A. L. Rowse

Alfred Leslie Rowse, CH FBA (December 4, 1903 – October 3, 1997), known professionally as A. L. Rowse and to his friends and family as Leslie, was a prolific British historian. He is perhaps best known for his poetry about Cornwall and his work on Elizabethan England. He was also a Shakespearean scholar and biographer. He developed a widespread reputation for irascibility and intellectual arrogance.

Life

Alfred Leslie Rowse was born in Tregonissey near St Austell, Cornwall, the son of Dick Rowse, a china clay miner, and Annie (née Vaston). His parents were very poor and virtually illiterate. Despite this handicap and fragile health, he attended St. Austell grammar school and won a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford in 1921.

Politics and All Souls College

Rowse had planned to study literature, having developed an early love of poetry, but was persuaded to read modern history. Whilst an undergraduate he developed a reputation for his devotion to speaking precise English and for his candour about his homosexual behaviour. He was a popular student and made many friendships that lasted for life. He graduated with first class honours in 1925 and was made a Fellow of All Souls College, the first such Fellow from a working class background. In 1929, he was awarded his Master of Arts degree, and in 1927 was appointed lecturer at Merton College, where he stayed until 1930. In 1931, he contested the parliamentary seat of Penryn and Falmouth for the Labour Party, but was unsuccessful and became a lecturer at the London School of Economics.

In the general election of 1935 he again proved unsuccessful, and then chose to return to Oxford as Sub-Warden of All Souls College. In 1952, he failed in his candidacy for election as Warden, shortly after which he retired to Trenarren, his Cornish home, for the remainder of his life. He received a doctorate (D. Litt.) from the university in 1953. After delivering the British Academy's 1957 Raleigh Lecture on History about Sir Richard Grenville's place in English history he became a Fellow of the Academy in 1958. Despite his academic and social success, he remained proud of his working-class origins.

Character

Rowse published 105 books. Upon publication of the first volume of his autobiography in 1942 he became celebrated and travelled widely, especially in the United States. He also published many popular articles in newspapers and magazines in England and the United States. His brilliance was widely recognised, and his knack for the sensational, as well as his academic boldness (which some considered to be irresponsible carelessness), sustained his reputation. His opinions of the academic abilities of his popular fellow historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, were expressed sometimes in ripe terms, sometimes with irony.

In his later years, Rowse moved increasingly towards the political right, and many considered him to be part of the Tory tradition by the time he died. Rowse wrote a series of books and articles in the 1950s and 1960s condemning appeasement as a consequence of the degeneration of part of Britain's elite. During this period, Rowse broke with his former friend A.J.P. Taylor and became one of Taylor's most bitter critics. He also furiously denounced Sir Arthur Bryant, with whom he had been on cordial enough terms when the latter was still alive, but whose posthumously-revealed tendresse towards aspects of Nazism Rowse detested.

Work

Rowse contributed poetry to student magazines. He had verse in Oxford 1923 and continued to write poetry throughout his life. He published his collected poems as A Life in 1981. The poetry is surprisingly good, and some of it may live for a long time, e.g. The Progress of Love, which describes his love for Adam von Trott, a handsome and aristocratic German youth who much later died during a conspiracy to kill Hitler.

His first book was On History, A Study of Present Tendencies published in 1927 as the seventh volume of Kegan Paul's Psyche Miniature General Series.

In 1931 he contributed to T. S. Eliot's quarterly review The Criterion. In 1935 he co-edited Charles Henderson's Essays in Cornish History for the Clarendon Press.

Shakespearian history

Rowse's early works focus on sixteenth century England and his first full-length historical monograph, Sir Richard Grenville of the Revenge (1937), was a biography of a sixteenth century sailor. His next was Tudor Cornwall (1941), a lively detailed account of Cornish society in the 16th century. He consolidated his reputation with a one-volume general history of England, The Spirit of English History (1943), but his most important work was the historical trilogy The Elizabethan Age: The England of Elizabeth (1950), The Expansion of Elizabethan England (1955), and The Elizabethan Renaissance (1971-72), respectively examine the society, overseas exploration, and culture of late sixteenth century England.

In 1963 Rowse began to concentrate on Shakespeare, starting with a biography in which he claimed to have dated all the sonnets, identified Christopher Marlowe as the suitor's rival and solved all but one of the other problems posed by the sonnets. His failure to acknowledge his reliance upon the work of other scholars alienated some of his peers, but he won popular acclaim. In 1973, he published, Shakespeare the Man, in which he claimed to have solved the final problem - the identity of the 'Dark Lady': from a close reading of the sonnets and the diaries of Simon Forman, he asserted that she must have been Emilia Lanier, whose poems he would later collect.

Rowse's discoveries about Shakespeare's sonnets amount to the following:

1. The Fair Youth was Henry Wriothesley, the 19-year-old Earl of Southampton, extremely handsome and very bisexual. 2. The sonnets were written 1592-1594/5. 3. The rival poet was the famously gay Christopher Marlowe. 4. The Dark Lady was Elizabeth Lanier. 5. Christopher Marlowe's death is recorded in the sonnets. 6. Shakespeare was an extremely heterosexual man, who was faced with a very unusual situation when the handsome, young, bisexual Earl of Southampton fell in love with him.

As a result of this, Sonnet XX can now be read in a very new way. It is Shakespeare making a courtly and witty refusal of the young Henry Wriothesley.

Current scholarly opinion regarding Rowse's theories about the sonnets seem to fall into two camps. (1) He is absolutely wrong (2) He isn't telling us anything new, but neglecting to mention the contributions of others.

