Books: The Bard for a New Generation

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THE ANNOTATED SHAKESPEARE by A.L. Rowse; Potter; 3 vols.; $60

The theater that first housed Shakespeare's plays was not merely named the Globe, it was the globe. Under its famous open roof humanity passed in review. It was a whore and a fool and a murderer and it laughed; it was a virgin The theater that first housed Shakespeare's plays was not merely named the Globe, it was the globe. Under its famous open roof humanity passed in review. It was a whore and a fool and a murderer and it laughed; it was a virgin and a king and a samaritan and it mourned. It was fettered to its passions and ruled whole nations. It fumed at fortune and men's eyes and celebrated its own appetites. It passes still, and the writer who sets out to map the plays and poems ends, as Critic Leslie Fiedler once did, with "not another book about 'Our Shakespeare.' but one about 'Shakespeare's Us."

Yet it would be false to call the Bard contemporary. His psychological insight may be keener than Freud's, and his social perceptions, about women and blacks for example, travel freely across the borders of age. But he was first and last an Elizabethan.

In his time, plague was in the air, and the death of kings implied an unimaginable catastrophe. Racism and superstition prevailed. Occupations that are now obsolete dot his plays: cooper, wheelwright, alchemist, bellman. His language glitters with marvelous words that have, alas, also become obsolete: porpentine (porcupine); swound (faint); german (akin); caitiff (wretch); borthens (the hair of corpses); grise (a stair); bisson (blind). However immortal, Shakespeare, no less than Aristophanes or Mozart, needs his modern interpreters.

Enter, stage right, A.L. Rowse. "If it is something about Elizabethen Age, you would do well to ask me" the retired Oxford don once wrote to a critic, and he was right. Volume after volume has testified to Rowse's intimacy with the 17th century. No sexual custom, no oddity of language or quirk of lore seems to have escaped his attention. Now he displays his wit and erudition in an extravagant three-volume work that has no precedent and is not likely to have successors. The Annotated Shakespeare has no restrictions; it suits the actor and the scholar, the general reader and the child. Its pictures are copious but never merely decorative. Some 4,200 illustrations compare ancient productions with those of Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando. Woodcuts from Holinshed's Chronicles, which Shakespeare ransacked for his plots, jostle with faded maps and new costume designs for the Stratford festivals.