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A. L. Rowse

The Knitting Circle: History

Biography,work,bibliography,press cuttings.

British historian.

Son of a china-clay worker in Cornwall.

He was the first in Cornwall to gain a university scholarship and in 1921 he went to Christ Church, Oxford at the age of 17. He went up to Oxford to read English but he was soon persuaded to pursue history.

At the age of 23 he was ellected a fellow of All Souls, Oxford.

He wrote many works on English history includingTudor Cornwall, (1941),The Use of History, (1946),The England of Elizabeth, (1950). He has also written some poetry, much of it on Cornwall, many literary works, including several on aspects of Shakespeare, a Life ofMarlowe(1964), and his own autobiographyA Cornishman at Oxford, (1965).

• Tudor Cornwall, 1941.

• A Cornish choldhood; autobiography of a Cornishman, 1942, Cape,SBU Library Main Bookstock 920.

• The England of Elizabeth, 1950.

• The expansion of Elizabethan England, 1955, Macmillan, 450 pages,SBU Library Main Bookstock 942.055.

• The use of history, 1963, first published 1946, EUP,SBU Library Main Bookstock 907.

• William Shakespeare: a biography, 1963, Macmillan, 485 pages,SBU Library Main Bookstock 822.33 SHA.

• Shakespeare Sonnets, 1964, Macmillan, 319 pages,SBU Library Main Bookstock 821.3.

• Christopher Marlowe: a biography, 1964, London: Macmillan, 220 pages.

• A Cornishman at Oxford, 1965, an autobiography.

• The Elizabethan renaissance: the life of the society, 1971, Macmillan, 294 pages, ISBN 0333125347,SBU Library Main Bookstock 942.055.

• Shakespeare the man, 1973, Macmillan, 284 pages, ISBN 0333144945,SBU Library Main Bookstock 822.33 SHA.

• Homosexuals in History: A Study of Ambivalence in Society, Literature and the Arts, 1977, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, ISBN 0 297 77299 6, 346 pages.

  • Blurb:"e;Many men of genius or eminence are portrayed, from all walks of life and many countries, from the Renaissance onwards: artists likeLeonardoandMichelangelo; intellectuals such asFrancis Bacon; poets fromMarlowetoHart CraneandAudenin our time. Novelists and dramatists includeProust,Wilde, Cocteau, Gide andMaugham. Kings, politicians, musicians, soldiers: British, Americans, Russians, Germans, French, Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, ending with the Japanese Mishima, are impartially presented."e;

  • Many other figures get a mention but some of the other more substantial entries include, W. J. Bankes, John Beazley, William Beckford, A. C. and E. F. Benson,Bloomsbury, C. V. Bonstetten, Horatio Brown, Duke of Buckingham (George Villiers), Lord Byron, 'Cardenio' (Hofmann),Edward Carpenter, Robert Carr, Roger Casement, Tommaso Cavalieri, C. P. Cavafy, Harold Cheevers, Adler Christensen, 'Baron Corvo' (F. W. Rolfe), Marquis de Custine, Serge Diaghilev,Goldsworthy Dickinson,Edward II,Erasmus, J. E. Flecker,E. M. Forster, Stephen Fox,Frederick the Great, Morton Fullerton, Stefan George,W. Goethe, Ronald Gower, Thomas Gray, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Hervey,A. E. Housman, Queen Isabella,James I,Henry James,John Maynard Keynes, D. H. Lawrence,T. E. Lawrence,Leonardo da Vinci, Louis XIII,Christopher Marlowe,Herman Melville, Y. Mishima, H. De Montherlant, Harold Nicolson,Vaslav Nijinsky,Ivor Novello,Walter Pater, Christopher Perkins, Cardinal Richelieu, Arthur Rimbaud, Ernst Röhm,Lytton Strachey, Esmé Stuart,John Addington Symonds,Tchaikovsky, Paul Verlaine, F. M. Voltaire,Horace Walpole,Edward Perry Warren, A. Weldon,Walt Whitman,Oscar Wilde, William II,J. J. Winckelmann, andLudwig Wittgenstein.

• The PoetAuden: A Personal Memoir, 1987, New York: Weidenfield & Nicholson.

• All Souls in My Time, 1993.

• Historians I Have Known, 1995.

• Richard Ollard, (1999), "e;A Man of Contradictions: A Life of A. L. Rowse"e;, Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 368 pages, ISBN 0 713 99353 7.

