Shakespearean Valentines
ARE these the pilot-fish before the Shakespeare Industry sharks in bulk for its quatercentenary booty? Or is it that books about Shakespeare are,. in their last phase, preying upon each other like monsters of the deep? It -is a brighter assumption, perhaps, that Dr. Rowse and Peter Quennell are proffering their costly and .pretty Valentines a day in advance. For the quality of the illustrations and for the energy and scope of the writing, Peter Quennell offers the better buy. But his fluency leaves little behind: Falstaff in the buck-basket is an emblem of the human condition; bawdy wit is a release and a corrective; Romeo's passion transcends his im- mediate object like the dreams of Walter Ralegh; Shakespeare took an affectionate interest in the Davenant children; and from the lofty chimney pieces of Elizabethan houses there looked down a fantastic parade of allegoric or mythological beings----divinities and demi-divinities, muses. satyrs, fauns and nymphs. Everything tumbles out of 'the cornucopia, and such disarming .plenitude of sentiment is perfectly fitted to the occasion—who would look for hard. systematic study on .a Valentine?
Yet Dr. Rowse 'does something of the kind. In a preface that seems modestly to amplify the claims of the blurb, he looks back on his own performance and declares himself 'overwhelmed by what historical investigation, by proper historical method, has brought to. light.' It is likely that readers familiar with the material will find here a transparent feat of selfdeception; for where the book is readable (and it is not Consistently so) it is not because a historian is at work on original material, but because a journalist is culling What is racy and plausible from secondary printed .sources. The opening chapters borrow stories about WarwickShire from Mark Eccles and about Shakespeare and Stratford from the fine work of Edgar I. Fripp (why not reprint 'that for I964?); most of the rest attempt, as one expects in a literary- biographical survey, a superficial digest of Spurgeon, Chambers, Harbage, Greg and a few others, For energy and for an appearance of closeness to the theme Rowse relies as others have done on snippets of local colour from the plays. 'When Rosalind tells us how "Time travel in diverse places [sic] with diverse persons," there is a flavour of personal experience,' and it there- fore follows that the days between the contract of marriage and its solemnisation passed slowly for Anne Hathaway. Shakespeare writes in K ihg John of a tailor hurrying with his news to the blacksmith, with his slippers 'falsely thrust upon contrary feet.' 'It is an authentic portrait,' says Rowse, 'that observant mind, which registered and stored up everything and forgot nothing, must often have seen such a one'; often.
There are for the literary historian problems Of relevance that can only be solved by the most Scrupulous finesse in attending to both kinds of evidence, Iiierary and historical. To test' Rowse by this criterion it is only proper to pass to what We are given as the centre of the work—the chapters on the sonnets and on Shakespeare's relations with the Earl of Southampton and Mr. W. H. Dr. Rowse sass that he solves definitively the problems of the sonnets. His solution is an insistence that they were written in the early I 590s, that they record the changing relationship of the poet with the Earl of South- ampton, and that Mr. W. H., the sonnets' only
begetter,' was Sir William Harvey, who procured them for the publisher Thorpe from the Southampton family. All these hypotheses, and most of the ancillary speculations attaching to them, are wholly familiar; and Rowse is new only in claiming to establish them as fact. But it is imperative, when the material is so way- ward and elusive, that the method should dis- criminate firmly between what we can know and what we can only guess.
Rowse's method is incapable of discrimina- tion. It happens, for example, that some have found an allusion to Essex's 1599 return from Ireland in Sonnet 25: The painful warrior, famoused for fight, After a thousand victories once foil'd.
Rowse prefers another candidate: 'It is obvious —though it has not been noticed—that what put this in mind was Ralegh's spectacular fall from favour this summer, for his seduction of and secret marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton, and this corroborates still more firmly the date 1592. The phrase "once foiled" even echoes Ralegh's own "once amiss hath bereaved me of all"—a phrase that reverberated at Court and would be picked up by Southampton.' Fresh from a read- ing of the chronicle accounts of the Wars of the Roses, Shakespeare would hardly need to exploit the amorous encounters of Ralegh; but it is not the falsity of the gloss that offends, it is Rowse's glib readiness to offer. it as fact, as corroborative evidence, without even a glance at other possibilities. The discussion of Sonnet 86 is made nugatory by a failure to admit other rival poets to the area of possibilities. Where he might have looked hard at Chapman and the Roydon circle (touched elsewhere only in the wake of the Arden editor of Love's Labour's Lost) he makes play with the clumsy, vulgar notion that the, 'affable familiar ghost: of the sonnet is Mar- lowe's Mephistophilis or (even worse) 'a dead Crony, like Watson or Greene.'
Much of the argument is marred by a failure to take the elementary sense.. of •the Shake- spearean text. With his characteristic obsession with rank, RoWse finds in Sonnet 27 (with the line 'Desiring. this man's art and that man's. scope') Shakespeare's 'resentment at not having been better circumstanced • in life.' Elsewhere, in, for example, the pages on Antony and Cleopatra. an arch worldliness keeps for the Valentine the airs of a novelette: 'No wonder there is an enigmatic smile on the face of the inscrutable author behind the play!'; 'People in high places who think thus are apt. to get what is coming to them': and (of Caesar's last words on Antony): 'It is much what Ralegh thought about his enemy Essex, as he watched the. scene of his beheading from a window within the Tower.'
For the central arguments relating to Shake- speare and Southampton, and to Mr. W. H., Rowse is deeply indebted to several sources (in- cluding, to a greater extent than he seems to realise, E. K. Chambers), but there is one that in the crucial chapters remains dominant. There is no deception. The name is there in the notes, if not on the page, for all to see. Bearing on her shoulders the mounted reputations of the Lon- don Times, Messrs. Macmillan, All Souls, English Historical Scholarship, and of Dr. Rowse him- self,. we have no excuse for failing to recognise the distinguished (but one had thought, diminu- tive) figure of Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, edi- tor of the sonnets (1904) and biographer of the Earl of Southampton.
PHILIP ItROC KHAN K
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