Shakespeare and the Elizabethan historian

A. L. ROWSE

What has the Elizabethan historian to con- tribute to the study of Shakespeare? Was his contribution really necessary? Yes. Fully to understand the work of Dickens you need to know a good deal about the Victorian Age, of which it offers the finest expression and depiction in literature. This is still more essential in the case of Shakespeare, for he lived between four and five hundred years ago; the social life of his time—of which his plays offer the fullest expression—has largely vanished, with its terms and conditions, the class-structure and its way of life. Of course you can appreciate the drama, the characters and the poetry; but unless you know about the Elizabethan Age your judgment of the writer's biography and personality is not likely to be of much value. And that goes for most of what has been written on the subject by people who are not immersed in the age, its facts and values and problems.

It is because of this that the subject has been the prey of so many crackpots with their speculations as to whether Shakespeare's works were not written by somebody else—possibly by Queen Eliza- beth under an assumed name: they are all as silly as that. Would you believe, what I know from lecturing to hundreds of au- diences in America and Britain, that the great heart of the English-speaking public isn't sure whether Shakespeare wrote his own works, and a good many of them whether he ever existed?

They are thoroughly mixed up in their minds, if that is the word for it. It is disgraceful that this lunacy should ever have been encouraged about the life and work of our greatest writer. There is not the slightest ground for it; there is no doubt about the facts, and the historian's business is with the facts. I am not going to waste your time answering lunatics; nonsense, you know, is self-proliferating and interminable. The most

brilliant of living French writers. Mon therlant, tells us 'Comme it est tres ditlicile de persuader les gens qu'ils sont idiots'. I am going to deal with some people who should know better.

Literary folk—critics, professors, journa . lists, Shakespeare scholars--have so con- fused the mind of the public by keeping so many questions open that are in fact set- tled. by suggesting uncertainties where there is none, that they have left the gates wide open for all the crackpots to canter through. Literary scholars rarely have much tactical sense, let alone political judgment (one reason, by the way, why their treatment of Shakespeare's political understanding is so inadequate, from Hazlitt onwards). Shakes- peare scholars, in this century, have all been dogged by this crackpottery, and have been at a total loss how to deal with it.

Now, a prime service I have been able to make to Shakespeare studies—by making the chronology of the Sonnets and Shakespeare's relationship to Southampton during these years perfectly firm and definite, by en- forcing proper dating and commonsense in the matter—has been to put my foot through the crackpottery. This is a very elementary sort of service to perform : it shouldn't have been necessary, if it hadn't been for the con- fusion and ambiguities created by the literary scholars. I have noticed in the last few years a quite definite decline in the lunacies about Bacon, the Earl of Oxford. Marlowe, Derby, etc. And I think that my bullying ways where nonsense is concerned have had something to do with it.

Were the Shakespeare scholars at all grateful? Did they have the simple tactical . sense to welcome an effective ally in the struggle for sanity in this field?

Not for the most part--especially in this country, with its decline of intellectual stan- dards along with everything else. When I came back from the Huntington Library. where I wrote my biography of Shakespeare. one of the cleverest of the English Literature dons at Oxford, John Bayley—who sees eye to eye with me on the detailed problems of the Sonnets—said to me, 'Hi, you have been offending against trade union regula- tions!'

Writing the book was not a flash in the pan, though it seems to have flashed unex- pectedly out of a clear sky upon them: I always had intended to write it, only I didn't tell them. It seems only reasonable—after devoting my working life to research into the Elizabethan Age, writing biographies of Sir Richard Grenville of the 'Revenge'. Sir Walter Ralegh in the perspective of the Throckmorton Diary, a good deal about the Queen, full-length studies of the society—that I should tackle the biography of its greatest writer. I hadn't intended to go on to an edition of the Sonnets, or biographies of Marlowe and Shakespeare's Southampton. I owe these to the obtuseness and obstinacy of my critics: they merely made me go on to complete and confirm the picture.

