A. L. Rowse (1903–1997)

[The Elizabethan Renaissance; The cultural achievement, A L Rowse]
A L Rowse was not a man to keep his opinions to himself; he is quoted as describing 1960’s England as a "Slacker State":

"I don't want to have my money scalped off me to maintain other people's children. I don't like other people; I particularly don't like their children; I deeply disapprove of their proliferation making the globe uninhabitable. The fucking idiots - I don't want to pay for their fucking”.

A L Rowse was an show more author, historian, biographer, poet and probably self publicist. A man who became deeply misanthropic and was not averse to sharing his opinions; something of this comes across in his otherwise excellent history of the Elizabethan age (Queen Elizabeth I, 1558 - 1603), published in 1972. Fortunately he saw the Elizabethan age as a golden age and his passion for and knowledge of his subject ranks with the two historians Jacob Burckhardt and J H Huizinga to whom he inscribes the frontispiece of his book (although of course they were historians of an earlier era).

The cultural achievement is the third part of Rowse’s trilogy of books on the Elizabethan age. It covers Drama (particularly the importance of Shakespeare), language literature and society, words and music, Architecture and Sculpture, Painting, domestic arts, science and society, nature and medicine and mind and spirit (religion). There is an epilogue which attempts to place the Elizabethan age in perspective, that is perspective with the rest of Europe and succeeding ages.

Rowse’s forthright opinions and his ability to make his history lively are a feature of this book, together with his in depth knowledge of the period. If you are looking to read a historian that presents various shades of grey then this is not it. A L Rowse certainly has his heroes; Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Hariot, Sir Philip Sydney and the Queen herself, but this is tempered with realistic portraits and an assessment of their impact on their society.

Rowse on George Chapman (Elizabethan dramatist, translator and poet):

Chapman reacted into an obscure intellectualism, which he justified by regarding himself as a superior spirit, with a hatred of the common man, and this he expressed obsessively……. The public reacted by never demanding a second edition of his books……. Others have seen in this strangulated poet the rival poet of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Such people have no sense of literature, and should get out of the field.

Rowse’s call for other critics, who do not agree with him to “get out of the field” is typical of his attitude, he is not above referring to such historians/writers as idiots and perhaps he has more in common with the Elizabethan poet George Chapman than he would have cared to believe.

I am sure there are more balanced histories of the Elizabethan era, but they may not be able to match Rowse’s peerless knowledge, or his passion for his subject. Perhaps we can mention his name in the same breath as Burckhardt and Huizinga and so I rate this as 4 stars. show less

Now mostly worth reading as an example of the kinds of things which could be published as historical writing in the mid 1950s in the UK without anyone batting an eyelid—though the blatant and unapologetic misogyny certainly made both my eyebrows rush towards my hairline. For example, this:

But she [Barbara, Lady Castlemaine] never put herself out to make the King [Charles II] easy; indeed, after she found out that ease was what he valued most, she made him purchase it at a constantly show more heightened price: scenes, propitiation, gifts, demands, scenes, forgiveness, grants and titles followed in the regular order of the dance she led him. What a fool he was! — she should have been beaten.

or this:

Instead of that the intolerable woman [Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough] —perhaps the only extenuation of her conduct may be her change of life, and an element of hysteria—when on tormenting the Queen [Anne] about Mrs Masham.

Oh, those perfidious females, with their dangerous tendencies not to spend their lives putting men at ease, with their hormones—why can't a woman be more like a man? Oh, that's right. Their brains aren't the proper shape. show less

Just a disaster, and I'm appalled by the people who gave this a five-star review. There's a fantastic review by the ever-reliable Jeanne Addison Roberts in Shakespeare Quarterly 1979 which is worth quoting: "the motivating spirit behind this spectacular non-book is clearly commercial".

Despite being published in 1978, A.L. Rowse's edition of Shakespeare breezily reprints a 1904 text (itself a copy of 19th century texts) which is itself an unusual decision, in light of the many worthy show more Shakespeare editions released in those intervening years, from the Arden to the Riverside. The introductions to each play are, as Roberts notes, "drawn almost entirely from [Rowse's] own earlier work" and are of the tossed-off variety, aiming to pontificate on a half-dozen received facts about the play without, it seems, much engagement with contemporary criticism. The margin glosses are surprisingly few and, while yes, Rowse can often be delightfully eccentric, as others note, he is also sometimes just passing the time. When pages pass with only three or four glosses, one feels that this can hardly be the Shakespeare for every household in the land. Sometimes, Rowse even uses "correct" as if he is just telling the reader what word should be there, rather than asserting his opinion in the crowded field of editors from 1709 to the present day.

The only reason this edition merited two stars was because there are many hundreds of pictures, most of them nineteenth-century, meaning at least there is some historical value to this work. Given the grotesque size of the thing, this is hardly worth the purchasing, particularly not with another forty years having passed in the interim.

To quote Roberts once more, "do we laugh or cry?" show less

I don't remember when or why I acquired this, but I obviously bought it without opening it first. It turns out to be one of those slightly embarrassing books Rowse wrote after retiring from All Souls', the sort of tory rant that might be quite entertaining in the setting of the Telegraph letters page or a High Table dinner, but soon gets tedious on the printed page. After a couple of pages on what a wonderful, funny, caring, empathetic, red-blooded sort of writer Shakespeare was, he moves on show more to his actual subject: "But Milton was a Cambridge man". He doesn't really need to say any more, does he?

All the same, he goes on for another couple of hundred pages, praising Archbishop Laud and the Stuarts, condemning the puritans and Parliamentarians (whom he treats as though they were 17th-century Brexiteers) and generally rubbishing the fizzing and subversive intellectual world that Milton existed in. And, of course, being Rowse, he has a Theory: Milton was a repressed homosexual. If he'd done what Rowse would have done in his place and picked up a couple of sailors for the evening, Paradise Lost might have been a very different epic. Hmmmm. show less