  • Find the ladyby Katherine Duncan-Jones inThe Times Literary Supplement, 22nd. October, 1999, page 35. "e;Most perplexing is the whole area of sexuality, a topic with which deutero-Rowse - as Ollard usefully labels him to distinguish him from the relatively quiet, likeable proto-Rowse, scholarship boy and Prize Fellow of All Souls - became embarrassingly and pruriently obsessed. The problems lie very deep. Ollard writes movingly of Rowse's agonized uncertainty about his own paternity - was he really the son of the lowly china-clay worker Dick Rowse, or was he, as he persuaded himself early on, the fruit of some scion of the local aristocracy, or yet again, as he conjectured somewhat later, the result of his mother's amour with the lively young Tregonissey butcher Fred May?"e;

    "e;Lifelong musings on the long-distant sexual encounters of his allegedly cold and egotistical mother must have a profound bearing not only on Rowse's personal sexuality, but on his extraordinary preoccupation with the sex lives of the Elizabethans."e;

    "e;I would like to know why it was of such vital importance to Rowse that Shakespeare should be heterosexual, while dozens of other writers, from Marlowe to Evelyn Waugh could be joyfully acclaimed as homosexual. But Richard Ollard's excellent book, carefully subtitledA life, not 'the life', cannot tell me."e;

  • Rowse, rows and rancourby Sam Leith inThe Observer Review, 24th. October, 1999, page 12. "e;Rowse belongs to that generation of writers and scholars who had initials instead of first names (A.L. and C.P.; W.H. and T.S.; F.R. and Q; G.M. and A.J.P.; A.E. and C.S.), who took pride in being generalists, and who under cover of elaborate scholarly obeisances tore chunks out of each other in print which would make the modern polemicist blush. He was prickly and difficult among other prickly and difficult men."e;

    "e;This clear-sighted book emerges as the portrait of a deeply unhappy man: an erratic if sometimes brilliant scholar; a gifted memoirist; an indifferent poet and a first-class prick."e;

  • What once seemed certain is now an open questionby Mary Beard in theLondon Review of Books, 27th. April, 2000, pages 26-27. "e;I approached this biography very much in the hope that Rowse would turn out to be, if not nicer, then at least more complicated than he is usually made out to be; in the hope that the blustering and boasting might prove to have had a delicately self-ironic side; or that he would emerge cleverer than the stream of his books, from the 1970s to the 1990s, suggests (Historians I Have Known,All Souls in My Timeand so on; not to mention his fixation on the Dark Lady). No such luck. Ollard is a careful biographer and does his best with the early years (when Rowse was an unsuccessful Labour Party candidate in Cornwall, struggling with illness and writing imaginative local history). But it is only the elderly Rowse who makes any impact: his conviction of his own genius, his cruelty to erstwhile friends, his total self-absorption (his 'strong proclivity to monologue', as Ollard tactfully puts it) and his snobbery.A Man of Contradictionsis a generous title."e;

• 'Dark Lady' scholar dies at 93by Arnold Kemp inThe Observer, 5th. October, 1997, page 9. "e;Scholar Jonathan Bate wrote last year: 'The breezy confidence of Rowse's prose has not worn well with age.My View of Shakespearehas no biography. There are two footnotes, both to other books by the author himself. The number of minor errors becomes a major irritation."e;

  "e;In other ways, noted Bate, Rowse's Shakespeare was still living in the fifties. 'He is, for instance, still locked securely in the closet. We are told that "e;Southampton, William's patron, was homo when young"e;, but that this was not in the Bard's "e;line"e; of things, for "e;he did not have the cock-eyed view of life"e;.' "e;

  "e;At a recent Shakespeare congress, scholar Al Austin told of meeting Rowse at the London Athenaeum to discuss the filmThe Shakespeare Mystery. He said fellow producer Nick Rosen 'had to use a hefty file during tea' to 'ward off the octogenarian's groping attacks upon his modesty'."e;

• Rowse, finder of the Dark Lady, dies at 93, by Rajeev Syal, inThe Sunday Times, 5th. October, 1997, page 12. "e;Rowse achieved worldwide fame in 1973 when he claimed the elusive Dark Lady of the sonnets was Emilia Lanier, mistress of Queen Elizabeth's lord chamberlain, but his theory continues to be challenged."e;

  "e;David Starkey, the historian, said: 'He was an extraordinary pioneer who brought together history and literature, and wrote some of the best local histories ever written. But he never fully fulfilled his promise of greatness he so wished to attain. He will be missed'."e;

• Gay Historian AL Rowse dies, inThe Pink Paper, 10th. October, 1997, issue 502, page 3. "e;The formidable gay historian AL Rowse has died this week aged 93. He published more than 100 books during his lifetime, and is best known as director of the Shakespeare Institute and general editor of the Oxford Shakespeare. He was openly gay, and despite a brusque and blustering disposition was well-known for the habit of calling all-comers 'sweetie'."e;

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The Knitting Circle

First uploaded 21st. February, 1996.

Last altered 25th. August, 2001