Pure Bardolatry

SHAHANI, RANJEE

Pure Bardolatry WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE By A. L. Rowse Harper & Row. 485 pp. $6.95 Reviewed by RANJEE SHAHANI Department of English Fairleigh Dickinson University Many years ago-in the...

...One approaches every problem with passionate disinterestedness...
...His portraits of Raleigh, Marlowe, Chapman and others are also sharp, clear and strikingly impressive...
...The theory of the objective artist is, of course, absurd...
...This conceit (there is no other word for the attitude) is slightly ridiculous, and it gives Rowse's prose an unnecessary tone of pomposity...
...I went ahead, of course, but the fact remains that there are indeed far too many tomes about Shakespeare...
...About the intriguing problem of the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, on which any light would have been welcome, he is eloquently silent...
...And if we look carefully into Shakespeare's Sonnets as well as into the work of his contemporaries, we find that the words "the proud full sail of his great verse" and "which nightly gulls him with intelligence" can only apply to George Chapman, who claimed that he had what Shakespeare calls an "affable familiar ghost" that inspired him...
...Yet there appear to be gaps in Rowse's omniscience...
...Yet people keep turning them out...
...He is middle-aged, a time of life when one is neither excitable nor indifferent...
...For myself, I find many of Rowse's conclusions questionable...
...Had he read Middleton Murry or G. Wilson Knight on the subject he would have seen that this brief poem concentrates in a dew-drop the mellow wisdom of a lifetime...
...there seems to be little he does not know...
...Shakespeare, as Rowse reminds us, was a man whose every word doth tell his name...
...and his two longish poems, "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece," have now only the glitter of glass beads...
...Rowse maintains that Shakespeare's rival poet was Marlowe...
...Who is right...
...Unfortunately, Rowse has not separated the wheat from the chaff in Shakespeare's work...
...And most everything he says about the happenings of the Shakespearian age is illuminating...
...That most of these are "wood, hay, stubble" goes without saying...
...One could cite other instances of disagreement with Rowse, but more important than his scholarship is his attitude toward Shakespeare...
...He forgets that in the work of the very greatest man there is little that is of permanent value...
...Think of Romeo and Juliet...
...6.95 Reviewed by RANJEE SHAHANI Department of English Fairleigh Dickinson University Many years ago-in the early '30s, to be more exact-when I was about to undertake a doctoral thesis on Shakespeare at Cambridge, my official guide, that delicately sensitive writer E. M. Forster, sent me the following little note: "There are more than 60,000 volumes on the poet...
...This, at any rate, was the advice of Bernard Shaw to both young and old writers...
...Take one example...
...From this it is clear that Chapman, as revealed in "The Shadow of Night," a poem which critics have called "palpable darkness," was trying to convey to us something of the dusk of the spirit, which Shakespeare mocked and, as usual, copied in a manner all his own...
...On that moment's monument, the mysterious The Phoenix and the Turtle, he echoes the established opinions of certain academic pundits...
...This, though, seems unlikely, since Shakespeare treated Marlowe as a master whom he sedulously aped, and since Marlowe died too soon to have been a threat to Shakespeare's great and growing popularity...
...Such a person is badly needed to reassess Shakespeare, for the supreme poet of England lies buried under a mountain of commentary and needs to be dug out and presented in his true colors...
...That Rowse is an excellent historian has been demonstrated by the various books he has written...
...On Shakespeare's place in world literature Rowse's view is Englandbound...
...Further, consider the lines: No pen can anything eternal indite That is not steeped in the shadow of the night...
...Already, the Swan of Avon has a somewhat unwieldy nest...
...Professor Dover Wilson, a Shakespearian critic of long standing, who has recently published a book on the poet especially designed for the enlightenment of historians, disagrees with Rowse on many points...
...Only we must read him properly and try to catch his cadences...
...A. L. Rowse, the English historian, is lucky in his years...
...What is there new to say now...
...Almost everything in that play happens at night, and yet the night is not dark as Erebus, as in Chapman, but washed with silver...
...Nor has he given us a fresh insight into that wonderful psychic influx that found no abiding reality except in the body and soul of Shakespeare...
...To be sure, Shakespeare has written as much that will last as any man, but to treat everything of his as sacrosanct is pure Bardolatry...
...There are no doubts in Rowse's mind about anything...
...But because he is an accomplished recorder of facts, and justly proud of his métier, he seems to think that only a man of his profession is capable of entering into the spirit of his country's master playwright...
...As with most of his countrymen, he believes that there is no one who has ever written, or is ever likely to write again, as Shakespeare did...
...What little he does offer is not worth its weight in wind...
...Moreover, Chapman translated Homer, and it was this translation, which had something of the splendor of the blind bard's own art, that made Shakespeare uncomfortable...
...Here, patently, is a case of rivalry...
...In addition many of the Sonnets are poor, being mere exercises in versification, though some of them are incomparable...
...he knows the identity of the rival poet...
...Poetry in the Elizabethan age was more important than playwriting...
...He is quite right in scoffing at those critics who say that Shakespeare was a kind of magical druggist who prepared various phials called Desdemona, Othello, Ophelia, Hamlet, and so on...
...Many of Shakespeare's plays have already dated...
...he knows what the various plays signify...
...Can it be because the easiest way to get known quickly in England and America is to write a challenging book on Shakespeare...
...He knows who the young man to whom the Sonnets were addressed...

Vol. 47 • March 1964 • No. 7


 
Developed by
Kanda Sofware
  Kanda Software, Inc.