Rowse on Shakespeare
Sir: While Dr Rowse engages in his spirited bouts with all corners, one can quietly follow up trails as he suggest. And all the evidence about his Emilia Lanier so far discovered — in parish registers; wills; the State Papers; and accounts of successive Lord Chamberlains and Masters of the Wardrobe relating to the liveries of the Court musicians — strongly points not to two Emilias, but one: Emilia Bassano, born in January 1569 and dying in late March or early April of 1645.
Of the points enumerated by Dr Rowseonlyone (on the evidence of the Forman case-books) is indisputable: that Emilia had been the mistress of the Lord Chamberlain. the first Lord Hunsdon and first patron of Shakespeare's company. But, as recent events have surely emphasised, there is absolutely no reason to assume that a man's mistress invariably moves in the circles in which his public and professional life is conducted — the contrary is more often true. As for the assumption that Emilia was "musical like the woman in the Sonnets ", all that can be said with certainty is that her father and other male relations were Court musicians: she herself may have been stone deaf. Her husband was not "called Will as in the Sonnets ": he was Alphonso Lanier, whom she married at the church of St Botolph Aldgate on October 18, 1592 (so that she is not " pinpointed to the year 1593 "). She was not "Italian and presumably dark ", but only half-Italian: her mother was called Margaret Johnson and was presumably English, and she may have been ash-blonde or a redhead for all we know. From Forman's account, Emilia certainly had " a bad reputation ", and was "proud " tyrannical " and able to drive men "frantic-mad ": but Elizabethan London was surely not so small that the same could not be said of some other women tdo.
Mary Edmond 28 Westholm, London NW I I Sir: I do not venture to hope that such a learned man as Dr Rowse (The Consolations of being right, June 2) will listen to a " third rater " such as I. Nevertheless I offer two points for.,his consideration; (a) Socrates did not say that " a Wise man knew when he didn't know "; he said that a wise man knows that his wisdom is worth nothing. In other words he knows that he IS not as clever as he is sometimes tempted to think. The fact that Dr Rowse has chosen to take this stand against his detractors indicates to me that he has failed to understand this very fundamental principle of wisdom. By his heated self-justification ("this isn't a theory, it's the answer ") and the trenchant way in which he calumniates his critics (" the third-raters of the Shakespeare Establishment "). the doctor shows himself guilty of the very sin for which he so roundly con .demns the "Shakespeare Establishment" — that of dogmatically refus ing to admit the possibility that he might be mistaken. Dr Rowse may Well be the "leading authority" on the Elizabethan Age; but even experts (e.g. John Dover Wilson) sometimes fall prey to error. This is why openness of mind, a constant readiness to revise Opinions in the light of serious critical scrutiny, is the very stuff of whith scholarship is made. Bertrand Russell, as Dr Rowse will recall, frequently mile this pbint; but perhaps Bertrand Russell was "dead from the neck up wards," and therefore not to be heeded? If Russell will not do, how comes it, then, that the Doctor has not learned from Socrates how to adopt an urbane and high-minded attitude towards his persecutors? Can it be that he has not read the Apology?
(b) Dr Rowse has evidently written this piece of self-praise because he can find no one else to praise him. Even those whose allegiance he so proudly claims do not seem to have flung themselves to his side. Incidentally, if it is true that "hardly anybody's opinion . . . is of much account" (be cause not many people know anything about the Elizabethan Age), why is Dr Rowse so pleased to have the appro bation of Harold Macmillan and General De Gaulle, of all people? Selflove manifests itself in many inter esting ways, and a goodly few of them are represented here — I liked, for example, the fondly pitying " poor old Dover Wilson " and the contemptuous dismissal of "the miserable Crow," who, after all, was a mere "Reader, not a Professor." As the good Doctor so rightly says, " envy and spite are such familiar phenomena in contemporary literary life as to be boring." I would suggest to him that an ungracious and vituperative tirade of this kind does not much contribute to a reputation for disinterested scholar ship. He plainly hopes that posterity will afford him a place as a notable Elizabethan scholar. Undoubtedly such a place will be his, and undeniably he will have earned it; but modesty,
: humour, self-restraint and fairmindedness will not be among the qualities enumerated on his tablet in the Halls of the Great.
R. W. Dyson 91 Talgarth Road, Kensington W14.
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