The Sonnet Investigator

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE by A. L. Rowse. 485 pages. Harper & Row. $6.95.

Not a single letter from Shakespeare is known to exist. Only one letter to him--a plea from a Stratford acquaintance for -L-30--is on record. Such facts of his life as can be ascertained from Stratford town records and a handful of references to him by folk in Elizabethan London can easily be (and, in fact, are) completely set down in a few columns of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But for decades scholars have felt compelled to spin these few threads into an overblown fabric of speculation which the academic world charitably describes as literary biography. The latest offender is a brilliant and bumptious Cornishman named A. L. Rowse.

Biographical Blather. Rowse is a noted writer of Elizabethan history and one of the few historians ever to invade what has clearly been marked out as literary terrain. This, plus the fact that 1964 is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, allowed some small room for hope--not that his book would offer new material (there has been none discovered since 1931), but that it would somehow be intriguing and different. Alas, Rowse is no further along than his second chapter before it becomes clear that he is going to bog down in much of the traditional blather of Shakespearean biography.

Like other authors before him, he strews his book with phrases like "we have no reason to doubt," which keep him honest while he pushes conjecture to the far limits of common sense. Like others, too, he is an image-counter and an incorrigible drawer of conclusions about the man's life from the man's works. Because Shakespeare refers to bowling 19 times in his plays, Rowse is sure that the bard must have loved bowling. Because Shakespeare puts in Sir John Falstaffs mouth the famous speech slighting honor ("Who hath it? He that died of a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No . . . I'll have none of it then!"), Rowse writes: "I think we may conclude that Shakespeare, sensible man, would not have been eager to risk his life for honor."

Anniversary Orgy. But if Rowse is only a competent biographer, he is outstanding as a side-winding literary promoter. For the past two months, he has been touring the U.S. lecture circuit, proclaiming that he solved the "problem of the sonnets" when all others have failed.

Anybody who has read the sonnets knows that Shakespeare is addressing a young man and urging him to marry and preserve his line: "Die single and thine image dies with thee." But who is the boy? When did Shakespeare write to him? And who are the rival poet and the dark lady who later appear in the sequence? These murky questions have perplexed generations of scholars.

Since Shakespeare's only patron was the young Earl of Southampton--a delicately hued blond boy who for years was the despair of his family because he took no interest in girls--the sonnets might seem, to any reasonable man, to have been written to him. Ah, but wait. They are prefaced with a dedication signed T. T., addressed to W. H., "the only begetter of these poems."

Wilde Theories. T. T. is understood to be Thomas Thorpe, Shakespeare's publisher. But who is W. H.? Encountering this conundrum, scholarly parties have scattered like quail. Some insisted that the poems were not written to Southampton but to William Herbert (W. H.), the Earl of Pembroke. Others pointed out that the initials of Southampton's given name, Henry Wriothesley (rhymes with grizzly), come out W. H. when reversed. Most ingenious of all was Oscar Wilde's theory. For reasons best known to himself, Wilde invented a homosexual figure called Will Hughes, by whom, he stoutly asserted, Will Shakespeare was enthralled, and for whom he had written the sonnets.

Snuffling about in the text for historic cross references to support any and all of these theories, the critics stumbled upon all manner of troubling touchstones. The most famous is contained in sonnet 107:

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur'd,

And the sad augurs mock their own presage;

Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd,

And peace proclaims olives of endless age.

Interpreting this as a news report, 20th century Scholar Leslie Hotson, wrote a whole book to prove that the "mortal moon" referred to the defeat of the Armada--thus putting the date of the sonnets back to 1588.

Begetter Guessed. Into this mare's nest Rowse has stalked, offering his services, as he puts it with marvelous false humility, as a "mere historian." For anyone acquainted with Elizabethan history, he reports, it is all "quite simple." Beyond all doubt, the sonnets are to Southampton. W. H. was, clearly, William Harvey, Southampton's stepfather, who, when the young earl's mother died in 1608, inherited the sonnets and "got them" for Publisher Thorpe. Rowse points out that "beget" is used twice in Hamlet as meaning simply "to get." The sonnets were written in 1592-94, because they contain innumerable topical references "obvious to an historian." "Mortal moon," for example, was a stock epithet for Queen Elizabeth. Sonnet 107 therefore could only refer to the Queen's safe survival after the attempt of her Spanish physician, Dr. Lopez, to poison her in 1594.

As presented by Rowse, the sonnets do seem delightfully clear. They read, in fact, almost like a novel. But is Rowse's theory fact? U.S. Shakespearean critics are inclined to think so, since it agrees with the current commonsensical view. But with characteristic scholarly caution, they wish that Rowse would not be so cocksure about it. "Until there are some new documents," said Harvard's Professor Alfred Harbage, expressing a whole scholarly philosophy of life, "we want more people to say 'I don't know.' "

But the great thing about playing the Shakespeare game is that nobody can be proved a winner or a loser. And Rowse is even now preparing to get the last word--a new edition of the sonnets, translated into Rowse's English, all neatly arranged with commentary to be read--well, just like a novel.

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