Rowse, A. L.

▪ 1998

      British historian and author (b. Dec. 4, 1903, Tregonissey, Cornwall, Eng.—d. Oct. 3, 1997, St. Austell, Cornwall), was widely respected for his scholarly studies of Elizabethan England and his 1942 best-selling memoir, A Cornish Childhood. Although his parents were barely literate, Rowse learned to read at the age of four. Having won scholarships to grammar school and the University of Oxford, he took a first in history in 1925 at Christ Church College, and soon after he was elected a fellow of All Souls College, where he taught and wrote for the next 49 years. Rowse went on to earn a master's degree (1929) and a doctorate (1953) from Oxford. With Sir Richard Grenville of the Revenge (1937), a book about a 16th-century naval officer, he established himself as a writer with both solid scholarly credentials and popular appeal. The Elizabethan Age, a three-volume historical study published in stages from 1950 to 1972, assured him of a place in the canon, but his works on Shakespeare, including two biographies, earned him the disdain of many Shakespearean scholars, who questioned his research. Rowse announced in the early 1970s that he had, through a close reading of the sonnets and the diary of a contemporary Elizabethan figure, discovered the definitive identity of Shakespeare's mistress known as the Dark Lady, and he would brook no argument from those literary critics who considered his evidence circumstantial at best. Relishing the controversy, Rowse dismissed the unbelievers as "third-raters." The author of some 90 books, Rowse continued writing throughout his life, publishing his last book, Historians I Have Known, in 1995. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1996.

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