Of course. I never expected when I began to work on the Shakespeare book—having read and loved him all my life—that the so- called 'problems' of his biography would work out and be shown to be no problems at all. I wondered. modestly. what I might have of my own to contribute, to make the book worth reading. Well, there would be a portrait of the society, of Shakespeare's background in the life of his time, in Warwickshire and London: the history he lived through I could make real and live

again. Secondly, as an historian I could ap- preciate Shakespeare's profound political un- derstanding, which went with his instinctive knowledge of society and human beings—no one has so thoroughly un- derstood and seen through human nature. Living amid the horrors of the religious wars abroad, the devastation of ideological strife, in that blissful interval of internal peace at home between the cataclysm of the Reformation and the idiocy of the Civil War, this sensitive, perceptive man well un- derstood how thin is the crust of civilisation, how easily it is cracked and what dark waters, what cruelties and sufferings, men are plunged into beneath. To vary the image: he knew well that if the social order is undermined, if it slips and slips, the in- teguments slackened, the heartstrings eaten away—it takes a mighty effort, sometimes revolution, bloodshed, untold suffering, to reconstruct a viable order again. This humane man was against the misery and cruelty unleashed by revolution. So he was deeply conservative of social order—out of kindness, humanity and scepticism as to results. With the spectacle of revolution and destruction in our time all round us, can anybody say that he was wrong? He knew the facts about human beings infinitely bet- ter than any Victorian liberal, or, for that matter, contemporary progressive. Look at the world around you!

• • • I had no idea when I began work that the `problem' of the Sonnets would work out and prove to be no problem at all. I had sup- posed, like everybody else, that the `Mr WH' of Thorp's dedication was Shakespeare's young friend. For years at Oxford Lord David Cecil and I would discuss the Sonnets and say, if only we knew who Mr WH could be! It seemed an insoluble enigma. We never noticed in those days that the dedication was Thomas Thorp's, the publisher's—yet it is signed plainly by him, TT—and not Shakespeare's at all. It is very curious that nobody had noticed the significance of this, or paid any attention to it. People very often miss what is fight under their own nose. Once you grasp the simple fact that Shakespeare did not write the dedication you perceive that Mr WH was not Shakespeare's young friend. He did, however, get the manuscript of the Sonnets for publica- tion—this is what is meant, in Elizabethan usage, by 'begetter', not the inspirer of the Sonnets, of whom there were anyway two: the mistress was almost as important in the story as the young man.

But this was not all. I found that the topical references in the sequence of Sonnets 1 to 126 were in order as they are and con- firm the traditional dating 1592 to 1595. This crackpot about it : the bulk of literary scholars, from Malone onwards, had seen that the Sonnets to the young man cohered with Venus and Adonis, published in 1593, and Lucrece in 1594: both dedicated, in terms closely similar to the Sonnets, to young Southampton. Shakespeare's one anti only acknowledged personal patron. The two narrative poems and the Sonnets, utterly similar in language and theme, were written at the same period : 1592 and 1593 were plague-years, when the theatres were mostly closed, and Shakespeare had the time on his hands.

But, if you have an intimate knowledge of the events of the time, you could see for I/ yourself that the topical references cor-

roborated this and made it perfectly clear and certain. Quite early on, Sonnet 25, with its reference to the fall of a favourite:

Great princes' favourites their fair leaves spread—recognisably refers to Sir Walter Ralegh's fall from favour which was the sensation of the summer of 1592. Sonnets 79 to 86, which refer to the rival poet—what was he rivalling Shakespeare for but the patronage of his patron, Southamp- ton (QED)?—end with the sensational valedictory Sonnet 86, in the past tense, when all the previous sonnets have been in the present : something has suddenly happened to the Rival, he disappears and is never mentioned again. All the references to him are to a superior spirit: there was only one such, and his images and phrases rang in Shakespeare's ear the rest of his life, right up to The Tempest. This was Marlowe: he was killed at Deptford 30 May 1593 and was buried in the parish church there, after a proper inquest, on 2 June. There is no mystery about his end. With Sonnet 107 we

move on to 1594. A vast deal of nonsense has been written about 'the mortal moon', who in Elizabethan literature was always the Queen; sometimes the terrene or terrestrial moon, often Cynthia, the chaste moon-goddess. Ac- tually there are two topical references in those four lines, giving us complete certainty, for the two must relate to the same point of time. As they do: peace proclaimed lives of endless age with the surrender of Paris to Henry of Navarre, the end of the civil wars that had raged in France all Shakespeare's life so far, in May 1594. At that same time the shadow that had threatened the mortal moon—the eclipse she had endured, i.e. come through—was removed with the ex- ecution Gf Dr Lopez for conspiracy to poison her (he was her physician in at- tendance upon her). Lopez, guilty or not, was brought to book by Southampton's friend and leader, Essex. Sonnet 124 clearly reflects the ordinary Englishman's attitude to the campaign against the Jesuits and the numerous executions of 1594-5: Shakes-

peare calls them the fools of time which die for goodness who have lived for crime. i.e. they died as martyrs who had lived as traitors to their country.

