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Dr. Rowse's introductions to the plays are models of brevity and resonance. "Each age flatters itself that it understands the past better than its predecessors have done," observes the annotator. "But I think that we in our time do understand the Elizabethan Age better... Our very insecurity, the sense of contingency upon which all life hangs ... give us better—or, rather, worse—reason for understanding the tragic depiction of life in Shakespeare's greatest works." Yet Rowse is quick to notice that in the comedies "the salty humour has been a preservative through the centuries, one of the forces that have kept him alive. For sex is a force, indeed the life-force; and Shakespeare is the sexiest, bawdiest of all great writers."
It is in the broad white margins that The Annotated Shakespeare makes its most enduring contribution. Here are the old phrases, clarified and illuminated; here is the James VI family tree traced back to Banquo; here is the real Cleopatra staring out from an Egyptian wall painting; here are the faces and personalities of pagan gods who haunt the soliloquies: Tellus, Jove, Aesculapius, Venus and Adonis, Phaethon. Hardly a character, historical or fictive, remains unshown in this vast museum without walls. Primary among them is the Bard himself: London-dweller and countryman, conservative and revolutionary, pursuer of women and country husband, writer for the galleries and the Queen; a man as rich and original and varied as this inexhaustible work.
Certainly there have been closer examinations of Shakespeare's "motiveless malignity" and comic imagery; there are variorum editions that more thoroughly note corruptions of the text from the First Folio onward. But no other book so resourcefully examines the correspondence between the stage and life, particularly modern life; no writer has made Shakespeare more beguiling to the eye or more accessible to the age. In death, Hamlet's father cries, "Adieu, adieu! ... remember me." It is also the playwright's plea. Rowse has heard it and amplified it for generations to come. —Stefan Kanfer
When Alfred Leslie Rowse and the century were young, he used to perch on the high stone wall surrounding a Cornish manor house. "I'd sit there and wonder," recalls the owlish bachelor. "Why couldn't I live there? Why couldn't it be mine? Well, I finally made it."
The climb over the wall took almost half a century and incalculable strain. Of Rowse's 43 books, none is more revealing than his first appearance in print: a schoolboy poem in a slender anthology. All the other contributors, among them Graham Greene, were from privileged private schools. Alfred, the son of a tradesman, was the sole county-school representative. His rise thereafter was rapid, but its price was prohibitive. While at Oxford, the scholarship winner succumbed to attacks of ulcers. "Illness dominated the 'first half of my life," he remembers. "It made me more withdrawn."