ELIZABETHAN ENTERTAINMENTS

Press, 5 November 1977, Page 17

ELIZABETHAN ENTERTAINMENTS

Shakespeare the Elizabethan. By A. L. Rowse. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 128 PP- N.Z. price fl 1.95. Will Shakespeare: An Entertainment. By John Mortimer. Hodder and Stoughton. 256 pp. N.Z. price (Reviewed by David Gunby) Like Tennyson’s brook, the Shakespeare industry goes on forever, but unlike Tennyson’s brook, in infinite variety. The latest examples of the industry illustrate this well, for on the one hand we have what John Mortimer chooses to call an “entertainment” — a narrative derived from the six TV plays he was commissioned to write about the life of Shakespeare — and on the other a scholarly example of the “life and times” species of biography. Both are about Shakespeare, yet beyond that they have little if anything in common.

Almost all the criticisms that might be levelled against John Mortimer’s “entertainment” are disarmed by his use of that term to describe the book. The narrator of the six major episodes is one Jack Rice, an old man who was formerly a boy-actor in the company Shakespeare wrote for, and the style is designed to reflect the speaking voice of this lively and rumbustious character. To some it will sound lively and individual, no doubt, and perhaps create a sense of period. To this reviewer, it must be said, it was remarkably tedious and offputting, with its plethora of Elizabethan or para-Elizabethan idioms and even greater plethora of backslapping, bum-pinching, bubby-groping,

drinking and laughing. In its way, Mr Mortimer’s entertainment offers us a variant on the old and long-discredited notion of “Merry England,” and though it may pass on TV, it does not so easily do so on the printed page. From A. L. Rowse, of course, we should not expect such a crude version of Elizabethan England. As a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and author of a series of books on sixteenth and early seventeenth century history and literature, he is a labourer in the fields of scholarship even though (as a leading exponent of popularised history) he is also in many respects an entertainer.

In “Shakespeare the Elizabethan,” Dr Rowse gives us a concise account of what is known of the dramatist’s life, together with what can reasonably be conjectured, spliced neatly together, with quotations from the plays which the author contends reflect Shakespeare’s own views. Here we begin to enter dubious ground, for there is no way in which we can be certain that what a dramatist gives a character to say reflects the writer’s personal views: indeed, the good dramatist is good precisely because he can be objective in the creation of his plays, and avoid his own omnipresence in the works. Still, Dr Rowse chooses his quotations neatly, and if not all of them will convince those who have some scholarly understanding of the dramatist, they will add flesh and colour to the popular reputation. Dr Rowse is a man of strong opinions, and no opinion does he hold more strongly than that of his own rightness. Of this there has been ample evidence in earlier books most notably, perhaps, that in which he

asserted that he had “solved” the problems raised by Shakespeare’s sonnets, and (moreover) identified the “dark lady.” These triumphs of his earlier books are repeated here as facts. So Dr Rowse tells us that the dark lady is Emilia Lanier, that the rival poet is Marlowe and that the Mr W. H. of the Sonnets’ title page is “someone in the Southampton circle” (i.e. of the retinue of Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, to whom, Dr Rowse asserts, the sonnets were addressed.) Yet scholarly opinion equally as weighty as Dr Rowse’s will assert that William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke is a much better candidate for W. H., that the rival poet may well be George Chapman, and that there is insufficient evidence for asserting categorically that Mistress Lanier was the dark lady. Had Dr Rowse admitted the possibility of alternative identifications, his breezy and co n f i d e n t progress through Shakespeare’s life might for a moment have faltered, but it would at least have admitted the existence of alternative “truth.” As it is, ‘‘Shakespeare the Elizabethan” presents us with the “Authorised Version” of Shakespeare’s life — authorised, that is, by A. L. Rowse. And because of this, because Dr Rowse so powerfully dominates the book, whether asserting “fact” or opinion (e.g. that Marlowe’s early death was the “greatest loss English literature ever suffered” — what of Keats?), his book will, in spite of its many fine illustrations, appeal only to a popular audience; one not so far removed from Mr Mortimer’s, in fact.