All had worked out perfectly clearly and with complete consistency: there was no problem. I suppose it was this that so much annoyed the critical canaille: it was like tak- ing away a favourite bone from a dog. All except for the identity of the mistress: with regard to her we have no corroboration from the external world, we have only the sub- jective information we are given in the Son- nets and with regard to the dark lady in Love's Labour's Lost, the same person in much the same language. But with regard to the young lord—`Lord of my love'—there is no doubt whatever : we have the complete corroboration of the internal with the ex- ternal evidence, of the subjective world of the poems with the objective world of the dedications, of all the contemporary circumstances, the events, the persons, the dates. This is what the historian, immersed in knowledge of the age, can give you. You see the decisive importance of the internal and external evidence fitting with the consistency of a vice?

Professor Hyder Rollins of Harvard, the leading textual authority, didn't. He wrote: `The question when the Sonnets were written is in many respects the most important of all the unanswerable questions they pose. If it could be answered definitely and finally, there might be some chance of establishing the identity of the friend, the dark woman. the rival poet . . . and even of determining whether the order of the Quarto is the author's or not. In the past and at present such a solution has been and remains an idle dream.'

Notice that to him the identity of the friend, of the rival poet, and of the mistress, are in pari materia. But they are not: we now have certainty from the combination of internal and external evidence; with regard to the mistress we have only the internal descriptions, and thus no external knowledge

whatever. •

You can imagine how excited I was when I found that it all worked out consistently and with commonsense; but I kept the secret. When I first made public my findings, at a lecture at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, crowded with Shakespeare scholars, and also Baconians, Oxfordians, Marlovians (including the chief propagator of that nonsense himself), I ended with a challenge: 'You may think what you like, but it will be impossible to impugn the historian's account of the matter.' And so it has proved to be: no one has been able to impugn any part of it, for it gives you the solid, commonsense facts of the matter.

An American friend who helped me greatly with the drama side of my bio- graphy, Professor Richard Hosley, a leading authority on Elizabethan staging and theatre-construction. said to me: 'If only you had come to the Eng. Lit. people cap in hand, and said, "Here is another hypothesis, which I submit to you for your better judgment".' ... I replied, 'But I couldn't saY that : this isn't another hypothesis, this is the answer, and I am right about it.' He said. `Yes, that's the trouble: you are right. But think -what they would have done to you if you had been wrong!' It is a rather sad reflection on the level of academic and literary life in our time. One

way and another I went through a great deal for writing the best biography of Shakespeare that has ever been written.

Before coming home, I did impart my secret to my chief buddy about Elizabethan literature at Oxford, Professor F. P. Wilson, admirable sound scholar, whose judgment I salued, and particularly wanted on such an exciting matter as this. He was not an ex- citable man and nothing would upset his weighty judgment—other Wilsons were more volatile. He replied by air-mail : 'If — had told me that he had solved the problem of the Sonnets, I should have known it was only another mare's nest. But when you tell me I know I must take it seriously, for I have always greatly respected your knowledge of Elizabethan society, and in particular the rel- ationships of families and persons.'

When I came home, F. P. Wilson came down from Cumnor to All Souls for two afternoon sessions, when I read him first my chapter on the Sonnets and, second, that on the plays related to the Southampton circle, Love's Labour's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream. When I had come to the end of my chapter on the Sonnets, FP said, in his deliberate way and with slow emphasis: 'All I can say is that I am deeply impressed, and have nothing whatever to urge against it.'

Why did two such scholars in our time as Sir Edmund Chambers and Dover Wilson think that Shakespeare's young friend was the Earl of Pembroke? I think they simply never drew the conclusion from the fact that the dedication to Mr WH was Thorp's, not Shakespeare's. It was as simple as that. They just assumed that they were one and the same person, whereas they were two different persons. By identifying two distinct individuals they thought that Mr WH was the only inspirer of the Sonnets, when there were two inspirers, in that sense, anyway.

