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The library became his refuge and salvation. Between the wars, the don's reputation as a researcher and writer grew; T.S. Eliot sought his articles on Marxism, presented with a historian's detachment; W.H. Auden befriended him. By the '50s he was famous. Today Rowse laces his conversation with recollections of the mighty: "Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt spoke much clearer English than Winston, who had a speech impediment as a child and always lisped somewhat."
Although Rowse has long been a part of the British literary establishment, he has never felt comfortable with it. For one thing, the members operate in the wrong era. "This filthy 20th century," complains the self-made elitist. "I hate its guts." What better place for a man who loathes welfare statism than the century of the other Elizabeth? After decades of living in its atmosphere, Rowse tends to treat the Bard as an intimate. Others may puzzle over the identity of the Dark Lady of the Sonnets; Rowse is sure that she is Emilia Bassano Lanier, the half-Venetian wife of a court musician and "a bad lot." As for those who find evidence of homosexuality in the canon, Rowse dismisses them as "silly buggers. The idiots can't see that Christopher Marlowe was a roaring homo, and Francis Bacon was a homo, but that Shakespeare was more than normally heterosexual—for an Englishman." Such fulminations have provoked assaults by critics, who find the challenger "impudent," "self-advertising" and full of "melodramatic fantasies." Rowse counters in iambic pentameter, by cursing "the blinkered outlook of academics." His most persuasive replies, however, are a series of militant books about the Elizabethans, and The Annotated Shakespeare. There he dissects Love's Labour's Lost to find fresh evidence that Shakespeare penned his own droll self-portrait as Biron and modeled Biron's dark lady, Rosaline, on Emilia Lanier. Further clues are on the way. This month, when Rowse visits the U.S., he will bring with him a sheaf of newly discovered poems by Emilia. The 74-year-old Cornishman is rooted to his native soil, but this, after all, is a special occasion. "Americans," vows Rowse, "are really more open-minded than the British."