A.L. Rowse

THE books that A.L. Rowse became famous for are a vivid recreation of Elizabethan England. They have sold in large numbers. His admirers said that, as a popular historian, he was as good as Macaulay. For most people that would have been enough. But Mr Rowse became obsessed with the supreme prodigy of the Elizabethan age, William Shakespeare. In 1973, when he was 70, he announced that he had solved the mystery of the identity of Shakespeare's Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Oh yes? Such a claim is made regularly by Shakespearean academics, although usually with the respectful acknowledgement that it could be challenged. Mr Rowse was not respectful. The search was over. There was nothing more to be said. Anyone who disagreed with him was an idiot or, more insultingly in the world of academe, “a third-rater”.