In any case, Pembroke never was, and never could be called, Mr WH: until he became Earl of Pembroke in 1601, he was always Lord Herbert, and would have to be referred to as Lord H. Anybody with any knowledge of social usage, even today, knows that. If you would like to know a little more about this Lord Herbert—at the time the Sonnets were being written, he was a boy of twelve. Well, really, you don't write Son- nets like that to a boy of twelve, urging him to marry right quick and carry on the family. And, for another thing, Pembroke was not an ambivalent young man, rather feminine in appearance and tastes, as we know Southampton was as a young man and in the Sonnets. Pembroke was a complete hetero- sexual.

I greatly fear that these distinguished old gentlemen, Victorian in their upbringing, had no very subtle knowledge of the facts of life; nor, middle-class in their background, had much understanding of the ambivalent sex- uality of Renaissance court life. F. P. Wilson recognised Chambers at once when 1 refer-

red to `the most massive, but not the most perceptive, of Shakespeare scholars'.

Chambers was a very hard-working, hard- driving civil servant; the amount and quality of his work on the Elizabethan stage is magnificent, like a grand mountain-chain; but he was not a very sympathetic man and, though massive, he was not perceptive. At the time I was reproved for saying this: but it was exact and right, and I repeat it.

Dover Wilson was a very different sort, and a great dear, of whom I was fond. 1 knew him first through Quiller- Couch—whom I adored, and to whom ‘N e both owed much for our respective starts. Now Dover Wilson was perceptive, but undeniably erratic. He based the whole

punctuation of the Cambridge Shakespeare on the mistaken theory of Percy Simpson as to Elizabethan punctuation, now known to be wrong. Quite young, I remember being slightly shocked at Dover reproducing the

portrait of a young man not Shakespeare as the frontispiece to The Essential Shakespeare, because he liked to think of

Shakespeare looking like this handsome young person. A factual historian would never dream of doing such a thing; besides we all know what William Shakespeare looked like : have you ever seen such a dome of St Paul's in anybody's cranium but his?

When I told Dover that I had solved the problem of the Sonnets and that there was no doubt whatever that Southampton was the young friend, he said that he was too blind to read my book. I said that he could

have it read to him. He replied that he was so far along now with his edition of the Sonnets that he couldn't change course. So the last

volume of his Cambridge Shakespeare came out repeating the nonsense about Pembroke and with the consequent confusion about the dating of the Sonnets—quite superfluously, and sadly, when it had been definitively set- tled by the historian, in keeping with the dominant tradition all along.

I do not remember the Times Literary Supplement troubling to review Dover Wil-

son's edition of the Sonnets. If so, it is hardly

to be wondered at, since, in reviewing Leslie Hotson's Shakespeare's Sonnets Dated a few years before, the TLS reviewer accepted

its utter nonsense-dating of them back to the time of the Armada, with the glorious rub- bish of the 'Mortal Moon' featuring as the Spanish Armada! Absolute rot, of course. These non-historians have no idea of the crucial importance of getting a date right, of the decisive distinction between one year and the next—yet everybody here recognises the significance of, say, 1939 as against 1940, of 1914 or 1918 or 1933, the unforgettable year when Hitler came to power. These dates, and their significance, are burned in upon an historian's mind. Literary commentators on the Sonnets have no idea of the difference between one year and another, and wobble all over the place with their idiotic sug- gestions from 1588 to 1603, from the Armada to Queen Elizabeth's death, and from that to 1607. One woman, not otherwise notably insane, wrote to me from America that Marlowe was not killed, but lived to write Shakespeare's plays, did not die in 1616 but lived on to go to America on the Mayflower—I forget what he did over there : became John Winthrop or Cotton- mouthed Mather. I expect.

Professor Leslie Hotson began well by lighting on the coroner's inquest concerning the death of Marlowe. He has received due publicity for that—though others in our time have fished up no less remarkable documents from the archives (it is our métier as historians, and we rather take it for gran- ted)—and he was always a devoted researcher with a good nose for a document. His prime failing has been to inflate the significance of each small find, until it loses touch with reality and the work is spoiled. There was no point in suggesting that there was anything more in Marlowe's death than meets the eye. Hotson devoted a whole book, Shakespeare versus Shallow, to identifying Justice Shallow with a Justice Gardiner in Surrey; it was all love's labour's lost : there is not the slightest point of resemblance between swaggering, bullying Justice Gardiner and feeble, senile old Shallow. Nobody was convinced—sheer waste of effort Similarly with The First Night of Twelfth Night: I do not know anyone in the whole world of Elizabethan stage- scholarship who accepts Hotson's eccentric theories of performances in the round or of stage construction.

