The Bard for a New Generation

By Stefan Kanfer

THE ANNOTATED SHAKESPEARE by A.L. Rowse; Potter; 3 vols.; $60

The theater that first housed Shakespeare's plays was not merely named the Globe, it was the globe. Under its famous open roof humanity passed in review. It was a whore and a fool and a murderer and it laughed; it was a virgin The theater that first housed Shakespeare's plays was not merely named the Globe, it was the globe. Under its famous open roof humanity passed in review. It was a whore and a fool and a murderer and it laughed; it was a virgin and a king and a samaritan and it mourned. It was fettered to its passions and ruled whole nations. It fumed at fortune and men's eyes and celebrated its own appetites. It passes still, and the writer who sets out to map the plays and poems ends, as Critic Leslie Fiedler once did, with "not another book about 'Our Shakespeare.' but one about 'Shakespeare's Us."

Yet it would be false to call the Bard contemporary. His psychological insight may be keener than Freud's, and his social perceptions, about women and blacks for example, travel freely across the borders of age. But he was first and last an Elizabethan.

In his time, plague was in the air, and the death of kings implied an unimaginable catastrophe. Racism and superstition prevailed. Occupations that are now obsolete dot his plays: cooper, wheelwright, alchemist, bellman. His language glitters with marvelous words that have, alas, also become obsolete: porpentine (porcupine); swound (faint); german (akin); caitiff (wretch); borthens (the hair of corpses); grise (a stair); bisson (blind). However immortal, Shakespeare, no less than Aristophanes or Mozart, needs his modern interpreters.

Enter, stage right, A.L. Rowse. "If it is something about Elizabethen Age, you would do well to ask me" the retired Oxford don once wrote to a critic, and he was right. Volume after volume has testified to Rowse's intimacy with the 17th century. No sexual custom, no oddity of language or quirk of lore seems to have escaped his attention. Now he displays his wit and erudition in an extravagant three-volume work that has no precedent and is not likely to have successors. The Annotated Shakespeare has no restrictions; it suits the actor and the scholar, the general reader and the child. Its pictures are copious but never merely decorative. Some 4,200 illustrations compare ancient productions with those of Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando. Woodcuts from Holinshed's Chronicles, which Shakespeare ransacked for his plots, jostle with faded maps and new costume designs for the Stratford festivals.

Dr. Rowse's introductions to the plays are models of brevity and resonance. "Each age flatters itself that it understands the past better than its predecessors have done," observes the annotator. "But I think that we in our time do understand the Elizabethan Age better... Our very insecurity, the sense of contingency upon which all life hangs ... give us better--or, rather, worse--reason for understanding the tragic depiction of life in Shakespeare's greatest works." Yet Rowse is quick to notice that in the comedies "the salty humour has been a preservative through the centuries, one of the forces that have kept him alive. For sex is a force, indeed the life-force; and Shakespeare is the sexiest, bawdiest of all great writers."

It is in the broad white margins that The Annotated Shakespeare makes its most enduring contribution. Here are the old phrases, clarified and illuminated; here is the James VI family tree traced back to Banquo; here is the real Cleopatra staring out from an Egyptian wall painting; here are the faces and personalities of pagan gods who haunt the soliloquies: Tellus, Jove, Aesculapius, Venus and Adonis, Phaethon. Hardly a character, historical or fictive, remains unshown in this vast museum without walls. Primary among them is the Bard himself: London-dweller and countryman, conservative and revolutionary, pursuer of women and country husband, writer for the galleries and the Queen; a man as rich and original and varied as this inexhaustible work.

Certainly there have been closer examinations of Shakespeare's "motiveless malignity" and comic imagery; there are variorum editions that more thoroughly note corruptions of the text from the First Folio onward. But no other book so resourcefully examines the correspondence between the stage and life, particularly modern life; no writer has made Shakespeare more beguiling to the eye or more accessible to the age. In death, Hamlet's father cries, "Adieu, adieu! ... remember me." It is also the playwright's plea. Rowse has heard it and amplified it for generations to come. --Stefan Kanfer

When Alfred Leslie Rowse and the century were young, he used to perch on the high stone wall surrounding a Cornish manor house. "I'd sit there and wonder," recalls the owlish bachelor. "Why couldn't I live there? Why couldn't it be mine? Well, I finally made it."

The climb over the wall took almost half a century and incalculable strain. Of Rowse's 43 books, none is more revealing than his first appearance in print: a schoolboy poem in a slender anthology. All the other contributors, among them Graham Greene, were from privileged private schools. Alfred, the son of a tradesman, was the sole county-school representative. His rise thereafter was rapid, but its price was prohibitive. While at Oxford, the scholarship winner succumbed to attacks of ulcers. "Illness dominated the 'first half of my life," he remembers. "It made me more withdrawn."

The library became his refuge and salvation. Between the wars, the don's reputation as a researcher and writer grew; T.S. Eliot sought his articles on Marxism, presented with a historian's detachment; W.H. Auden befriended him. By the '50s he was famous. Today Rowse laces his conversation with recollections of the mighty: "Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt spoke much clearer English than Winston, who had a speech impediment as a child and always lisped somewhat."

Although Rowse has long been a part of the British literary establishment, he has never felt comfortable with it. For one thing, the members operate in the wrong era. "This filthy 20th century," complains the self-made elitist. "I hate its guts." What better place for a man who loathes welfare statism than the century of the other Elizabeth? After decades of living in its atmosphere, Rowse tends to treat the Bard as an intimate. Others may puzzle over the identity of the Dark Lady of the Sonnets; Rowse is sure that she is Emilia Bassano Lanier, the half-Venetian wife of a court musician and "a bad lot." As for those who find evidence of homosexuality in the canon, Rowse dismisses them as "silly buggers. The idiots can't see that Christopher Marlowe was a roaring homo, and Francis Bacon was a homo, but that Shakespeare was more than normally heterosexual--for an Englishman." Such fulminations have provoked assaults by critics, who find the challenger "impudent," "self-advertising" and full of "melodramatic fantasies." Rowse counters in iambic pentameter, by cursing "the blinkered outlook of academics." His most persuasive replies, however, are a series of militant books about the Elizabethans, and The Annotated Shakespeare. There he dissects Love's Labour's Lost to find fresh evidence that Shakespeare penned his own droll self-portrait as Biron and modeled Biron's dark lady, Rosaline, on Emilia Lanier. Further clues are on the way. This month, when Rowse visits the U.S., he will bring with him a sheaf of newly discovered poems by Emilia. The 74-year-old Cornishman is rooted to his native soil, but this, after all, is a special occasion. "Americans," vows Rowse, "are really more open-minded than the British."

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