A Fine New Life of Shakespeare

By Peter Bellamy It is very meet and proper that the Bock of the Month Club selection for January is A. L. Rowse' biography of William Shakespeare (Harper & Rowe, $6.95).

It is meet because April marks the 400th birthday of the world's greatest playwright. It is proper because Rowse' book is one of enormous scholarship, research and imagination. In the future it may well become a standard source and text book on the subject.

If Rowse never writes another thing, this will be his monument. It is for the inquiring mind or the scholar rather than light entertainment for the surface reader. Its attention both to the works and history of Shakespeare's era make it impossible of swift or casual perusal.

ONE HAS to stop frequently to digest the tremendous amount of facts and theories advanced by Rowse about Shakespeare.

In addition to his great grasp of Shakespeare's works, Rowse has the vast advantage of being a leading historian of the Elizabethan age. It is through his historical approach that he is able to make myriad explanations of Shakespeare's allusion to events of his own

era.

To be sure, Rowse is not always certain of his speculations and introduces many with such phrases as "we may infer," "it seems to "it seems to have been," "it would be reasonable to suppose," "we see signs," and "we may conclude.'

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Nor is his logic always on the firmest ground. For example, he quotes from Shakespeare's works to prove he was not a homosexual, an opinion taken seriously by very few. On the other hand, I defy anyone to read Oscar Wilde's plays and conclude he was homosexual. That Wilde was is a matter of tragic

rapher of Shakespeare, Rowse plays the game of mental ouija board in trying to figure out whom the Bard had in mind when he wrote the sonnets. He is dogmatic in his conviction that he has solved all of the questions involved except the identity of the sonnet's "Dark Lady.

I cannot understand all the dither about this. Would the line "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" be any less lovely if it had been inspired by a barmaid than by the Earl of Southampton? Would Edgar Allen Poe's exquisite ode, "To Helen," be any less so if it had been prompted by a girl named Sarah?

However, most of Rowse' conclusions about the life and contemporary historical references of Shakespeare are reasonable and saturate the reader in the aura of Good Queen Bess, who so loved and encouraged the theater.

ROWSE MAKES one feel he almost knows the friendly, brilliant Shakespeare, the grumpy Ben Jonson, the quarrelsome Marlowe, the magnetic, irresolute Earl of Essex, the dashing Sir Walter Raleigh, and the grim Puritans who scarcely 30 years after his death would suppress all of Shakespeare's works.

The reader can almost see, hear and smell the natural beauties of the forest of Arden and the dynamic city of London in the sceptered isle of England. Here's a great book about a great man.

Peter Quennell, another literary historian, has also written a new biography of Shakespeare. (World Publishing Co., $6.95). It is a fine book, but I do not think it compares with Rowse's in scholarship or imagination.

The Kalevala, the national folk epic of Finland which was Longfellow's inspiration for Hiawatha, is being published in an English prose translation by Francis Peabody Magoun Jr. it is being published by the Harvard LIKE MANY another biogUniversity Press.

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