A proper historian detests theories and hypotheses and reconstructions; he respects facts. Thus, in my opinion, Hotson's book, with its 'dating' of the Sonnets, the mortal moon of the Spanish Armada and all that stuff, is valueless. And when we come to the latest hypothesis, Mr WH as William Hatcliffe, Prince of Purpoole, let me tell you it is ludicrous balderdash. All based, too, on the mistaken conception that Thorp's Mr WH is Shakespeare's young friend.

No one in the whole world of scholarship fell for this nonsense—though Professor Hotson regurgitated it recently in a colour supplement of the Sunday Times. Professor F. P. Wilson, of good, sober judgment thought beforehand it would be another mare's nest. No reputable scholar thought any other—with one singular exception : my erstwhile pupil, Dr C. V. Wedgwood, who, in a review in the Daily Telegraph, fell flat into the mare's nest. The plain fact is that there is a crack right down the middle of Professor Hotson's work : it is a great pity, ruining the modest value of the documentary finds, good in themselves. Inflation is the disease of our time.

As to chronology, the historian's business of dating, it is absolutely fundamental. How could you possibly interpret the development of Beethoven's work if you thought that the late opus numbers, 130 to 135, came early in his career? The same is true for any artist, composer or writer. It is absolutely essential, for the understanding of the work as a whole, to get the dating right. Just as similarly we want to know for whom the Sonnets were written, etc. One friend of mine told me he had read the Sonnets all his life without understanding what they were about, until he read my edition of them.

In determining to join in no controversy about my book when it came out, I made one exception. There was a gross caricature

of a review in the Times Literary Sup- plement. One can hardly blame the editor of

a paper for its reviewers: I can only say that it was unfortunate that our leading literary guide—if that is the word for it—which rather fell for the nonsense of Hotson's `dating' of the Sonnets, the Spanish Armada and all that, should have made such a hash of reviewing the best biography of Shakespeare to have been written.

I was perhaps unduly wounded by the reception of my book in Britain (not in America)—it is no use expecting people to be more intelligent than they are. All the same, it was a very bad chapter in contemporary

literary life, and rather symptomatic of what has gone wrong. My biography of Shakespeare was not approved of by a number of academics and literary journalists, rather significantly by the second-rate and the third-rate : it did not recommend itself to Mr Muggeridge or Pro- fessor Kermode, or Miss Brigid Brophy or Miss Bradbrook, or John Crow. But it was warmly welcomed by such people at the head of their profession as J. B. Priestley and Andre Maurois, C. P. Snow and Rebecca West, Harold Macmillan and de Gaulle (from both of whom I had remarkable personal letters), John Gielgud and Elizabeth Jenkins. I see that some of the literary journalists were more enthusiastic than I had remembered—Cyril Connolly, for example (but then he is a real writer). Even some of the professors were occasionally generous: Kenneth Muir admitted, 'The book remains the best account so far of Shakespeare the man.' Even so I have not noticed that the book has been given its ,place among the required reading by English Literature departments in the universities, or my work on Elizabethan literature. the Sonnets, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Ralegh, taken much notice of in their critical journals, when inferior work regularly is.

The reason is simple : it offends against trade union regulations. So I produce my last surprise for you. It was a first rate literary scholar at Oxford, J.I.M. Stewart (author of many good books, unlike a John Crow), who saw the point: `Dr Rowse is a poet as well as an historian—and it is really the poet who has written a very good book about Shakespeare. Not only does be draw a splen- didly rich and vivid background for the dramatist; he also shows again and again, how the passion and excitement of the age

, pours into the plays.'

Here is my surprise : you probably were not supposed to know that I am not merely an historian, but a poet. They have certainly kept it quiet long enough : if you are known as an historian, you cannot be a poet too. It is contrary to trade union regulations, or at least it goes counter to the unimaginative over-specialisation of the age—quite unlike the Renaissance ideal, the Elizabethan Age. But I am an Elizabethan, and share their values; I have no respect whatever for con- temporary society, and I know it is breaking down. Anyhow I wrote poetry years before I came to writing history; and though you may not know it, from the way it is disconsidered or ignored by the literary journals, there are five volumes so far, all but one out of print. I console myself by reflecting that poetry that was good enough for Eliot (who wrote the commendations to the public for the first three volumes), and appreciated by John Bet- jeman, Robert Lowell, Richard Church. Col- in Wilson, among others, is certainly good enough for the third-rate literary journalists and critics who ignore it.