughes’s A Houseful of Women and The Wound, which appear during key phases in Plath’s poetic development. Walker accounts for a dramatic shift between Plath’s earlier and later work, and demonstrates the importance of an oft-overlooked, yet highly vital, poetic context.