In the meantime, the mainstream of "scholarship" (if it exists at all, any more) continues to maintain that Shakespeare was gay, or bisexual, and that the publisher's dedication to a certain "Master W.H." somehow provides the name of Shakespeare's fair youth!

The name of Shakespeare's fair youth was "Lord H.W." -- never, ever, Master (the title of a Knight).

In 1976, he used Forman's diaries again as material for another book, Sex and Society in the Elizabethan Age. Rowse completed his studies of Shakespeare with an annotated edition of the complete works (1978).

Other subjects

Human sexuality was the subject of another high profile book in the 1970s: Homosexuals In History (1977). But Rowse was no gay partisan. He resisted the prevailing academic suggestions that the sonnets were written to a gay lover, asserting (for he never proposed or suggested) that Shakespeare was "a strongly sexed heterosexual […] more than a little interested in women—for an Englishman."

Although Rowse did not tolerate fools, he also did not make such assertions without supplying reasons. In the case of Shakespeare, he noted that Shakespeare had managed to get an older woman pregnant by the time he was 18, and was consequently obliged to marry her. Moreover, he had saddled himself with three children by the time he was 21. In the sonnets, Shakespeare's explicit erotic interest lies with the Dark Lady; he obsesses about her. As anyone can figure out, Shakespeare was still married and therefore carrying on an extramarital affair. This sort of behavior is, to put it mildly, not typical of a gay man.

He wrote other biographies of English historical and literary figures and many other histories. Among his most interesting biographies are the ones of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Southampton, the major actors in the sonnet. He also published a selection of Emilia Lanier's poetry. His bestselling autobiography appeared in several volumes, starting with A Cornish Childhood (1942) and ending with whimsical stories of Cornwall in the 1980s. His last book, disdainful accounts of Historians I Have Known, was published in 1995.

Honors

Rowse was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Exeter in 1960, was elected to Athenaeum under Rule II in 1972, received the Benson Medal of the Royal Society of Literature in 1982 and was made a Companion of Honour in 1996. He was also made a Bard of Gorseth Kernow, taking the title Lev Kernow (the Voice of Cornwall).

Bibliophile

One of Rowse's great enthusiasms was collecting books, and he owned many first editions, many of them bearing his acerbic annotations. His copy of the January 1924 edition of The Adelphi magazine edited by John Middleton Murry bears a pencilled note after Murry's poem In Memory of Katherine Mansfield: 'Sentimental gush on the part of JMM. And a bad poem. A.L.R.'

Upon his death in 1997 he bequeathed to the University of Exeter his collection of books, and his personal archive of manuscripts, diaries, and correspondence. In 1998 the University Librarian selected about sixty books from Rowse’s own working library and a complete set of his published books. The Royal Institution of Cornwall selected some of the remaining books, and the rest were sold through a London book dealer.

Selected works

• On History, A Study of Present Tendencies, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1927)
• Science and History: A New View of History, (London: W. W. Norton, 1928)
• Queen Elizabeth and her Subjects, (London: Allen & Unwin, 1935)
• Mr. Keynes and the Labour Movement, (1936)
• Sir Richard Grenville of the Revenge, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937)
• Tudor Cornwall (1941)
• A Cornish Childhood (1942)
• The Spirit of English History (1943)
• West-Country Stories, (London: Macmillan, 1945)
• The Use of History (1946)
• Teach Yourself History, (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1946)
• The England of Elizabeth (1950)
• An Elizabethan Garland (1953)
• The Expansion of Elizabethan England, (1955)
• The Early Churchills (1956)
• The Later Churchills (1958)
• All Souls and Appeasement : a contribution to contemporary history, (1961).
• Appeasement : a study in political decline, 1933-1939, (1961).
• William Shakespeare: A Biography, (London: Macmillan, 1963)
• Christopher Marlowe: a biography (1964)
• A Cornishman at Oxford (1965) (autobiography)
• Bosworth Field and the Wars of the Roses (1966)
• A Cornish Anthology (1968)
• The Cousin Jacks (1969)
• The Elizabethan Renaissance I-II (London: Macmillan, 1971-72) ISBN 0-333-12534-7
• Shakespeare The Man, (London: Macmillan, 1973)
• Peter, The White Cat of Trenarren, (1974)
• Jonathan Swift: Major Prophet, (London, Thames & Hudson, 1975) ISBN 0-500-01141-9
• A Cornishman Abroad, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976)
• Brown Buck : a Californian fantasy, (1976).
• Matthew Arnold: Poet and Prophet, (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976)
• Homosexuals In History, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977) ISBN 0-297-77299-6
• The Byrons and the Trevanions, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978)
• A Man of the Thirties, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979) ISBN 0-297-77666-5
• Stories From Tenarren, (Kimber, 1986)
• The Poet Auden: A Personal Memoir, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987).
• All Souls in My Time, (1993)
• Historians I Have Known (1995)

References

• Sydney Cauveren, A.L. Rowse: A Bibliophile's Extensive Bibliography, (2000)
• Valerie Jacob, Tregonissey to Trenarren, (St. Austell: Valerie Jacob, 2001) ISBN 0-9541505-0-3
• Richard Ollard, A man of contradictions, (London: Allen Lane, 1999) ISBN 0-7139-9353-7
• Richard Ollard, The Diaries of A. L. Rowse, (London: Allen Lane, 2003)
• James Whetter, Dr. A. L. Rowse, (Gorran, St. Austell: Lyfrow Trelyspen, 2003)